Black History Month discounts importance of black Americans

Crispus Atticus. George Washington Carver. Harriet Tubman. Booker T. Washington. Louis Armstrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. These are the people of Black History Month. Every February, the shortest month of the year, teachers drag out these and other notable figures for an exercise in multicultural education. This yearly ritual seeks to promote tolerance by emphasizing the contributions of a group of people traditionally ignored in school. The place of blacks in American history is a gaping hole in the social studies curriculum. However, this hole cannot be filled with the contributions of random individuals whose only common trait is the color of their skin.

History is a story. Like any story, characters are essential to its meaning. Too often, American history, as it is taught in high schools, is the story of the white man. To some extent, this is a matter of fact. No one can change the fact that the Founding Fathers and all the U.S. Presidents were white. This history has to be taught. Everyone should understand the patriotic ideals of liberty, equality and justice, even if white slave holders created these ideals.

We should not, however, pretend that white men are the only characters in American history. History is told so that we might better understand the world as it exists today. To ignore a group of people that has been in the New World nearly as long as the white man fails to explain anything about that group today.

Telling the story of African Americans, however, requires more than a month-long mish-mash of disconnected facts. The white man’s American history is, to some extent, a coherent narrative of the triumph of freedom over tyranny. What is the story of African Americans as told during February? It is that blacks have, occasionally, made important contributions to the white story of triumph over tyranny. Crispus Atticus. Harriet Tubman.

But isn’t there another side to the coin? The Founding Fathers gave us amazing ideals, but did they themselves live up to these ideals? These men who expounded upon the inalienable rights of humanity also had no trouble with slavery or counting slaves as three-fifths of a person. Moreover, only male property owners could vote in early America. Perhaps the Declaration of Independence should have read: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white male property owners are created equal…”

This dark underside of American history is just as important as the more pleasant story of triumph so often told in school. Telling both stories would give a more realistic picture of America’s past and better explain to students the historical challenges that face the U.S. today. Its not that one story is better than the other. It is that both are equally important and reveal different things about America’s past and present.

Harriet Tubman, Crispus Atticus, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Louis Armstrong, and Martin Luther King Jr. are important individuals who made valuable contributions to American society. The importance of these individuals should not be discounted. But this is exactly what Black History Month does. It takes these important people and crams them all into the shortest month, as if to say that they have no importance during the eleven months of white history. Further, simply listing the contributions of blacks decontextualizes them, strips them of all meaning. Without context, their only importance is their shared blackness.

The solution is to teach black history as an integral part of American history. Rather than the story of triumph over tyranny, perhaps American history should be the story of the fulfillment of a dream: the Founding Fathers’ dream of a society based on liberty and justice for all. This story would tell both the triumphs and setbacks in the pursuit of this dream and show present-day America as a work in progress. In this context, black history wouldn’t be relegated to one month. Black history, along with the stories of other minorities, would stand alongside the white men of history, equally.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 4 2005. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry