02/10/2026
This is Black History Month.
And we call it Black History Healing Month because this is not just something that happened back then. It lives in our bodies. In our breath. In the messages we were forced to swallow long before we had language to refuse them.
White supremacist culture didn’t just dominate land and law…it taught us what to ingest. It told us which languages were acceptable, which accents were “unprofessional,” which ways of being were worthy of dignity. We swallowed those rules to survive. We learned to quiet ourselves. To code-switch. To make ourselves palatable.
And now many of us are choking on what we were forced to consume.
Language policing has never been about communication or respect. It has been a tool of dominance - training us to measure our self-worth against proximity to whiteness. Anti-Blackness taught the world that sounding “proper” meant being more human, more intelligent, more deserving.
From enslaved Africans punished or killed for speaking their languages, to Indigenous children beaten for using theirs, to communities today mocked, surveilled, or thrown into cages for how they speak, the message has been consistent: erase yourself to be tolerated.
Over time, that message stops sounding external.
It becomes internalized.
It becomes the voice that questions our own legitimacy.
It becomes the tightening in the throat when we speak freely.
It becomes the moment we doubt ourselves before anyone else has to.
This is why we call it Black History Healing Month.
Because healing isn’t just remembering what was taken — it’s noticing what we were forced to swallow, and deciding we don’t have to keep choking on it. Our languages, accents, rhythms, and ways of speaking are not defects. They are evidence of survival. Of lineage. Of refusal.
This has never been about how we speak.
It has always been about who was expected to disappear.
And healing begins when we stop carrying what was never meant to nourish us.
