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More Proof Why There’s Black History Month

Date: Thursday, February 18, 2010, 6:06 am

By: Gregory P. Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com

And this, dear BAW readers, is precisely why there’s a Black History Month.

The “this” in question is the March cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Eight actresses are featured on the cover of the magazine’s “New Hollywood” issue. All are white.

Some have cried foul. One blogger chided Vanity Fair editors for implying that the only talented young people in Hollywood are white. Joanna Douglas from shine.yahoo.com was even more blunt: “Unless Vanity Fair considers one redhead to be diversity, we need to cry foul.”

The Afro-American Newspapers, in a Feb. 7 weekend news roundup, ran the headline “Vanity Fair Cover Lacks Any Women of Color.” Excuse me, isn’t that precisely why the Afro-American Newspapers exist?

During all my years as a columnist, the most frequent comments I’ve received from white readers run along these lines: “Why is there a Black History Month? If there were a White History Month, there would be crimes of racism.”

Similar idiocy has been spouted about the all-but-defunct Miss Black America pageant, the black national anthem “Lift Every Voice And Sing,” this or that black organization, this or that black publication and the Congressional Black Caucus. Granted, I’ve criticized the CBC harshly over the years, mainly because the late, great Rep. Adam Clayton Powell was more effective and influential by himself than the current lot is as a group. But I’ve never questioned the reason for the CBC’s existence.

Really, with what black people have gone through in this country, would some white people really begrudge us one measly national anthem or one piddling CBC? I get these questions from whites who figure, because I’m a black conservative, that they’d have a sympathetic ear. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Just because I’m a black conservative doesn’t mean I haven’t read history, black and otherwise. And here’s what years of reading about America’s race situation has led me to conclude: The history of white Americans is NOT the history of black Americans. And these idiotic questions and comparisons have, as their basis, the assumption that the history of whites and blacks in this nation is precisely the same.

They’re intertwined, yes, but not the same. Oh, and I’m not just talking about the slavery or the segregation. There were peonage, the chain-gang system, convict-leasing and other forms of neo-slavery that lasted well into the 20th century. (Reparations advocates blew it by asking for reparations for slavery only. Opponents argued that all the slaves were dead. Had reparations advocates included peonage, convict-leasing and chain gangs into the mix, they’d have found some very-much-alive victims, even early in the 21st century.)

There were the pogroms euphemized as race riots, the ethnic cleansings that saw blacks expelled from entire counties, with an enormous loss in property (something else reparations advocates neglected to add to their list.) Now there is plenty of evidence that bad things did indeed happen to various groups of white people throughout American history, but nothing I have read indicates that the worst of their bad was as awful as even the best of our bad.

So, if we want to have a black national anthem, let us have one. Leave our CBC alone. And let us have our own magazines and newspapers because editors of those publications often see what white editors don’t.

I’m not as down on the editors of Vanity Fair as some black folks are for that March cover. Those editors have shown, by their cover, whom they prefer to watch in Hollywood films. They’ve made it clear who their target audience is.

Black newspapers and magazines have THEIR own target audience: Us. Rather than berate Vanity Fair editors for having a magazine cover with no diversity, we should use this opportunity to commit ourselves to the revival of every black newspaper and magazine in the country. What Vanity Fair editors pulled with their March cover is the very reason black newspapers and magazines were founded in the first place.

Yes, we have Ebony and Essence. We have Jet. But what happened to Emerge magazine, which was, for my money, far superior to Ebony, Essence and Jet combined? We let it die for lack of circulation and readership. I tell former Emerge editor George Curry that every time I see him. And politically, we agree about very little. But we both agree that black folks letting Emerge die was a crying shame.

No women of color on the March cover of Vanity Fair magazine? I’ll take a revived Emerge magazine over a more diverse Vanity Fair cover any day.