The Ancestors Want A Refund On Black History Month 2026

Somewhere in the afterlife, the ancestors are sitting at a long mahogany table.

Harriet Tubman has her arms folded like she already knows this meeting is about to be stupid. Frederick Douglass is rubbing his temples the way you do when you realize you escaped slavery just for people to still be arguing about your humanity. Ida B. Wells has receipts stacked so high they’re touching the ceiling. Nat Turner is sitting there tight-jawed like, “See… this is exactly why I did what I did.”

And Rev. Jesse Jackson, who just arrived and hasn’t even taken off his coat yet, is pulling out a chair like, “Y’all not gonna believe what they did in February.”

Because if this was Black History Month, somebody owes them a refund. With interest.

We made it through 28 days and somehow managed to cram in a racist AI monkey video from the president. Because apparently, even in 2026, some white folks still need primate graphics to feel alive. MAGA had a full emotional breakdown because “Lift Every Voice and Sing” got performed at the Super Bowl again. A song hurt their feelings, y’all..

Then the internet decided to rediscover Surya Bonaly, the Black figure skater who landed a one-foot backflip decades ago and got penalized for daring to be spectacular, only to turn around and credit a white skater with “making history.” The audacity of erasing a Black woman’s athletic defiance during Black History Month is almost performance art at this point.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, in the literal middle of Black History Month, there was an actual legal tug-of-war over whether a slavery exhibit telling the story of the people George Washington enslaved and fashioned his fake teeth from should be allowed to stand. The panels were removed. Ordered restored. Appealed. Paused. As if even the truth about bondage needs a courtroom brawl before it can breathe. As if America is still negotiating whether slavery is too uncomfortable to display.

And because February refuses to waste a plot twist, we also got the viral clip of a Black granny hugging and kissing Trump like he personally walked her across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This is the same man whose political rise was built on birther lies and racial grievance, getting embraced like a church deacon. Somewhere, Rosa Parks is leaning back in her seat, blinking slowly, like, “No ma’am…”

Then came the BAFTA mess, a Tourette’s debacle where Black people were basically instructed to summon infinite compassion while being hit with the N-word on a global stage. We weren’t supposed to be angry. We were supposed to be understanding. Reflective. Gracious. Because Black folks only get to heal when we’re swallowing a slur in public and thanking everybody for the opportunity to grow.

And just in case February felt light on intellectual contempt, a tenured white professor popped up on Zoom to inform the world that Black children are “too dumb” to know they’re in broken schools. Not underfunded. Not structurally sabotaged. Just dumb. Centuries of resistance to educational apartheid, and here we are, still refuting a lie that should have died before Jim Crow.

Then, because satire clearly died years ago, a Black sitting congressman got escorted out of the State of the Union address for holding up a sign that said “Black people are not apes.”

Let that sit. All of it.

If this all feels like noise and foolishness to you, our ancestor Toni Morrison gave us the language for it decades ago. She said, “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

Distraction, y’all. That’s it. That’s the whole month.

Every single incident we just walked through required Black people to stop living and start explaining. Explaining why monkey imagery is violent. Explaining why a song born of segregation exists. Explaining why slavery should be publicly remembered. Explaining why Black children are not inherently deficient. Explaining why being called the n-word on a global stage might provoke anger. Explaining why holding up a sign that says “Black people are not apes” is not the radical act in the room.

Distraction.

But distraction from what? From the deeper crisis unfolding in white America. Because what February exposed was not Black dysfunction. It exposed white instability.

Whiteness in this country has long functioned as a psychological shelter and an unmarked norm that did not have to see itself as racial at all. It was simply “American.” Neutral. Objective. The baseline. Morrison understood this better than anyone: whiteness sustains itself by imagining itself universal while positioning Blackness as deviation.

That mythology is cracking, demographically, culturally, politically, and technologically. And when a mythology cracks, it does not quietly retire. It flails.

And so the monkey imagery is not creativity. It is a regression. The outrage over a song is not patriotism. It is displacement. The erasure of Black excellence is not oversight. It is anxiety.

The courtroom fight over slavery is not a legal nuance. It is denial. The claim that Black children are “too dumb” is not analysis. It’s a confession about themselves.

These are not random outbursts. They are stress responses. What we are watching is a segment of white America confronting the erosion of a story it has told about itself for centuries.  A story that says white folks are naturally superior, intellectually central, historically innocent, culturally default.

Instead of revising the story, it is trying to restore it through racial contrast and degradation. And degradation requires distraction. So the old tropes come back online. Because if Black humanity is undeniable, then white exceptionalism has to stand on its own merit.

And here’s the thing, secure identities do not panic over songs. Secure nations do not fight slavery exhibits in court. Secure people do not need to recycle 19th-century racial caricatures in the age of AI. Insecurity does that.

And insecurity at scale looks like February.

For Black folks, the tragedy is not that we are surprised. We are not. The tragedy is that we are still required to participate in the performance, to debate whether harm is harm, to prove our intelligence, to litigate our humanity in public. Morrison called it a distraction because she understood the cost to us. Every minute spent arguing over obvious dehumanization is a minute not spent building, creating, strategizing, loving, organizing, and basking in joy.

The function of racism is to exhaust. The ancestors aren’t asking for a refund because we are failing. They’re asking because America keeps trying to rerun the same psychological script and calling it progress.

Back at that long mahogany table, the ancestors are not wringing their hands. They are watching us and reminding us that they did not endure chains, lynching, exile, bombings, assassinations, jail cells, dogs, hoses, and courtrooms so we could spend our days explaining to irreparably racist people that we are human.

They did not fight for literacy so we could argue with people committed to ignorance. They did not survive so we could be lured into debating caricatures. That is the distraction. That is the trap. And committing treason against them would mean falling for it. The ancestors want us unbothered by theatrics and undistracted by people fighting to preserve a lie that cannot outlive the truth.

All that noise is not power. It’s panic and decay. When people know their time is winding down, they get loud. They get cruel. They reach backward.

Let them.

We have work to do.

And unlike mythology, we know how to survive.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

SEE ALSO:

Tourette’s Tic Blamed For The N-Word Yelled During BAFTAs

Why Black People Don’t Have To Accept The Apology Or The Gaslighting