2-26-07, 9:34 am

February as Black History month has now become part of national consciousness, which in itself is a great leap forward from the days when African American history was taught usually as one course in a small number of universities with few African American students, in contrast with historically Black colleges and universities. Then scholars and activists had to fight to develop and gain some media attention for “Negro History week.”

Today there are departments of African American studies and students in some states who wish to become teachers are required to take courses in African American history as part of their education. There are also a significant number of insightful documentary films and videos on African American history, of which the Eyes On the Prize series (on the post WWII Civil Rights movement) and the late Marlon Riggs classic Ethnic Notions (on the history of racist stereotypes) and Color Adjustment (on TV's treatment of Blacks) are among the most valuable.

But most Americans unfortunately don't read books about history and politics, even well-written and accessible ones like those of Gerald Horne, Manning Marable, and David Levering Lewis. And they don't watch serious documentaries, which still appear only on public television, as against the sensationalistic commercial History Channel (which rarely has anything about African Americans or women, except where it may relate to warfare) or the various other “educational cable channels” which specialize in programs related to technology and forensic crime detection.

So important figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Fanny Lou Hamer and many others are passed over in popular consciousness. Prominent entertainers like Lena Horne and Ossie Davis may be remembered and celebrated as entertainers but marginalized in terms of their role in politics.

Of course, African American Communists like Ben Davis, William Patterson, Henry Winston, James Jackson, and others have great difficulty getting honorable mentions even on PBS.

Along with this reality, I have noticed what may be a new(at least new to me) and disturbing trend in mass media's “celebration” of Black history month, that is an attempt by commercial TV to use African American history to celebrate what Herbert Hoover used to call Rugged Individualism.

First the National Basketball Association (NBA) has been running a quote from Booker T. Washington about the value of doing things right, being excellent. The players (workers, albeit very high salaried ones) in the NBA are majority African American, but Booker T. Washington isn't exactly someone who deserves to be celebrated, since he was identified with an “accomodationist” policy that encouraged African Americans to accept and work within the system of segregation to advance themselves without fighting for their rights as citizens.

A statement from Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois (who emerged as Washington's major opponent) or Martin Luther King emphasizing the need to stand up and fight for rights would do more honor to the players of the NBA and might even teach fans something significant about African-American history as they were watching those players.

Spike TV, a cable network which specializes in being a “man's” network (meaning crime show reruns, wrestling, and other examples of camp macho stuff) has also been “celebrating” Black History Month with individual success and hero stories. Chevy, which has launched what appears to be a series of “Americana” commercials is doing much the same thing.

The messages in all of this are pretty clear. Those who sit in front of TV drinking beer and watching murder and mayhem can be secure in the understanding that in February, at least, African Americans are in their individual achievements proof that the U.S. is the embodiment of progress and democracy.

Those who drive Chevys and watch what appears to be the all white and heavily Southern NASCAR races (from what I can see that is even true of the crews) can take solace in General Motors February celebrations of what African Americans have accomplished on their own (even though the well paying union jobs that both African Americans and whites had in the past have been made a thing of the past with the export of capital abroad and GM's elimination of plants and people to maintain profits)

As the old Virginia Slims cigarette commercial for women of the 1970s went, “you've come a long way, Baby,” which, when one looked seriously at the use of “Baby” meant that women had come that far at all, even though the purpose of the commercial was to encourage women to believe that they had already reached the end of the journey, if they smoked the right cigarette, wore the right business suit, learned to administer their work and home lives to achieve the wealth and power that advertisers called “the American Dream.”

The best(or worst example) of media's “salute” to Black History Month was a CNN “human interest” segment I saw last week about an African American CIA “spy” who rose in the system to become a handler or manager of other spies. This polite and pleasant gentleman was the son of a woman who worked as a photographer for the CIA in the 1950s. From his boyhood he wanted to be a spy, join the excitement and the derring do, and he did. Eventually, he became a manager, one of the very small number of African-Americans in that position and today is a security consultant.

Of course there was no mention of what the CIA was doing from the 1940s and 1950s on and is still doing--its involvement in assassinations, coups, turning over to local death squads the names of Communists and other anti-imperialist activists in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and support for brutal dictatorships of the right that it had helped install from Chile to Indonesia.

When I was at City College, a fellow student of West Indian background told me that the CIA had tried to recruit him for work in their analysis unit and he had told them to go to hell. I respect him that a great deal.

Ironically, in those days, when J. Edgar Hoover was doing everything in his power to use the FBI against the Civil Rights movement and listing his personal servants as FBI agents to make it appear that there were African Americans working in the Bureau, the CIA was a place where people of color could find decent employment. Even more ironically, this had, as I see it, a lot to do with the fact that the CIA was fighting in the Communist movement, an anti-racist movement appealing to and having within its ranks large numbers of non whites on the global scene. Thus, it needed people of color to work for it to give it credibility and also work in the field in many parts of the world.

Booker T. Washington, CIA agents, and athletes and entertainers praising the athletes and entertainers of the past in a political vacuum commercialize and trivialize African American history, which is a history of mass struggle against slavery, segregation, racism in all of its forms, a struggle whose victories are victories for all people except the capitalist class and those blinded by ideological racism in U.S. society.

For Black History Month 2008, activists should fight for the inclusion of African Americans who have distinguished themselves in these struggles in all walks of life, including the labor movement and the peace movement. That would help the general population which spends a significant part of its waking hours in front of TV sets understand that they are the beneficiaries of struggles and achievements of African Americans.