Our conscious decision on the histories that we share
The jfa editorial board
"For me, it means understanding where we’re coming from, where we’re going. We can’t ask for liberation if we don’t know what we have to be liberated from," explains Hayley Headley, one of our regular contributors, when asked about the importance of openly acknowledging and understanding Black History.
Learning History, and how History has diverged depending on who was experiencing it, is a necessary building block to developing a critical understanding of the issues that plague us and affect our rights. As a publication, we are actively pursuing historical approaches within the stories we share with our readers.
We find that often the stories that plague us, and that we work hard to bring to you, respond to a historical context that we have never known because of deficiencies in our educational systems as well as deficiencies in our own personal education. We want to change this.
Celebrating what we like to call “Big International Days” is a way to push us to recognise and better understand the struggles that communities around us have and continue to face. By engaging with the achievements and challenges faced by communities that are not ours, we can better empathise with their experiences. This, in turn, allows us to support policies that grasp the nuanced experiences across communities, which are equally deserving of attention and care.
When we don’t engage with our histories throughout our childhood education, we only “grasp concepts like this [racism, the impact of colonialism] more when you’re older”, as Hayley describes. In her experience growing up in Jamaica, there was no teaching on the positive elements of Black History, but rather a focus on “slavery and resistance and things rooted in imperialism”.
Having a thorough knowledge of our histories is necessary to understand who we are as a people, as well as key to challenging the systems that sustain a paradigm. “We never learn about a time in history when people were happy and just existing doing things that are meaningful for themselves and not in opposition to some greater power,” she points out.
“Black is all too often today defined in contrast to whiteness, and that’s not true, that’s not necessary in itself. Something that these things evolve into is understanding what being black means when you’re just black in isolation, in complete separation from white people.”
Our historical understanding of human rights is also important when it comes to critically examining the value of these norms we fight to uphold. A more all-encompassing history, and histories, become core to a dual question of understanding and representation: of what we are and what we can be.
We believe these perspectives are necessary because they remind us of the stories we are missing, and of the work that we have to do as a community to seek them out and to bring them to the forefront. These stories teach us histories that are different from ours, shed light over sources of power, provide stewardship for change.
“At home”, Hayley concludes, “we need to understand Black revolutionaries in Jamaica and the people who have shaped the country today, for better or worse. Understanding that we have more power now to make our country better, and something that we all too often forget.”