I remember watching the crowd in front of me at Langerado 2005. It felt strange, but in a good way.
I was listening to Michael Franti and Spearhead sing a song called “Stay Human,” and it seemed as if this crowd was not just listening, but rather completely feeling Franti’s music. The crowd simultaneously calmed as Franti spoke, “Tell your neighbor, tell a friend. Every flower got a right to be blooming.”
Then as Carl Young dropped the phatest bass line I have ever heard, everyone in earshot exploded into dance at the same time, and Franti sang the lyric, “Stay human.”
It was at that very moment I realized that there was not one black person, or white person, or Spanish person or purple person in that crowd. Race was not an issue; all had come together as one, as humans, to exist in harmony.
In that crazy-celebration-party of a crowd, there were only humans.
I think Black History Month destroys this mentality. It creates division and emphasizes difference, seemingly dissolving our basic human similarities.
Simply put, it helps build walls among people that are fundamentally the same.
A quick Wikipedia search of some human population bottleneck, which I could vaguely remember from a class, brings up a page about the “Toba catastrophe theory.” The passage describes it as, “A volcanic eruption on the island of Toba in present-day Indonesia, 70,000 years ago, that led to a dramatic drop in human population with as little as a 1,000 humans left on earth.”
The theory tries to provide a reason why all males share the same Y-chromosome that can be traced to a common ancestor 60,000 to 90,000 years ago. Basically, in some notion of science, everyone not only shares a great grandfather a little ways back, but also is just a member of one big human family.
The words “stay human” have a far deeper meaning than such a simplistic phrase seems to suggest.
Perhaps I’m thinking too much into it, but consider that even some prominent blacks seem to see it my way as well.
I distinctly remember reading about Academy Award-winning African American actor Morgan Freeman describing Black History Month as “ridiculous.”
In his 60 Minutes interview with Chris Wallace, Freeman says, “You’re going to relegate my history to a month? …Black history is American history.”
Obviously, there is a lot of merit in that statement.
Consider World War II when the Tuskegee Airmen fought the Nazis in the skies over Europe with the true grit of the American spirit. Or in the 1960s when individuals who so truly believed in the “American dream” became a movement for civil rights and showed that our great country will hold and represent itself to the ideals and values embodied in our Constitution-values of equality, justice and unity.
But even closer to the notion of Black History Month, as Freeman explains, the only way to get rid of racism is, “To stop talking about it.”
“I’m going to stop calling you a white man,” Freeman says to Wallace. “And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”
I don’t know what it is to be black, but I can say with some certainty that I know what it is to be an American. I recognize the fact that all of us are made the same way and that skin color or ethnicity should not be a reason to blur the line of what we all are-people.
Hey, I’m just trying to “stay human.”