From Black History to Women’s History
Race in America is getting to be like the weather in that everybody’s talking about it. Bay Weekly is in on the discussion, with Black History Month coverage that has people talking.
The discussion continues in Your Say, with letters from readers — both white women, FYI — explaining what the red-flag term “white privilege” doesn’t mean — that you get all the advantages — and does mean — that you don’t get all the disadvantages, starting with enslavement.
Hearing people’s give and take — as we have in Your Say over the past weeks — makes us examine more closely what we think ourselves, and how our thinking is reflected in our action.
About the weather, as everybody knows, all our talk ends with nobody doing anything about it. Maybe with race, talking is a step on the road to taking action. The weather — though apparently not the climate — is pretty much out of our hands. Our thoughts, on the other hand, out themselves in our words and actions.
Which, in our black-face wearing, n-word saying, noose-waving world, makes what we’ve been thinking pretty clear.
Which further means that white Americans, ourselves included, have a lot to learn, and unlearn, about black Americans and ourselves.
As a newspaper devoted to chronicling the human story in this time and place, that means asking ourselves whether we tell black stories in fair proportion to white stories the 11 months of the year that aren’t Black History Month. Likely, those other months are White History Months.
So much of this month, we’ve made telling black stories our mission. We’ve expanded our point of view with Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman telling his own story last week, and with a packet of stories noting the achievements small and large of black Marylanders. That commitment continues this week in our report about too-little-sung Josiah Henson, who stands as tall in achievement against the odds as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Henson gets some overdue recognition in the new book Uncle Tom’s Journey from Maryland to Canada: The Life of Josiah Henson.
Its author, College of Southern Maryland professor emerita Edna Troiano, is white — as are many of the Bay Weekly writers who’ve recounted chapters of black history this month. I hope that means we are open to listening and learning across race. If so, it should mean more routine 11-month coverage of black people and issues. It also means we could use more black writers.
This week, 2019 advances to March, which promises us spring, if not better weather. March also bring Women’s History Month, which we’ve mostly written off in past years as we have women in (as well as behind) our stories every month of the year.
This year is a little different. 2019 is the centennial of the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Asking ourselves how much we knew about the hard-fought campaign for women’s suffrage, we answered way too little — both nationwide and in Maryland.
So we make this week’s paper occasion to rectify our ignorance. That task, and the feature story 100 Years of Suffrage, we put in the hands of staff writer Krista Pfunder Boughey, who brings credentials as co-president of Calvert County’s League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan, educational organization celebrating its 99th birthday nationally this year.
Ending Black History and beginning Women’s History month, we also bring you a very local story about Rosa Parks’ 1984 visit to Annapolis — an event that for many of us is another who knew.
Of course, that’s not all you’ll find in your paper this week. As you’d expect, we’ve plenty for people of every race, ethnicity, creed and interest.
My unprejudiced, impartial judgment is that this week’s Bay Weekly is a paper worth reading.