Connect the Coast

Feb 10, 2026

Black Heritage Over Black History Why the Reframing Matters

by Cici Marz For the soil. For the Sound. For the Soul

Every February, we are asked to celebrate Black history. And while the intention behind that request is important, it is also worth acknowledging a quiet truth many people feel but rarely say out loud. History, for Black communities, is often not celebratory. It is frequently a record of harm, restriction, survival, and endurance under systems that were never designed for us to thrive.

That reality should not be ignored. But it may not be the most complete story to center.

Perhaps what deserves deeper recognition is not only Black history, but Black heritage.

History tells us what happened. Heritage tells us what endured.

Black heritage shifts the focus away from trauma as the centerpiece and toward inheritance. It recognizes what was carried forward despite everything that tried to stop it. The skills passed down when institutions were closed to us. The creativity cultivated in kitchens, churches, salons, barbershops, and living rooms. The businesses built without access to loans, mentorship, or protection. The artistry, care, discipline, humor, and ingenuity that survived because it had to.

Where Black history often asks us to revisit pain in order to justify our presence, Black heritage affirms that our value never depended on suffering in the first place.

This reframing matters because it changes the question we ask. Instead of only asking, “What happened to Black people?” we begin to ask, “What did Black people preserve, build, and pass down anyway?”

The answer is everywhere.

It lives in Black owned businesses that continue to operate without fanfare. It lives in cultural spaces that are still shaping communities. It lives in artists, entrepreneurs, and creatives who are not historical footnotes, but living continuations of something older than they are.

Black heritage is also visible in the everyday practices that do not make headlines but define identity. The recipes that turn a meal into memory. The music that evolved from field hollers to gospel to jazz to hip hop, each generation adding its own verse. The linguistic creativity that shaped American vernacular itself. The naming traditions that reclaim identity. The Sunday rituals that double as resistance and renewal.

It is present in the mathematical genius of Benjamin Banneker. The literary brilliance that spans from Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison. The scientific innovations that changed medicine, agriculture, and technology, often without credit, always without apology.

Black heritage is not frozen in the past. It is active. It is visible. It is local.

When we look at Black owned spaces in our own cities, we are not witnessing history. We are witnessing inheritance in motion. These spaces exist because someone chose to move forward without permission, resources, or guarantees. They are not anomalies. They are the result of generations of adaptation, resilience, and vision.

Consider the barber who learned the trade from an uncle who learned it from his father, each generation refining not just technique but community building, turning a service into sanctuary. Consider the chef whose grandmother’s kitchen was the first culinary school, where measurement was intuition and recipes were prayers spoken over pots. Consider the entrepreneur who built a business on principles learned not in an MBA program, but around a table where elders spoke about dignity, self sufficiency, and the long game.

These are not merely feel good anecdotes. They represent economic ecosystems built parallel to mainstream institutions that excluded Black participation. They represent knowledge systems that existed before they were validated by universities. They represent a refusal to wait for permission to be excellent.

This is not a call to erase history or minimize what has been endured. It is a call to widen the lens. To stop positioning Black pain as the primary entry point into Black worth. To recognize that survival was never the only thing passed down.

What was also passed down was excellence. Joy. Standards. A particular kind of discernment that comes from having to be twice as good to get half as far, and choosing to be twice as good anyway, not for validation, but for self respect.

What was passed down was the understanding that your work is your witness. That how you carry yourself matters. That representation is both burden and opportunity.

This inheritance shows up in the HBCU graduate who returns to teach the next generation. In the artist who mentors in the same community center that first gave them a stage. In the business owner who hires locally not just out of obligation, but out of memory, memory of who gave them a chance when no one else would.

If Black history explains where we have been, Black heritage reminds us who we are and why we are still here.

It reminds us that we are the descendants of people who were denied literacy and became orators. Who were denied instruments and made music with their bodies. Who were denied land and cultivated beauty in the margins. Who were denied humanity and created culture anyway.

Black heritage answers a question that should never have needed asking. What would happen if a people faced centuries of systematic exclusion and chose, generation after generation, to build anyway?

The answer is jazz and Juneteenth. It is fraternities and sororities founded when universities would not integrate. It is the Green Book and mutual aid societies. It is Sunday dinner and stepping and spoken word. It is ventures started in living rooms that became institutions. It is movements born in church basements that changed nations.

And that, perhaps, is the part worth celebrating. Not once a year as a historical footnote, but continuously, as a living inheritance we all participate in, whether we are adding to it or benefiting from it.

Because heritage, unlike history, is not something we observe from a distance. It is something we inhabit, extend, and pass forward.

And recognizing that distinction changes everything.