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by Sumiko Saulson
Why do most institutions honor the same few figures every Black History Month, cherry-picking their histories to center and pacify whiteness, erasing the Black LGBTQ community and Black history before the transatlantic slave trade? What can we in the Black community do to challenge this?
In my interview with Priscilla Ofosu-Barko, B.A., CYW, RSW (she/her), of the KOJO Institute, we explore these questions.
Sumiko Saulson: Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and your organization?
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: I am the director of programs and services with KOJO Institute, an equity consultancy. Our founder and leader, Kike Ojo-Thompson, has been engaged in equity work for over 20 years, and KOJO Institute will be 24 this year. We support organizations in achieving equitable outcomes for their employees and their service users within all sectors, working with not-for-profit as well as for-profit corporate organizations.
I am a social worker by training and spent the bulk of my career working in children’s mental health, with a focus on equity and anti-racism, specifically anti-Black racism, supporting young people and their families to achieve equitable outcomes within the healthcare and the mental healthcare system.
Sumiko Saulson: Where it regards the intersection of Blackness and queerness, often we see important Black queer figures like Marsha P. Johnson – a prominent figure in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 that was the start of Gay Pride – and James Baldwin, a Black Gay author, were assigned to one or the other Black History Month or Pride.
We don’t really talk about Marsha P. Johnson during Black History Month. If James Baldwin comes up during Black History Month he often gets straight-washed, erasing his importance as a Black Gay man. I want to talk about this phenomenon. Why do you think this happens and what can we do about it as members of the African American community?
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: Full transparency, I have worked with a lot of Black and other non-white LGBTQ community members. I don’t identify as one, so I’ll be speaking from my experience in terms of how I’ve engaged with the community, on a personal level or on a professional level. I want to make sure that that was clear. And so your question about why the Blackness of certain figures essentially becomes erased when they are brought up during Black History Month or Pride, I think, is a complex one.
What I believe is that talking about race and acknowledging how intersectionality sort of plays into how people are in the world is not something that we as a global society are entirely comfortable with.
So when Black History Month comes around, people may bring up, but not always, Marsha P. Johnson or James Baldwin because somewhere along the line they became mainstream for particular reasons, but that mainstreamness had nothing to do with the community. But really, are they celebrating those individuals if they’re not seeing them as a whole?
I would argue that they’re not, because, yes, James Baldwin has a significant impact on the community and on society and also within the LGBTQ community, but he was Black. Same with Marsha P. Johnson, and I think it’s difficult for people to acknowledge – because acknowledging that would also mean needing to acknowledge how Black LGBTQ community members are treated differently from non-Black LGBTQ community members.
When you think about the Civil Rights Movement or the Gay Rights Movement and the people who were integral and moving things forward, oftentimes they were Black and non-white. Because of their sacrifices and the work that they put in, everyone has been able to benefit.
But who really is benefiting from those sacrifices and those struggles and the fight that those individuals put up? Oftentimes it’s white LGBTQ members, and then everyone else is sort of an afterthought, unless you’ve managed to find dedicated spaces for Black LGBTQ community members or for racialized LGBTQ community members.
I think the lack of paying attention to intersectionality and its importance is something that significantly harms society’s ability to accept important individuals like Marsha P. Johnson and James Baldwin as a whole.
Sumiko Saulson: Marsha P. Johnson and some other Brown and Black transwomen are literally the ones who started Pride, threw the first brick, and stuff like that, but the “Stonewall” movie has a young white cisman doing it. Blackness gets put into service to the white LGBTQ community and then we still have a whole bunch of oppression of Black transwomen today.
As Black History Month approaches, they’ll have these posters with the same group of people that gets celebrated every year, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., people that have a pretty clean reputation and who they don’t feel are going to shock any little children. We don’t see a lot of queer representation, although there really is nothing inherently wrong with queerness that makes it inappropriate for people that are in grade school.
We as a society need to take a really strong look at our problematic conscious and sometimes unconscious thinking in terms of who Black people are.
I’m not saying that those people are not important. In fact, I’m related to Marian Anderson, who is one of the people who pops up. But they should have more inclusion of queer Black people.
What can we do as members of the Black community, as Black businesses, as Black educators and as Black nonprofit administrators to make it so that the way that we celebrate and honor people during Black History Month is more inclusive towards the diversity within the Black community, including with regards to the LGBTQ community?
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: The starting place for most people is acknowledging that the Black community is not homogeneous. We all have different histories, we come from different places and religions. Just because you’re Black doesn’t mean that your experience is the same across the board.
We as a society need to take a really strong look at our problematic conscious and sometimes unconscious thinking in terms of who Black people are. What makes up the Black community? Because only when you really critique your own opinions and beliefs about what qualifies as a Black person who should be celebrated, can you really start to think outside of the box.
One of my long-standing issues with Black History Month has never been about the celebration of Black History. The issue has been the way that we as a society choose to celebrate Black History by showcasing the same people over and over again who have all made wonderful and meaningful, important contributions to society. But those contributions, or the way that their contributions are spoken about, have been sanitized and whitewashed.
People pull the same five or six Martin Luther King Jr. quotes and leave out other pieces that are of equal importance because it’s friendly, or more engaging. It allows people to feel okay. But we need to be okay with being uncomfortable.
