My History, Your History
For painfully obvious reasons, celebrating Black History Month is more important than ever.
At a time when the sitting President of the United States is doing his best to erase non-White from public view, we must fight to preserve our history and educate as many as people about it as possible.
It shouldn’t have to be this way, but it has always been this way.
Before my college days, I went to segregated public schools.
I was a frequent visitor to my elementary school library.
In the dark recesses of time, before the existence of computers, video games, DVDs and VCRs, there were books.
Books with tactile covers and pages.
I loved to read. My favorite books to read were history books.
My school library got rid of old books and gave away books that had fraying spines and edges. Books with children’s stories went quickly.
My favorite books were the ones that languished in the giveaway boxes.
They were Black history books.
I loved reading about Black history and learning about people who looked like me accomplishing and achieving great things.
Especially people who I’d never heard of, people other than the ones who always dominated Black History Week/Month class discussions.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass were always the most discussed Black history figures, and the ones students fought over when Black History report assignments were being made.
Their contributions were important, but there were many other people that could have and should have been discussed, but there wasn’t time to do so.
That’s because our history has always been relegated to snippets and overviews, if mentioned at all.
It’s too scarring and jarring to the American psyche to treat our history as inclusive, just as it is to discuss the history of Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, and LGTBIQIA+ Americans.
People that are marginalized in life are not treated with dignity in the history books.
There’s an old saying that history is written by the victors.
Victors are not always winners of wars.
Sometimes, they are winners of the genetic lottery.
Not enough White people recognize the connectedness of the American experience to teach American history fully and honestly.
Race was constructed as an excuse for oppression.
It was not a hierarchy created by God.
It was not created by natural selection.
It was and is an artificial construct devised for oppression.
Black American history is American history.
Asian American, Native American, Hispanic American, Women, and LGBTQIA+ history is American history.
When you erase my history, you erase your history.
Banning books that discuss bigotry and prejudice make you think you’re removing inconvenient history and painful reminders of the past.
What you’re actually doing is ensuring that centuries of wounds never heal.
You’re not only picking at scabs, but you’re also tearing them open until blood runs freely.
Our lives should matter to you because we’re human, just like you.
But it doesn’t matter, not to enough people.
Until it does, we will remind everyone of our accomplishments.
We will instruct our children and our children’s children.
We will shout it from the rooftops.
We will tell it from the mountaintops and the valleys.
We will keep our history alive despite the futile attempts to suppress it.
And when the day comes when it is no longer suppressed,
When it is no longer ignored,
When it is accepted as your history, not as Black history,
America will be one step closer to becoming what it pretends to be.