Every year I hear that we don't need Black History Month anymore and that it's just another transparent, commercial ploy to corporatize multiculturalism and add another flavor-of-the-month to the operation of hegemonic capitalist culture. I often believe the hype, recognizing the validity of claims that every month should be Black History Month, though I would add that every month should also be Asian/Pacific/American Heritage Month and every week should be Latino Week and every day should be Native Peoples' Day. And I think that would work out okay, as long as everyone maintained a well-organized calendar. I come back to this subject every year and reflect on the significance that Black History Month has had in my life. I can't help but wonder where I'd be without it.

My great-grandfather went to college before there was a Black History Month—I would imagine your great-grandfather did too, if he went to college. He was fortunate enough to have a job and one summer, his job was to sell Negro History textbooks for Dr. Carter G. Woodson.

Woodson initiated Negro History Week. The month of February was chosen because it includes the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In his lifetime, he popularized his efforts to raise awareness about the place of the Negro in American society by doing historical research and by making known what had previously been ignored; he also kept my great-grandfather gainfully employed for a little while.

I only learned that my great-grandfather had gone to college and that he had worked for Dr. Woodson after interviewing my grandmother for a school project—in college. Meanwhile, I also learned that poetic titan Langston Hughes spent a few years squinting over tiny, barely legible chronicles of historically significant African-American families when he was employed by Dr. Woodson, at about the same time that my great-grandfather was. They never knew each other; even then, Black history was a far-reaching enterprise.

These tangential historical details, are nonetheless nearly impossible without a healthy and institutionalized appreciation for the legacy of an uppity Negro named Carter who decided he would assure himself a place in something called Black history by inventing it.

I've never really felt more than a threshold level of commodification during February at the sight of great numbers of people, many of them not Black, celebrating, affirming or trying to look interested in the knowledge and power that African peoples have brought to the world and to this country in particular, while I'm here.

This isn't to say that I haven't thought about how uneasy it makes me at times when I feel that I'm being taken out of context by being celebrated and affirmed for the shortest month in the year, or that I haven't thought about the awesome inadequacy of one month of lowest common denominator feel-good essentialism in the project of conscietizing the American people to the historical reality of race…

It's just that, I like Black History Month. I learn something new every time. Even if there are better and more efficient ways to overcome the obstacles placed in our way by ignorance and misrepresentation, I do not feel that abolishing the only month I have is the best first step to take in that process.

Not that I think it's going anywhere.

But please, learn something while you have the chance.