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Black Future Months by Movement 4 Black Lives

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Black Future Months by Movement 4 Black Lives

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Black Futures Month celebrates Black people, art, culture, joy, and organizing in service to our bold vision for Black liberation.

The Black experience is rife with ingenuity, experimentation, success, and the fight for self-sufficiency. The stories told about Black people by the media don’t reflect the boundless offerings our communities have made that enrich and expand the notion of what it means to be human. Through art, ideas, food, discourse, and dissent, we have shaped the contours of an America deserved of Black people.

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Our Movement is #SoMuchMore By Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter Co-Founder and Executive Director 

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Our Movement is #SoMuchMore By Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter Co-Founder and Executive Director 

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The spirit of Black History Month goes beyond achievement. It is also about remembering and demonstrating that our lives and contributions are creative, industrious, transformative and joyful. Given the traumas of the last year, it’s important to call out that our experience is about more than the deaths we protest and the pain we hope to heal. Black life is so much more than that. We are not only triumphant and resilient, we deserve to be celebrated and valued. Our minds, our bodies, and our spirits are worthy of real investment.

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Black Future Months by Movement 4 Black Lives

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Black Future Months by Movement 4 Black Lives

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This Black Future’s Month let’s give ourselves the freedom and permission to follow our radical imaginations and visualize the world we deserve because in order to realize a society in which we have healthcare for all, a meaningful wage, self-determination, and true freedom, we have to first imagine it!

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By Suprihmbé* / WearYourVoice Mag, AFROPUNK contributor

During Black History Month we gird ourselves for the inevitable white-centered mentions of Martin Luther King Jr. and his supposedly pure non-violence compared to our supposedly recent civil unrest, à la the Black Lives Matter movement.

We spit curated "facts" about everyone from MLK Jr. to Madam CJ Walker to The Black Panther Party and we have our paragons lined up and ready just the way we learned them in school: Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, etc. What happens when we center people like Marsha P Johnson, people like Trudy of Gradient Lair, people like me?

Well, usually what happens is an immediate shutdown. Someone brought up colorism in regards to Rosa Parks success as a public civil rights figure and people were up in arms. Instead of placing Parks into historical context where colorism is definitely relevant, the response was an All-Lives-Matter esque, "We are ALL Black." The same thing happens with Beyoncé - but that's nothing compared to the uproar a mention of MLK Jr.'s infidelity brings.

In conversations about our Black idols we are encouraged to forget their very human transgressions or imperfections in favor of "preserving the legacy." Perfection over reality or relatability engenders idolization, and that's why political leaders preferred monotheism to paganism - control.

Black men are still overwhelmingly the majority seen and celebrated during Black History Month. Black feminism and womanism tends to take a back seat in talks about Black civil rights movements and culture. I cannot count how many Gen X/Boomer Black women I hear saying that feminism is for white women and womanism is for Black women, because they don't know that Black/brown feminism has its own parallel history distinct from white/mainstream feminism, which tends to focus on a different, more inherent-to-them, power.

Womanism is another name for Black feminism, it's distinct in its own way from Black feminism, and it also has its different iterations - for instance many of the women who tell me that feminism is a white woman thing have had lives that were saturated with androcentrism and tend to (unknowingly and unsurprisingly) lean toward an Africana Womanist point-of-view. That we have been told that centering Black women is harmful to Black men, i.e. Black culture - because race first is BIMOC first - speaks volumes. Africana womanism is a heterocentric theory which tends to characterize feminism as a white woman politic, irrelevant to Black women and ignorant of our issues. In this assumption she ignores the long history of Black feminism (which focuses on race and class as well as gender, unlike white feminism) and Black queer theorization.

That decentering Black men is viewed as a betrayal or, to some, an act of violence, shows the lack of knowledge we have about our civil rights history. Indeed, many are unaware of the feminist or woman-centered leanings of many of our predecessors. In Danielle L. McGuire's book "At the Dark End of the Street", she connects a nascent/adjacent Black feminist movement with the Civil Rights Movement by bridging the gaps in the history we are taught in school, filling them with oft-erased history and anecdotes of Black women fighting against rape, assault, abuse and other injustices. Lacing together stories of race and gender we learn about Rosa Parks detective work and discover a movement that began around Black women's resistance to sexual assault. McGuire's book places Black women and our unique struggles at the center of the movement without taking anything away from Black men the way that people seem to think we do when we focus on Black women or Black queer and trans struggles.

There is a book on my Amazon wish list that I am hoping will bridge more gaps in our Black history: "Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity" by C. Riley Snorton. The description reads:

In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials-early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films-Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

Black trans and queer history has been erased along with the silencing or backgrounding of cis Black women's history, and as trans rights begin to come to the forefront I hope to see more documentaries and textbooks featuring them. Understanding that we live in a [white] male-dominated society, we should understand race-gender-class hierarchies. All of these issues are Black issues. Even in the present day Black political/activist communities, Black men are still overwhelmingly seen as the leaders or as the primary victims of racism and are seen as the arbiters of proper Black man- and womanhood.

We see this a lot in the prison abolitionist movement and overall in the Civil Rights movement. It has been proven that when cis(het) men dominate the narrative, others and remain unseen, unheard. Although Black women's and queer struggles are more visible than ever before, we receive a lot more pushback, abuse and doubt than Black male leaders and progressives.

