Instead, Black History Month has degenerated into a performative series of celebrations and events that effectively do nothing to address the real hard questions and challenges facing Black Canadians today. 

Of course, we must celebrate our history of resilience from centuries of suffering and erasure. But that’s mainly our own responsibility, with our children, family and community.

Black History Month events have inadvertently greenlighted the whitewashing of Black History Month by institutions, government, and corporations, to just ‘check the box’ with symbolic PR gestures while avoiding meaningful, year-round actions. It marginalizes our humanity by reducing us to a consumable product, a seasonal promotional event for white guilt absolution. 

Many in ‘Black leadership’ have foolishly come to rely on this shortest month of the year for recognition, believing that recognition means progress. It does not! It just creates the appearance of advancement. It’s an illusion, a spectacle of allyship through hashtags and merchandise, while evading real questions about systemic barriers, intrinsic to the Black experience. 

Purposeful Performative Distractions

I recently saw a Black History Month gala social media post featuring Evan Solomon, Federal Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, talking about the typical “did you know he/she…was the first Black Canadian to….” 

But the more important question to ask, to truly measure our progress, is how many Black tech entrepreneurs are there in Canada? And how many of them is his Ministry supporting with real funding? Or even asking for their input on the future of AI? How many Black people are in positions of power in his Ministry, with the power to make policy and investment funding decisions? That’s what’s important, not the trivialities of social media posts about “the first Black….”    

February is rife with Black History Month awards and galas touting missions like “celebrating the Black community and its allies”. This is just another big distraction. 

Dress some Black folks up, show them a good time and recognize them with some contrived awards, and they’ll forget that the big corporate sponsor of the gala has no (or very few) empowered Black senior executives or board members. Or that they regularly parade out their Black employees and others for good PR, but when the show ends, nothing changes. These awards don’t come with power.  

Here's the hard truth: you can't solve an economic problem with a moral argument. The universe doesn't run on good intentions or galas—it runs on power. And power doesn't trickle down from corporate pledges and DEI committees. It builds up from the ground through one thing: economics!  

Booker T. Washington said that “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.”  

Relating it to today, self-determination is not achieved from the top down through others doing it for you. Economic self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and entrepreneurship are foundational and a bottom-up process that applies to all people, not just Black people. 

Washington urged his community to build wealth from “the bottom up” rather than just demanding immediate economic and political equality.

Marcus Garvey said: “A race without authority and power is a race without respect,” linking economic power to racial dignity, urging Black people to build independent institutions, businesses, and a global economic network (e.g., his Black Star Line shipping company) to achieve self-reliance and reject dependency on oppressive systems.

And a few years ago, in December 2022, at the U.S.-Africa Leaders' Summit in Washington, D.C., Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo urged African nations to “stop begging” the West and instead focus on prosperous development, from the inside out. Saying that Africans must lead themselves. "If we stop being beggars and spend African money inside the continent, Africa will not need to ask for respect from anyone; we will get the respect we deserve". 

What began as an act of reclamation now teeters on the edge of becoming an increasingly useful tool of complacency and control by the dominant systemic environment. 

By outsourcing leadership: allowing institutions, government, corporations and others to fund Black History Month, we allow them to effectively reduce Black history to a commodified spectacle, obscuring the urgent need for Black communities to reclaim stewardship of their history, present, and future. 

Performative allyship (diversity statements and parading Black employees out for the media) conflates visibility with equity; it distracts and creates the illusion of inclusion. 

The harm in Black History Month’s current form lies not in its existence but in its misuse as a substitute for Black economic and political self-determination pursuits. Power can not be gifted—it must be seized through mental sovereignty: unapologetic wealth-building, institutional autonomy, cultural and community empowerment, and the rejection of symbolic appeasement.