Lisa Ward holds up a sign as she participates in the 27th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade on Monday, Jan. 16, 2012 in Denver. Photo by Manuel Martinez, Associated Press/Viva Colorado
It may puzzle the average Vista reader to learn that “the month dedicated to the history and culture of America’s largest racial minority” is actually racist, but that is the argument today’s unsigned editorial makes.
In “Black History Month is Racist,” the unnamed author tries to explain that Black History Month is, well, racist, because “African American history is American history. Black culture in America is American culture. The effort to promote education and literacy among these sections of our culture is noble and needed but the segregation is not.”
That the month is not, in fact, segregatory seems to be the unaddressed elephant in the room here. Nothing is keeping a white kid in elementary school from learning about MLK Jr. or Malcolm X during the month of February, and as students get older and are taught a more in-depth (though far from perfect) history of the United States, the light-skinned kids aren’t shunted out of the classroom when Rosa Parks gets brought up.
What the editorial seems to suggest is that we live in a post-racist, post-classist, post-sexist and post-homophobic nation, and that commemorative months like BHK are doing nothing but ripping open the skin of our “melting pot” culture and rubbing salt in the fresh wound. This is not the case; culture was not created in a vacuum and it does not deserve to be treated as such.
“African American history is American history” not by choice, but by force. For 300 years white men of European descent bought, sold and treated Africans as if they were mere property, often keeping hundreds of them in the most inhumane conditions possible in every stage of their diaspora to America. Even after slavery was abolished in the late 1800s, the white upper class of the South forced black Americans into lives of poverty and second-class citizenship through Jim Crow laws, which weren’t abolished completely until 1965. Black men weren’t allowed to marry white women until the 1970s. Even today, black male unemployment is twice as high as the corresponding number among white males, and 39 percent of the national prison population is black.
It’s not just BHM that presents an affront to the editorial’s cultural relativist sensibilities:
“However, Black History Month is no way the only offender. We still have Women’s History Month, LGBT History Month, Irish-American Heritage Month, Jewish-American Heritage Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month and more.”
That there is a continuing battle for women, Hispanic people and people of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered orientations to attain equal rights and consideration under the law (to say nothing of mainstream society) going on right now in this country goes unsaid in the article, but that doesn’t negate their existence.
These groups don’t just deserve a month to celebrate their heroes and martyrs – they deserve the same right to near-unmitigated freedom that every straight, white, privileged male in America has. That means the freedom to earn an equal wage, and not suffer abuse and harassment at the hands of men; that means not driving down a street in Arizona in fear of being falsely deported; that means being able to enjoy the same legal right to marry as straight people; that means being able to walk down a street anywhere without fear that a police officer is going to beat them into a pulp for simply being black.
The statement “Splitting our history up into pieces is selfish, racist and un-American” proves exactly why we need to continue to have these commemorative months. As the saying goes, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
That may not fit into the “candyland” ideal of a perfect melting-pot America, but neither does the state of America as it actually exists.
