Black History Month: The Other Side

I really disagree with Black History Month.

In my school at least, February would roll around and we'd break out the Black History Materials. For 28 (or 29) days we'd talk about George Washington Carver, W.E.B. DuBois, King, and Malcolm X. We'd celebrate cultural diversity, cultural health, cultural history...

And then, come March, we'd go back to the history curriculum as normal.

My problem with Black History Month is that it makes the rest of the class "White History Months." Black people made real and substantive contributions throughout the course of human history. Admittedly, there were some large swaths of history where is really sucked to be a Black person, particularly if your region of the world happened to be overrun by imperialist Europeans.

But pulling all of the accomplishments of Black people out of their historical context just so we can study them in February strikes me as historically dishonest. It seems to me like we're saying "we've marginalized Black people in our curriculum so much that we're going to take February to talk about what Black people did." I wouldn't mind that quite so much except that it seems to be regarded as "good enough" by so many people. "Now that we've dedicated February to the study of Black people we can go back to studying White people."

That's messed up.