OCTOBER is a month where, if you know where to go, you could spend the entire time without ever having to cook or buy your own African, Caribbean or Asian food. You can just go from meeting to meeting and get more than well fed.

Your main problem will be getting to the food across the liberals taking a knee or being able to eat in peace as you’re told how much these people are against anything bad to anyone.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Black History Month without being constantly told about the decline of West Indies cricket and how wonderful Bob Marley was.

Be careful though — because come November you’re screwed with many of these folks again.

Some may think this is all rather harsh but it’s only slightly exaggerated.

I think Black History Month could serve a really important purpose.

As with so many initiatives, such as black self-organisation, liberals — both black and white — have worked hard to strip away any revolutionary or radical edge.

The black radical tradition of resistance to racism has been placed in a box that can be opened on October 1 and neatly packed away on October 31.

You may get the odd meeting in workplaces around the country during the rest of the year when you can hear all you like about Dr Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi.  

Chances are, outside of October, you won’t get any money from employers towards any pakoras of samosas. You certainly won’t get them to pay for a meeting to hear about the likes of the legendary communist organisers Claudia Jones or the late Indian activist Avtar Singh Jouhl.

Clearly to many it is much better to hide from polite company the inconvenient truth that the black radical tradition was born out of the blood, sweat and tears of racial capitalism.  

We need to build an understanding that the struggle against racism is not just something to look back on from a long-ago era but that it still feeds the brutal capitalism we face today.

I’m arguing for a radicalisation of our political education on the role played by racism in underpinning capitalism.  

We won’t get that through Black History Month.

We can, though, develop something that captures the true radicalism of the black radical tradition talked about by the great academic Cedric Robinson, most notably in his seminal work Black Marxism.  

That education must be year-long, community and workplace-based and aimed at building an understanding of the nature of racial capitalism and, crucially, the steps that need to be taken to organise against it.

It must not just rely on the largesse of employers or liberals, and we need the organising commitment to make it happen.

If we are to talk of the black “superstars” of our past, let it be the truth about what they stood for and recognised that they didn’t all come from the US. We can broaden our education beyond Nelson Mandela in South Africa or Gandhi in India.

For example, we can draw on the work of legendary educator Paulo Freire for some principles for how we might deliver this work in communities and workplaces in a collaborative and emancipatory way.

We need to chart a new course for an engagement with black history which foregrounds liberation.  

In doing so we need to deal with the constant tension that exists between those of us seeking liberation and others who either pay lip service to anti-racism or actively oppose what we stand for.

I believe continuing along the path of celebrating or managing diversity will not lead us anywhere.  

This seems to me to be what is really happening with the current activities of Black History Month.

The diversity that Black History Month celebrates is a reality of life that racists would rather was not the case. But to believe that celebrating diversity alone holds the key is foolhardy.

One look at the front bench of the Tory Party should show us that class interests always trump the “colour line,” as WEB Du Bois famously called it.

That’s why I have long argued that merely studying the black radical tradition is not enough. We have to be prepared to use the tradition to help us organise today.

The fact that I, as a black man, can argue and organise for peace and socialism today is only possible because my ancestors survived slavery and colonialism and many before me established the idea that black people can indeed talk, write and organise around those ideals.  

The work of Jones, Du Bois, CLR James, Angela Davis, Paul Robeson, Claude Mackay and many others helped to develop the black radical tradition that allows me to do the work that I do.

They did this in the face of fierce resistance — even from some who had the audacity to call themselves socialist.

Black History Month must change. But it must do so in the way we who are black wish it to change.  

No changes to the way we engage with black history and the spreading of our radical tradition can be negotiated away in order to make people feel better about the truths we need to tell about racism and its ongoing impact.

Our job is not to make people feel at ease with their racism.  

Those of us who are black have to make our contribution to building the next layer of our radical tradition.  

Those of you who are white need to be more than passive “click allies” — you need to be collaborators in our struggle to link black history to the practice of defeating the triple-headed hydra of racism, colonialism and imperialism.

Roger McKenzie is a journalist and general secretary of Liberation.