Carter G. Woodson, “the father of Black History,” wrote The Miseducation of the Negro in 1926. Woodson earned his PhD from Harvard University, and during his academic career served as the Dean of Howard University, an historically Black research university, established March 2, 1867, nearly two years after the end of America’s Civil War.

One hundred and fifty-nine years after the end of the Civil War, America is in the midst of Uncivil Culture Wars, around Critical Race Theory (CRT), diversity, equity, and inclusion, with some white people waving the “cancel culture” flag, not surrendering to the fact that 2024 is not Antebellum America, or Jim Crow America, where white folk were not held accountable for crimes against Black humanity, including dehumanizing language to refer to Black folk that cut right to the core of their being. Whenever I hear a white person shout “cancel culture,” I know that it’s a clarion call to what some white folk think of as “the good ol’ days,” when Black folk knew their place or faced the consequences of mob violence, culminating in the Day of the Rope, becoming the strangest of “strange fruit” if they didn’t stay in their place.

“Strange Fruit,” as sung by Billie Holiday, is haunting. It’s the anti-National Anthem that haunts America. Picture “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,” and picture the postcards of this violence preserved for posterity, white men, women, and children mugging for the camera around a Black body that often was brutalized beyond human recognition, and the denial and whitewashing of this history, which is pushed into the shadows and “relegated” to Black history, though as I have written elsewhere, Black history is American history.

At its core, CRT places people of African descent at the center of the study of history and the human experience, which is perhaps why there is so much resistance from some white people towards CRT. To borrow a phrase from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, CRT is about “speaking the unspeakable.” In Morrison’s lecture on this, it is not about “canceling” the thought and ideas of white people but making room on the Academic mantel for Black folk, and others.

Because most white folk have almost always seen Black folk as “the other,” CRT is anathema. It forces white folk to listen to those speaking the unspeakable, and they don’t like what they hear, when the ideals of America, and some white people, are put on trial, and as in most American trials, the verdict is a foregone conclusion. Guilty as charged.