We need to talk about and share all of Black History, including that predating the transatlantic slave trade. That’s another thing that often happens, as though Black History started with the slave trade and the period of enslavement, and then everything after that is sort of what makes up Black History.
Only once we’re able to examine how we as a society have erased the real existence and experiences of Black community members, will we start to think outside of the box in terms of who we talk about, celebrate and showcase during Black History Month.
On an individual level, it can be as simple as choosing to do something different. If you work in an organization and that organization, like many do, sends around newsletters or tips of the day that have little tidbits of Black History, do some research and share about people outside of those five to seven people that we see and hear about every February.
Sumiko Saulson: Agreed. The “I Have A Dream” speech was a direct response to police brutality and racial targeting of African Americans. People quote it out of context to make something that’s white-centering. That’s not really what he was saying.
You have a lot of people really white-centering the experience of Black people, acting like we did not exist until the transatlantic slave trade, acting like the beautiful art of Benin did not exist, like the library at Timbuktu did not exist. Acting like we were formed into existence when we were brought into slavery, is a way of erasing us.
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: I think it’s important to acknowledge that our society is built on white supremacy. So whether you’re white, whether you’re Black, whether you’re Brown, whether you’re Asian, we are all impacted by white supremacy.
But for the existence of white supremacy, we wouldn’t have to work even harder to create spaces and products specifically for the Black community.
It’s embedded in our systems, it’s embedded in our institutions, and people’s lack of ability to acknowledge the existence of white supremacy in our systems is something that adds another layer to the ways in which we choose to celebrate Black History Month. So we’ve come to a place where we need to have Black History Month so that we can celebrate Black people but we’re only gonna do so much.
Sumiko Saulson: Black people are pushing back against that when they start talking about Madam C. J. Walker. They talk about her because she did something for Black people which was not for white people. White people just want us to only celebrate people that they feel did something for them, like George Washington Carver, because they like peanut butter. Why shouldn’t we celebrate people who did things for the Black community that were not for white people?
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: We had to create things for Black people because of the circumstances a lot of Black people were brought into the Americas for, or the fact that anti-Black racism exists because of white supremacy. But for the existence of white supremacy, we wouldn’t have to work even harder to create spaces and products specifically for the Black community.
Sumiko Saulson: The products that she made were products to straighten hair and make it so that Black people could fit in with the white culture, so they are affected by white supremacy.
On TikTok right now, there’s a Black woman follow-chain going on. Some white self-described feminists have clapped back against this with some kind of idea that all women should support each other and not Black women specifically.
This is an example of white feminism, which is white women leveraging feminism to say that we should always put feminism first and just ignore how Black women are impacted differently. What do you think about that?
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: When you think back to the feminist movement, what you’re talking about when you’re naming white feminism, that movement wasn’t for all women, despite the fact that there were Black women right at the forefront with those white women fighting for equal rights. That movement was for white women.
Why does it bother you so much that Black women are showing each other love and uplifting each other and not causing any harm or trouble to anyone else?
The intersectional experiences and identities of Black women were never taken into consideration, which is why different spaces, and different opportunities needed to be created by and for Black women so that they could truly find ways to experience the equality that the feminist movement was geared toward.
I think the idea that there are women who take offense to Black women wanting to uplift each other is laughable, because it’s not as though those Black women are saying horrible things about white women. Why does it bother you so much that Black women are showing each other love and uplifting each other and not causing any harm or trouble to anyone else? Then you want to come and insert yourself into a space that is not for you. How horrible it is, again centering whiteness.
Sumiko Saulson: What are some ways that you can think of that Black people can celebrate Black History Month, including some people we may not have thought of, and decentering whiteness?
Priscilla Ofosu-Barko: We’re in Canada. One of the things I try to do for myself and my child is to look into Black Canadian people who have made important contributions to society. They are not always easy to find, because even here in Canada, it’s the same people that we talk about for Black History: Martin Luther King and sometimes Malcolm X.
I was born in Canada, but my family is from Ghana and we have a rich history within my own family. I will look into the things that my grandparents and great-grandparents have done and share that information.
Living in 2023, we have access to so much information. You don’t even have to go anywhere if you have internet access or if you have a phone that’s got data. Do your own search, if you don’t find that you’re getting what you need out of your organizations when they’re sharing resources about Black History Month. And then share what you search.
You may be surprised by how people respond to new information. I think it’s more than likely that people will be appreciative of having their eyes opened to new people and new histories. The hope is that that will nudge those folks to do their own research.
If you want to find out more about Priscilla Ofosu-Barko and the KOJO Institute at kojoinstitute.com and find them on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn at @KOJOInstitute.
Bestselling author Sumiko Saulson (they/them or ze/hir) writes award-winning multicultural sci-fi, fantasy, horror and Afrosurrealism. Their latest novel, “Happiness and Other Diseases,” is available on Mocha Memoirs Press. Winner of the 2021 Horror Writers Association Richard Laymon Presidents Award, 2017 Afrosurrealist Writer’s Award, 2016 HWA Scholarship from Hell, and 2016 BCC Voice Reframing the Other Award, their monthly series Writing While Black follows the struggles of Black writers in the literary arts and other segments of arts and entertainment. Support them on Patreon and follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