This Black History Month, and really every month, my goal is to decenter cis(het) Black men in favor of uplifting queer Black folks, Black women, and other marginalized or unheard groups within the Black community.
This post is in partnership with WearYourVoice Mag.
*Suprihmbé is a proheaux womanist thot scholar who wants to promote freedom, is Morrison political, and likes cats. Her personal website is thotscholar.com and you can support her work on Patreon.

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decentring black male paragons during black history month - AFROPUNK

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By Suprihmbé* / WearYourVoice Mag, AFROPUNK contributor During Black History Month we gird ourselves for the inevitable white-centered mentions of Martin Luther King Jr. and his supposedly pure non-violence compared to our supposedly recent civil unrest, à la the Black Lives Matter movement. We spit curated "facts" about everyone from MLK Jr.

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"our minds, our bodies, and our spirits are worthy of real investment" i chose it bc in order to be liberated time needs to be invested in finding ways to better the lives of black people,

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What stood out to me was the part where it said we deserve to be celebrated and valued. Most of the time for BLM they only show the bad parts but we also need to celebrate black lives and show their value so that others can understand.

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This quote standed out to me for the way that people of color feel like they aren’t as much here in the United States. They want to be acknowledged more and actually seen as worthiness rather than dealing with all of what life has to give.

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This quote stands out to me because it is inviting people to see a different narrative than what is usually portrayed to black people. Everyone has something create and unique to share, so focusing on that allows people to focus on what they can do to make a difference from their own unique world view

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What stood out to me was how they explained that Black Lives is not just about healing the trauma they have received, but also about celebrating Black Lives as beautiful and powerful.

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I think Black History is taught as the story of struggles, but they want to emphasize the resilience and the Black excellence that occurred in spite of their circumstances

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It goes behind how people value them. They celebrate and share stories because it isnt only about one aspect of their lives, its about recognition theyve longed to deserve and be shown.

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 "remembering and demonstrating that our lives and contributions are creative, industrious, transformative and joyful"

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 "remembering and demonstrating that our lives and contributions are creative, industrious, transformative and joyful"

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This stood out to me because although the are protesting what they believe the deserve and freedom they still have a life they may enjoy but just fighting to make it better for the future generations.

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this quote stood out to me because it brought up the events of last year and incorporates it into black history month 

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this quote stood out to me because it brought up the events of last year and incorporates it into black history month 

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Something that stood out to me was The part where it said how Black Lives is so much more than being resilient and triumphant, but they deserve to be celebrated and valued. This stood out to me because it is significant that people of color have more to fighting but they are people that should be celebrated for fighting for so long

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something that stood out to me was how we need to celebrate black lives

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what stood out to me was that its important to know were we are coming from. And BLM is something good and deserve so much more.

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"We are not only triumphant and resilient, we deserve to be celebrated and valued"

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"We are not only triumphant and resilient, we deserve to be celebrated and valued"

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That through the circumstances and trauma they went through, they're still resilient and powerful. Yes, what they have gone through and continue to go through should be talked about but also how they should be uplifted.

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"It is also about remembering and demonstrating that our lives and contribution are creative, industrious, transformative and joyful".

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its about remembering and demonstrating that our lives and contributions are creative, industrious, transformative and joyful. 

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its about remembering and demonstrating that our lives and contributions are creative, industrious, transformative and joyful. 

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What stood out to me was that even after so much struggle, the hope is not over.

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the reason why the quote stood out to me is because black life's matter for who they are. Although society targets them as dangerous, one person does not define who they are because not everyone is the same. Therefore, many black people can be very unique, joyful, caring, etc. 

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the reason why the quote stood out to me is because black life's matter for who they are. Although society targets them as dangerous, one person does not define who they are because not everyone is the same. Therefore, many black people can be very unique, joyful, caring, etc. 

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I notice that it is important for people to not regurgitate ideologies created by the media. If people really want to understand diverse cultures and people without bias, then they should formulate their opinions on the basis of direct experience.

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That even the media shows a small portion of what people are doing for Black Lives, and that the media doesn't determine the

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"the stories told about black people by the media don't reflect the boundless offerings out communities have made"

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"the stories told about black people by the media don't reflect the boundless offerings out communities have made"

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i feel like the media has normalized the criminalization of black people and portraying them as something that they are not. with that being said it makes even more sense that the media neglects the impact black people have left in our culture

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"... we have shaped the contours of an American deserved of Black people". I think that this is the whole message that BLM is trying to spread. There has been so much have towards the black community for years and America and all over the world needs to realize that Black should be valued like every other race.

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it is important for people not to rely on social media because it can be false information to manipulate people about their culture which does not define who they are.

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Stores reflected by other people don’t give the same meaning as someone explaining it on their own. Understanding the person thoughts rather than just listening to it on the media

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In addition to the struggles/fight, we should highlight how Black people have contributed to the world and our country since the media won't do that.

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The Black experience is rife with ingenuity, experimentation, success and the fight for self- sufficiency.

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The Black experience is rife with ingenuity, experimentation, success and the fight for self- sufficiency.

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Not everything done is being shown like it should.

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the stories told about black people by the media don't reflect the boundless offerings our communities have made that enrich and expand the notion of what it means to be human. 

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the stories told about black people by the media don't reflect the boundless offerings our communities have made that enrich and expand the notion of what it means to be human. 

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it stood out to me because just like most of us they also have a way of life through their culture and what they do all together as a community.

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I notice that the stories told in the media are fake and do not reflect on what the communities are trying to say.

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What the media portrays is not always correct and creates a false look on the culture.

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I noticed that the media is not always correct