Black History month, for me as a young white man, has always been “let’s celebrate dead African Americans from the past,” and even then, it was only about the civil rights movement. Please don’t interpret that as a diminishing of their important contributions to America. When a simple act of defiance, such as keeping your seat on a bus, changes the world as you know it, you are a powerful force to be reckoned with. I’m not suggesting that the past experiences, contributions or abuses that African Americans faced are insignificant or unimportant to us today. I was just a kid and the real importance for the month was lost to me for many different reasons.



                                 

                            Alabama Fire Department spraying demonstrators in May 1963 — Photo by Charles Moore
In a traditional white, middle-class home, discrimination wasn’t something I faced. The first time I recall hearing the N-word was from my grandmother, and it happened just once in all the years I knew her. In elementary, middle, and high school, discussions about African American struggles, discrimination, and abuse were confined to Black History Month. Come March, the impactful images and acts of those human rights champions disappeared, only to reemerge the following year. So, as a 40-something man now, this begs the question: Is this a thing for every one of us “white boys” or is there a deeper connection that we all share? Even today, I didn’t realize Martin Luther King Jr. Day was coming up until the Wednesday before. Truth be told, I don’t usually have the TV on, and when I do it’s a streaming service that doesn’t always promote such holidays, nor do I follow news, deciding to delete even the standard Apple News app from my phone. Maybe I’m just oblivious to the world around me?


                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                               

                                                                                               Emmitt Till with his Mother — Photo by Almy    
Maybe not. I have a lot of people that I know, and one or two extremely important friends, none of which have said anything to me about this upcoming holiday. Is it possible that America today enjoys the day off work, loves watching the movies that tell historic stories of past pioneers, but has really lost the meaning of the day all together? Have we, as a nation, really reduced African American contributions to the American story to just one month, just one day? Why not? There was a time when we beat them for drinking from the wrong water fountain, lynched them for looking at the wrong person, and worked them to death from exhaustion. America is great at hiding their past, though “hiding” is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps “ignoring” is more accurate. The past is in the past, and it shouldn’t have any reflection on what we do today, right?

Except that it does. Did you know that African Americans contributed to or developed the traffic light, GPS, crop rotation, peanut production, caller ID, automatic elevator doors, refrigeration technology, blood banks, open heart surgery, computers, just to name a few? Innovators like Garrett Morgan, Dr. Shirly Ann Jackson, Roy L. Clay, Mary Van Brittian Brown, James West, and Mark Dean are just a few of those contributors, yet I’ve never heard of them until recently. Let’s not forget those famous ones, the ones in our history books or highlighted during Blak History Month, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and Ida B. Wells. These figures were just as impressive in their actions as the lesser-known pioneers of history, all of which worked toward creating equal rights for human beings among all aspects of life.

And we have to remember the individuals that made an impact on life when they never meant to be in the first place, becoming symbols of the injustices Black Americans faced every day. Names like Emmett Till, Mack Charles Parker, and Virgil Lamar Ware, all killed for no reason at all, remind us of the harsh reality of racism, discrimination, and inequalities that are so prevalent in the American Dream, that, ironically, didnt, and to some extent, still doesn’t include people that are seen as “not white.”

So, the question posed earlier remains: What does this mean for us? Do we still “celebrate” Black History month in February, ignoring the contributions and pioneers for the rest of the year or do we try to tell the stories to our children that we never learned growing up ourselves? Do we teach the next generation that even simple actions, like smiling to a white girl, was dangerous, and that America as a whole considered “people other than white” as subservient, lower-class, or not people at all? Do we reject the sanitized versions of history that public schools teach, instead, confronting the harsh realities of what racism was and is today? Or do we continue to let it happen? As a white man in America today, I will never know what discrimination feels like, looks like, and sounds like. I just know what my teachers or parents taught me, and that isn’t always the full truth.