As someone who loves to study history, I have to disagree. You aren't wrong, of course - black history as we take it in America is a way to show the contributions and the value of black people on our culture and our history. And of course, it is to acknowledge the terrible pain that our culture brought upon a whole race for longer than anyone should have allowed.

However, segregating a month (the shortest one, incidentally) to say "right, this is where we learn about black people and their struggles and successes and humanity, then we'll get back to our scheduled lessons" seems very diminishing. Why? Why not teach this, and reinforce this all the time? Why not integrate the teaching of African history with the usual curriculum of dead white males? How about when you're teaching American history throughout the whole course reinforce that there were slaves, that it was traumatic, and here's what was happening at the time through every chapter? Until college, every US history class I'd ever taken had one chapter, maybe two about black people, usually squeezed into a 100-year period sometime between just before the civil war and just after MLK. Outside of that, you could assume, by most lesson plans, that there were no black people. That is insane.

So I ask - why do we only want one month to

try to fix that by showing great contributions of blacks to the US and the world as a way to try to impart some humanity and self confidence to the community while atoning for a former wrong in some small way