We don't need Trump's permission to celebrate us
Frederick Douglas is dead. In 2017, President Donald J. Trump didn't appear to know this fact. However, in 2025, he may still not know.
In kicking off Black History Month in 2017, Trump hosted a "listening session" at the White House, leaving attendants scratching their heads wondering if he knew Douglass—a self-liberated former enslaved male turned abolitionist—died in 1895. Expecting then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer to clarify what Trump meant regarding his comment on Douglass, Spicer, however, made it clear he, too, didn't quite know if Douglass was dead.
"I think he [Trump] wants to highlight the contributions he has made. And I think through a lot of the actions and statements he's going to make, I think that the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more."
The remarks from both Trump and Spicer could have been an episode of "Drunk History," a TV comedy series where an inebriated narrator fumbles to recount historical events, which illustrates why we need Black History Month and an intensive tutorial for Trump and his administration then and now.
Post-racial myth
With the election of Barack Obama as president, queries arose concerning the future need for Black History Month. Some Millennials, in particular, whose ballots helped elect the country's first African-American president, revealed that celebrating Black History Month seemed outdated. To them, the continuation of Black History Month was a relic tethered to an old defunct paradigm of the 1960s Black Civil Rights era and hindered the country's progress.
So, too, did Republican Senator Mitch McConnell agreed in 2009. McConnell gave his reasons: the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 1965 Voting Rights Act enfranchised Black Americans, and the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president.
Obama's candidacy was thought to have eradicated America's Original Sin and marshaled in America's dream of a "post-racial" era where race had finally become a "non-issue." In trying to prove how "post-racial" Obama was as a presidential candidate, Michael Crowley of "The New Republic" wrote in his 2008 article "Post-racial" that it wasn't only liberals who had no problem with Obama's race but conservatives who had no problem also, even the infamous ex-Klansman David Duke. "Even white Supremacists don't hate Obama," Crowley writes about Duke. "[Duke] seems almost nonchalant about Obama, don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain."
Obama's election encapsulated for some whites the physical and symbolic representation of Martin Luther King's vision uttered in his historic "I Have a Dream" during the 1963 March on Washington. However, from the March, Black Americans saw the deliberate racist political misuse of MLK's quote, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. " The quote has been used to discredit all race-based remedies for historical injustice: Affirmative Action (In 2003, the SCOTUS allowed the Bakke case on "reverse discrimination" to stand. In 2023, SCOTUS ended affirmative action in college admissions in the "Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College." ), reparations, Critical Race Theory, African American History, and now DEI. Trump 2.0 canceling of Black History Month comes as no surprise. He canceled all so-called "identity months."
For years, the celebration of Black History Month, especially among white conservatives, has always brought up their ire around "identity politics" and "special rights. Republican Senator John McCain argued that "special rights" were why he didn't vote for the MLK Holiday or acknowledge it until, of course, he ran against Obama for the presidency in 2008.
Identity politics and "special rights," however, have always benefitted white Americans and perhaps people of color in Trump's camp. In Trump's first presidency, he removed white supremacist groups- Ku Klux Klan, Identitarians, Identity Christianity, Neo-Nazis, and Neo-Confederates, to name a few—from the Countering Violent Extremism program to profile Muslims. In this presidency, Trump gave all the January 6th insurrectionists a get-out-of-jail pardon. Trump's action has emboldened his followers more than ever to not only contest the celebration of Black History Month but to insist on a white history month. The pushback against Black History Month is decades old.
Still, we rise
During Black History Month, we gathered to celebrate us. With 250 years of slavery followed by 90 years of Jim Crow and then 60 years of "separate but equal" discriminatory practices, we still rise. Our history is a canon for survival and an archive for future generations to pass along because our lived experiences are sacred texts. It's Trump's hubris to assume we need his permission to celebrate.