Not only is the coding messed up, but it’s incorrect grammar. Therefore it doesn’t count!
Lamia wrote:
I deeply regret invoking metaphorical imagery that was grossly inappropriate given your circumstance. Please accept my apology.
No apology needed, I thought it was funny. I’ve occasionally been accused of having a “swelled head” before, but never when it was literally true!
Lamia, just to let you know that we received your present through Scotti and I’ve been grossly negligent in getting out thank-you notes, but, knowing you were recovering from surgery, you’ve been in our prayers.
To return to the OP and the discussion thereon – I think gobear summed it up nicely in the idea that BHM is a “remediation of neglect.” I completely grant that the contributions of other cultures than the WASP seem to be generally minimized, Lib’s point about the Indian perspective being one of several that might be made – and I’d love to see a way to improve the curriculum to alleviate that. (It took a Larry Niven disaster novel, for Pete’s sake, to make it register on me that Kansas had a significant early Hispanic stratum underlying its culture. How many non-Kansans participating here were aware of that before reading that sentence? Without invoking the mythical International Jewish Conspiracy, it’s worth noting that Jewish immigrants had an impact on our history that receives scanty if any notice. And so on.)
But I think a fair part of the problem is not in the content but in the fact that school history curricula are designed by history teachers and university history professors – who are, understandably, fascinated by the subject they choose to pursue for a career. Which means that the kid who might be captured by seeing how events of the past directly influence his own life, is turned off by learning facts about the Credit Mobilier scandal, the Hawley-Smoot tariff, and the NRA fiasco instead. I got fascinated by Theodoric the Ostrogoth and what he tried to do, and how his dream died with him – but I’d never subject a class to 50 minutes of boredom while I talk about him.
Yeah, but kids are basically taught he’s the inventor of peanut butter - it’s a very simplified and dumbed down version that we are taught, not that he reformed crop rotation methods. I’m not saying that George Washington Carver is insignificant, but if he was white the only people who had heard about him would be people studying the history of agriculture. Because we try to draw extra attention to African American accomplishments millions of kids are taught his name and a brief description of what he did, leading them to think ‘Huh? Why is this important?’.
You coulden’t find any thing in the archives for “Black History Month”
There are two pages worth of Threads!
Try raido button for any date next time!
Now that history textbooks intentionally add “what blacks/women/other did during ___”, isn’t that enough w/o BHM? Remember that whites did do more than blacks in history. As someone back there (oh so accurate, eh? 
) said, when remediation is finished, will BHM b e?
It’s comments like these that make it clear that there is still much work to be done in educating people about history.
athelas’ comment may sound racist, but at least in terms of American history it may not be. Since whites compose more than 2/3 the population, one might expect that whites did do more than blacks in American history. It’s only logical to assume that the majority of the history was made by the majority of the population.
People tend to think history is just about trivial facts, like who invented the steam engine. But history is also about getting a perspective and gleaming a background on a particular event in history.
I promised my mother I would take a black history course while I was at college. To be honest, I thought I would be off the hook since my university was lily-white and I figured a course like that wouldn’t be offered. Just so happened that a new history prof showed up in town during my senior year, and she was teaching black history.
I thought it was going to be a class where we would memorize trivia, like who was Madame CJ Walker and who invented the stop light. But no. Instead, we delved into our country’s history with race and racism. We read Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia” (previous to that, I didn’t know that he had owned so many slaves and that he truly was a creep with regards to his “scientific” views on black people). We also learned about slavery from the perspectives of the slaves via their first-hand accounts (we read three different sets of accounts, from different periods during slavery). I thought I knew the whole deal about slavery previous to that, but man, was I ignorant! I had no idea there had been so many thwarted slave rebellions! Just do a google search on Denmark Vesey to see the sheer scale of those plans. If more people knew about this history, there’s no way people could even think that the slaves enjoyed their capitivity. The lessons about those thwarted slave rebellions shed some light on the term “house negro” and why being called one is not a good thing.
Remember Sojourner Truth? She didn’t say “Ain’t I a woman?” She said, “Aren’t I a woman?” Truth spoke with a heavy Dutch accent; not all slaves spoke in slave dialect! The person who recorded her words later changed Truth’s oration so that it sounded more “black”. And another tidbit: It is strongly rumored that Sojourner Truth, the pioneer in black feminism, was raped by her mistress.
The professor made us do a summary of the Civil War in which we were required to cite from primary sources, like newspapers. It was during this assignment that I learned about the NY Draft Riot. Again, I was astounded that I had never heard about this event before.
I also remember the prof giving us a lecture on the origin of black stereotypes. