If You Want Black Joy, You Have to Acknowledge Black Grief
Black history is also an open casket
Black history is beautiful.
It is brilliant.
It is creative, resilient, joyful, innovative, sacred.
And it is also an open casket.
In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley made an impossible decision after her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, was brutally lynched. She chose to leave his casket open so the world could see what racism actually does. Not what it says. Not what it claims. What it costs.
Her decision was not about spectacle. It was about truth.
About refusing to let comfort erase violence.
About forcing a country to look at what it was so eager to deny.
And that matters—especially in February.
Because every Black History Month, we see a familiar pattern.
Suddenly, Blackness is celebrated loudly by people and institutions that are otherwise silent.
Suddenly, there are emails. Slack messages. DEI statements. African-print backdrops. LinkedIn posts.
Suddenly, Black employees are being asked—implicitly or explicitly—to perform Blackness, to educate, to share, to explain, to soften, to make history “palatable.”
All while being ignored, underpaid, overlooked, or gaslit the other 11 months of the year.
Let’s be clear:
Black history is not just excellence highlights and feel-good quotes.
It is also grief.
It is also rage.
It is also survival under systems that were designed to crush.
You do not get the music without the mourning.
You do not get the joy without the cost.
You do not get to celebrate Black resilience while refusing to confront the conditions that made that resilience necessary.
And yet—every year—Black history is flattened.
Reduced to digestible moments.
Stripped of its violence, its resistance, its disruption.
Turned into a photo op where people kneel in African cloth, pose, post, and promptly return to business as usual.
That is not honoring Black history.
That is co-opting it.
Because honoring Black history would require something much harder:
Paying Black people equitably.
Protecting Black employees from retaliation when they speak up.
Listening when Black communities say something is harmful—even when it’s inconvenient.
Staying engaged after February 28th.
Holding leadership accountable instead of outsourcing discomfort to the people most impacted by it.
Mamie Till-Mobley did not ask America to celebrate her son.
She asked America to reckon with itself.
Black history asks the same of us.
So if your Black History Month celebration does not include truth, discomfort, accountability, and sustained action—
If it only shows up when it’s trendy, marketable, or safe—
Then it is not a celebration.
It is a performance.
And Black history—
our history—
deserves more than that.