I have to start this essay with me clarifying that Black History Month isn’t to be understood by the white majority.
It’s not our job to make white people understand our deep rooted history.
BHM is to celebrate the accomplishments and achievements that our people before us struggled and fought so hard for us to be able to accomplish. White people have colonized and written over generations of black history, choosing to try and suppress the inhumane treatment they put us through instead of facing it. BHM is one of the only things our people have to connect and keep pieces of our culture alive that have been trampled over by white people across centuries. They don’t deserve to understand the culture and values of our people after they’ve fought to erase our history for so long. Now that I have my disclaimer out of the way, let’s start the real conversation.
The question “How does BHM contribute to a wider understanding of American history?” sends me into a spiral of conversation because of how little this discussion is had despite the importance of it. Black History Month allows black people from everywhere to share our distorted and forgotten history and have someone maybe take the time to listen.
Although it’s sad to say, people don’t bother to educate themselves on black history. They choose to live ignorantly believing what their white teachers tell them in their history classes instead of taking a few minutes to look up what actually happened.
Black history is a huge part of American history and people fail to realize that. The books that we read in schools and the biased curriculums the higher ups force the teachers to teach have only told us the part of the story where the white man saves the day. The few books and the few teachers that teach the correct history are silenced and banned from the school system.
Project 2025 and people like Trump and Elon Musk abuse their power to suppress our history so it’s not taught in schools because it doesn’t put rich white powerful men like them in a “good light”. It’s completely ridiculous that instead of teaching the correct history to the children of the future, you’d rather ban everything that speaks on the topic so white people look like the heroes that do no wrong.
Black history fills in so many gaps of history that people still can’t make sense of to this day because of the lack of knowledge they’ve been provided with on black history. Black History Month, as I said before, gives black people a chance to share our people’s stories that’ve been stampeded over by the lies that white people make up to fill in the multiples gaps they’ve left trying to cover up our history.
Black History Month allows people to see that we weren’t aggressive monsters who just got what they deserved, we were people who’s families and lives were taken away from us. We’re people whose homes were invaded and were taken away to become slaves without any choice. Our rights were stripped from us as if we were animals who did whatever their owner said. Black people are people too and we don’t fight for no reason, White people continued to attack us from all different angles and we had enough. But they don’t tell people that in the books we read at school because black people are seen as these aggressive beasts that destroy and kill people for nothing.
But we’re not.
Black History Month gives black people the chance to share our stories and tell our history correctly without white people trying to colonize it to the way they see fit.