I don’t have any experience with Black History Month, but living in Germany as a half-Asian, I get endlessly annoyed at all the fake “diversity” crap.

The reason why black history month is so pernicious is that it puts black history at a remove to american history, which leads to a very distorted, datum based history without a comprehensible gestalt that moves events. To put it bluntly, without black and chinese people, much of this country’s interior could never have been seized from the aboriginals.

what always bugged me is that Black history just isn’t THERE in school books. what we see in school is white people fighting white people, with black people as a pretext. outside of Harriet Tubman (is that the correct spelling?) and some Civil Rights movement leaders, EVERTHING is through the lens of white people.

its not that white history is not important. its not even that the lens of white isn’t important. but i think all the OTHER viewpoints and such should be told TOO.

i mean… as an example, i am Cherokee. so in 5th grade we were studying the Civil War and slavery and such, and i mention something about how horrible slavery was and how i was ashamed that some of my ancestors owned slaves. and THE TEACHER just stared at me. A HISTORY TEACHER didn’t know that the Cherokee owned black slaves too! (to give what little credit is due, to my knowledge black slaves were treated as indentured servents and were always emancipated and almost always adopted into the tribe, if they weren’t married into the tribe. but they STILL fuckined OWNED SLAVES). why didn’t she know this simple fact? because to her, only white people ever had enough money or influence to own slaves. i swear that she probably never thought about all the other cultures that owned slaves, and if she were confronted with histories showing white people owned as slaves (generally by other white people, mostly Romans owning slaves or in Northern Europe slaves won in war from other tribes) she would pass out. we had a huge fight in class that day, she sent me to the principle’s office for “lying” in class, i was very lucky that the principle knew enough history to know that the Cherokee DID in fact own slaves, so i didn’t get in any more trouble.

so… what is it? only white people have history?

Still, I have fond memories of celebrating BHM as a kid, and I certainly learned about the contributions of black women just as much as I learned about men. BHM was when I first learned about Mary Macleod Bethune, Shirley Chisholm, Madame CJ Walker, Marian Anderson, and lots of others. Should I have been learning these things year round? Absolutely, but I don’t see what is so wrong about taking additional time to highlight those contributions.

I agree that black, women’s, labor, immigrants’, etc history should be integrated into formal curricula, and in the best of all possible worlds this would occur. Until then, adults (and children) can use some prodding and some guidance for independent learning.

(am I a book review addict, or what?)

Common history is white, the self-assigned color of the victors of history, but then, well, it isn’t even the half of it. Gotta go well out of your way into historical ghettos to get most of it.

“It’s only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!”

Pointing to the fact that, though people might treat a chosen group or a topic respectively and attentively for a day/week/month they’ll go right back to the hating they do for the rest of the year once it’s over.

A day/week/month of awareness and/or observation won’t do much good when 11 out of 12 months or more time is spent in status quo. What is needed is constant awareness and the constant prodding that activists, bloggers etc stand for.