I don’t know about you, but it’s not uncommon during Black History Month to hear someone ask, “Why don’t we have a White History Month?” I normally don’t interject my thoughts or respond. But I do have a few thoughts…
Looking back on my education, I didn’t feel like anything was missing – at the time.
I went to school, learned history, studied, took the exams, and moved on. The story I was told felt complete enough: presidents, wars, historical figures, and dates. The people at the center of those stories mostly looked like me, talked like me, and came from backgrounds I could imagine myself fitting into. I never questioned that. I didn’t have to.
Looking back, the uncomfortable truth is: I didn’t feel the absence because the absence didn’t affect ME.
I learned about slavery, but only at a surface level. It was presented as something tragic, yes, but finished. Closed. I learned more from watching the series, “Roots.” I didn’t sit with the lives of the people who endured it. I didn’t learn their names, their gifts and skills, their poetry, their resistance, their brilliance. I learned about Juneteenth when slavery ended, and about Juneteenth until relatively recently. And when I did, I remember feeling embarrassed—then defensive; then quiet. The same was true when I learned about the Tulsa massacre two years ago. And that realization hurt more than I expected.
I never learned how understanding slavery helped people see why pain, distrust, or anger didn’t come out of nowhere, and why “just get over it” isn’t how trauma works.
I didn’t learn that slavery is not a footnote; that it’s central, and that learning about it doesn’t weaken our country; it makes the story more honest and human.
I want to learn more about slavery because so many things around me didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Neighborhoods, schools, wealth, poverty, mistrust, and opportunity all have roots. Slavery shaped those roots. Ignoring that doesn’t make the present fairer; it just makes it harder to explain.
I learn about slavery because it teaches me how systems work. Slavery wasn’t just cruelty by a few individuals; it was law, economics, religion, and politics reinforcing one another. That matters, because injustice today often hides behind systems too.
I learn about slavery because empathy matters. Pain that isn’t acknowledged doesn’t disappear; it hardens. Learning this history helps me listen better and judge less quickly.
I learn about slavery because freedom means more when I know how deliberately it was denied. Rights are not abstract when I see how hard people fought for them—and how easily they were taken away.
I learned about inventors and entrepreneurs, but not about Garrett Morgan, whose ideas saved lives, or C.J. Walker, who built wealth while funding schools and civil rights work. I didn’t learn that success and generosity existed side by side in Black history long before modern movements.
Then I think about the civil rights movement – the part I thought I knew best – was softened for me. Martin Luther King Jr. was reduced to a dream, stripped of his anger, his courage, his disruption. I wasn’t taught how threatening his message was to those in power, or how many people wanted him to slow down – or disappear. I didn’t learn about Ella Baker’s quiet insistence that ordinary people mattered, or Bayard Rustin’s organizing genius, or how fear and prejudice decided who got remembered and who didn’t.
I didn’t learn about Black veterans coming home from war to find closed doors, red lines, and broken promises. I didn’t learn how policy, not laziness, not moral failure, shaped so much of what we now call “inequality.”
Black History Month forces me to sit with the truth that I was given an incomplete education, and that I accepted it without protest.
There isn’t a White History Month because white history never needed protection. It never had to fight to be remembered. It never had to justify its importance. It was always assumed to matter.
Black History Month doesn’t shame me; it humbles me. Our mistakes should humble us. Comfort is not the same as truth. I need to consider how many people I have misunderstood simply because I was never taught to see them fully.
This month matters because it exposes the cost of omission; not just to those whose stories were erased, but to people like me, who grew up believing we already knew enough.
I didn’t know enough.
And maybe the most honest thing I can say is this: Black History Month isn’t about correcting the past alone. It’s about correcting me, again and again, until I’m willing to listen to the stories I once didn’t notice were missing.
