by Herbert Harris
This year’s Black History Month is different.
Black history itself has become contested. Not debated at the margins but questioned at its core. School curricula are scrutinized, and institutions that preserve Black memory are accused of being “divisive.” Should Black history exist, or should it disappear, erasing its many uncomfortable truths and leaving a more homogeneous national narrative?
Narratives are what hold us together as individuals and as societies. To have the wholeness and continuity essential to our survival, our stories must be heard, recognized, and validated by others. Identity is not a monologue in an empty room; it requires an audience and a full cast.
History is our shared narrative. It is how a nation understands what has happened and who it is. It is also how we relate to those who came before us. To deny or erase significant portions of that history is not merely to rearrange a syllabus. It distorts the self-understanding of the entire society. A narrative that excludes central truths becomes brittle. It depends on selective memory and strategic forgetting. That society’s connections to reality inevitably fray, eventually breaking.
As a psychiatrist, I have spent much of my professional life listening to narratives. The people I have seen in offices, hospitals, and shelters nearly always have narratives broken by trauma, shame, loss, and the illness itself. When the narrative breaks, the self can lose its coherence. Their stories need to be heard by someone who can put the broken pieces back together. It is the continuity of others who recognize and connect the broken fragments that can restore continuity to the self.
When recognition fails, the injury deepens. Denial, minimization, or blame can amplify the original wound. The broken pieces of self cannot mend. These patterns are common in abusive relationships where the abuser rescripts the narrative, denies the harm, and blames the victim.
These clinical patterns illuminate our collective, societal behavior.
Frantz Fanon understood this intimately. In Black Skin, White Masks, he describes the shock of being reduced to an object under the white gaze, the moment when a child points and says, “Look, a Negro!” In that instant, Fanon writes, he becomes sealed into a racial identity imposed from outside. His lived experience is overridden by someone else’s story. James Baldwin also knew this shock. In “Stranger in the Village,” he describes arriving in a tiny Swiss village where the children had never seen a Black man and ran after him shouting “Neger!” The encounters were identical. Both invisible in the white gaze that granted them no recognition,
Fanon was trained as a psychiatrist. He knew that misrecognition is not merely insulting. It is fundamentally destructive of the self. What he described was not a single wound but a chronic condition, the ongoing struggle of holding a coherent self together against a world that persistently reflects mangled distortions. I have seen this struggle in countless forms. Few patients escape misrecognition, which can lead to stigma, prejudice, or discrimination. But the most disabling consequence is to lose the thread of one’s own story, and enter a narrative scripted in someone else’s language. The misrecognized self faces an exhausting battle that may never end. Fanon saw that colonial racism imposed this exhaustion on an entire people, not as an episode but as an institutional structure.
What is true in the consulting room and in Fanon’s colonial world extends to a global scale.
Racism clearly harms its targets, but this is only part of the story. Racism also distorts the inner world of those who practice and defend it.
James Baldwin gave voice to this with devastating precision. In The Fire Next Time, he wrote that “the white man’s unadmitted — and apparently to him unspeakable — private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro.” Baldwin’s point was not simply moral. It was psychological, and it cut in both directions. Projection allows fears to remain unexamined, but it also makes the projector dependent on the target. The fears do not disappear; they are merely redistributed. Because they have not been faced, they must be constantly managed through further distortions of reality and through the rewriting of history itself.
Baldwin understood that a racial identity built in opposition to Black humanity is inherently fragile. It must continually defend itself against the recognition it has refused to grant. Elsewhere, he observed that “the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.” This was not a fear of social change alone. It was a fear of narrative collapse, the terror that the story a nation has told itself might not survive contact with the truth. We all know this terror well in our personal lives. The idea that our narratives might become unreliable, or even end, is one of our most primal fears. Baldwin saw that America had organized an entire racial order as a psychological defense against that reckoning.
A nation cannot have a coherent identity that rests on strategic amnesia.
I was fortunate to grow up in a household where another story was always being told.
My father was a history teacher in the District of Columbia Public Schools. A graduate of Dunbar and Howard, he had mentors such as Carter G. Woodson and Haley Douglass, the grandson of Frederick Douglass. Through Woodson and Douglass, history was not an abstraction. It was lineage and a responsibility.
Woodson understood that the erasure of history is rarely a passive omission; it is active distortion. In The Mis-Education of the Negro he argued that when people are educated into a narrative that excludes them, they do not simply lack information. They internalize exclusion itself, coming to see themselves as marginal to the human story.
Woodson was the founder of what would become Black History Month. His agenda was not to block out time on America’s calendar but to rebuild an entire framework of recognition, badly damaged by centuries of oppression.
In my father’s classroom, the standard textbooks presented Eurocentric narratives. They often characterized slavery as benign paternalism. Most of his students found little in those pages that reflected their own lives. But after the bell rang, he told the stories that had been left out.
He was not alone. Teachers of his generation carried those stories forward even when institutions did not. They transmitted a history that had survived enslavement and segregation. It lived through times when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read. It was passed from generation to generation, from warm hand to warm hand.
This history is indelible.
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