Nia (Purpose) Pronounced: nee-AH To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants have been America’s bottom caste since our ignominious arrival, and slavery’s legacy is easily discernible in patterns of poverty and community dysfunction. Not only does this legacy include racial barriers to socio-economic inclusion, it has also socialized us for subservience, ensuring we’re dependent on our oppressors for our subsistence. Thus, it’s not just racist exclusion that stagnates and destabilizes our communities; it’s also the lack of access to what I call “cultural capital,” i.e., culturally transmitted behavioral traits that boost social success and civic wherewithal. That intangible capital includes attitudes of mind and relational rituals that are best accumulated far from the edge of survival. Unfortunately, Black Americans are disproportionately wedged on that edge.
We’ve sought to generate some of that necessary capital through varied strategies, and one is by adopting months as celebratory opportunities. Black Americans have officially appropriated February and June as Black History and Black Liberation Months, respectively, to commemorate our struggles and reinforce our sense of agency in the face of ongoing white supremacist assaults. One observance honors our historical achievements, the other shifts the focus from history to the ongoing struggle for political, economic and social agency.
Black History Month evolved from Negro History Week, established by Carter G., Woodson in 1926. He designated the second week in February to mark the birthdays of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The week was expanded to a month in 1976, as part of the nation’s Bicentennial commemoration.
Black Liberation Month is a recent innovation, largely triggered by the designation of Juneteenth as a national holiday in 2021, for its unofficial designation as Emancipation Day. Beyond just a celebration of history, the liberation agenda is much wider and can include actions like organizing against mass incarceration, police violence, and economic inequity, among many other things. The 7-day, year- end Kwanza celebration is an allied observance, pushing an agenda with wider, liberatory implications.
This need to boost our cultural consciousness is especially acute as we weather the current administration’s attempted erasure of Black Americans’ role in history. From removing the names of prominent Black folks from varied historical monuments, prominent sea vessels,
and national exhibits, to excising Black- themed observances from federal schedules, to many other examples, the administration of Donald Trump has transformed the acronym of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) from initials offering equal access into a curse.
Instead of designing a compensatory strategy to atone for past injustices, the Trump administration seeks instead to multiply those injustices -a retrograde intention for a 21st-century society. And, a society guided by that racist nostalgia is just one danger of our perilous re-Trumpment. His is an administration that rejects efforts to even acknowledge, much less offer compensation for, slavery’s damaging legacy. In just four months into his term, most African-Americans’ adopted celebrations have essentially been federally delegitimized.
But, context is all-important. Millions of Africans wound up in America only because they were kidnapped to fill the needs of a slave economy. The process had many ramifications, one of which included forging a new people; a people who became American by necessity and included 12 generations of chattel slavery. For nearly 250 years, American culture dehumanized those it enslaved and, more insidiously, socialized generations of African-Americans for enslavement. The nation’s economic reliance on slavery mandated a rigid and pitiless racial hierarchy.
The century of official Jim Crow segregation that followed slavery’s abolition did little to end African Americans’ social isolation or alter reigning cultural biases. Because of this unrelenting social hostility, the hyphen that connects African to American connotes dueling as well as dual identities. Slavery’s damaging legacy includes the social implications of that internal duel.
It is this history of our enslaved status, rather than racial identity, that accounts for the disadvantages accrued by the progeny of enslaved Africans — us. Our historical observances make that point with unrelenting clarity, and with this understanding, the culpability for redressing that specified legacy rests clearly on the forces that created and abetted it — the U.S. government. Were Americans humble enough to receive the messages of our hopeful observances, we’d be on our way to a just society.
