By Marisa Loranger, News Editor.
The whole month of February, my social media feeds are filled with complaints about Black History Month. “Why isn’t there a White History Month?” asks the whiny white boy who isn’t used to feeling left out. What white people fail to realize is that we’ve been celebrated every day of every month of every year since the beginning of time. Even during Black History Month, how much do we actually hear about black people throughout history?
I agree that Black History Month isn’t taken seriously, and it’s history that we should have been learning about since grade school. Look in any K-12 history book and you’ll read about Thomas Edison, Christopher Columbus (the white explorer who didn’t discover, but invaded America), the founding fathers and the 43 white presidents we have had.
I never read about Jane Bolin, the first African American woman to graduate from Yale, or Otis Boykin, the inventor of the pacemaker. Our education system fails us.
During Black History Month, kids are taught about Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and the infamous ‘I have a dream’ speech by Martin Luther King Jr. A month of learning about three or four influential African Americans isn’t really teaching kids anything. We get such a broad history of white people throughout time, but we really miss out on the important effects that African Americans had on our country.
My childhood was filled with stories of black America, of how an entire oppressed group of people beat the odds and became scientists, activists, teachers, inventors and explorers. My grandfather would tell me stories of the oppression that he and so many of his friends had suffered through. He would explain in detail the MLK Jr. march that he was apart of. How thousands of people would come together linking arms so that when they marched through city blocks and white people would throw things onto the marchers, knocking them unconscious, they could hold each other up. So no one was left behind. It’s awful to think other kids are missing out on the stories that made me feel like I was capable of anything I put my mind to.
That’s what Black History Month is about. It teaches us that we can beat the odds, that America is a great nation and nothing can hold us back if we fight hard enough. So until we decided to implement black history into the history books year-round, February will remain Black History Month. Instead of complaining, take the opportunity to learn about different people and cultures.
