Black History Isn’t American History

“My kids are growing up learning more about black history month in school than they are about the American Revolution! How can they be expected to run our country in 30 years or so if they do not even know how and why this country was formed to begin with! Please give me an [aspirin]! My head hurts from banging it against the bricks!!” – Just a Mom

“I don’t even want to get started on what our kids are learning and not learning! It irritates me too much! But once again, you make me think! I just wanted to let you know that you are an appreciated blogger today!” – nicholesmith

A lot of people make the claim that there’s no white American history or black American history but only American history. Of course, such a naïve and racially encompassing concept is a figment of most people’s imagination. When people say there is only American history, what they really mean to say is that there is only white American history and the smidgen of black or other minority history that white people choose to recognize as significant. Rosa Parks and Doctor King and Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and George Washington Carver and Crazy Horse and Frederick Douglas and WEB Dubois and Sitting Bull and Booker T Washington will get their fifteen minutes in the history class. But their achievements and acknowledgments will be regulated to little more than two sentences in the footnotes of white American history. And if people in the dominant community had their way many of these footnotes in the pages of white American history would be skipped over or truncated even further.

White parents will claim that because we have a single month where it is suggested that we as a nation make a more focused attempt on our nation’s black history, their little white kids are incapable of learning about the American Revolution. The other eleven months just aren’t enough for these exceptionally slow learners. The one month of black history is just too much a burden to bear. These are the same people that would say why do black people have to work in places of employment that should be all white? Why do black people have to go to white community schools or shop in white community stores? Indeed, why do good white people in this god fearing nation have to acknowledge black people at all?

With the one month focus on black history, slow children from the dominant community will grow up without having a complete understanding of why this nation was founded. White kids couldn’t possibly learn that all men are created equal by learning the history of all men of every racial color. Only white history could possibly explain the concept of racial inclusion. That is why white parents feel that it is so important to focus only on white culture with the handful of black people approved for white study. When these white parents were growing up and going through their school system, they learned the lessons of racial inclusion by focusing only on white American history. It hasn’t hurt their sense of racial equality one single bit. Why do we want to change things now?

For one thing, whatever these dominant community parents learned in school isn’t working. Racial disharmony is more rampant now than in any time in America’s history since our dominant white community imposed institutionalized racial slavery. Focusing only on dominant culture’s American history did nothing to prepare these people to run our country. The black community continues to suffer the worst of any measure against the white community and the dominant mindset wants to divorce itself from the black community. White people collectively turn their nose up at the thought of learning any more black history than absolutely necessary. And then wonder why the nation recognized February as black history month.

The reason we have a black history month is because there are so many white people who wouldn’t do jack to learn anything about black people. Black history month isn’t a law. But the way some white people tell the story it is so oppressive and divisive. To some white people, things were so much better in the good old days before we had to start all this racial inclusion nonsense. Don’t get me started on what poor white kids are forced to learn and not learn. It irritates white people so much that they need to take aspirin. And never once do these white people bother to think how black people and other minorities feel about white people’s history of racial exclusion against the Native American community, the Asian community, the Hispanic community, the Hawaiian American and other Pacific Islanders’ communities, the Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Caribbean Island communities, and the African American community. White American history is the only history that makes a difference, to many white people.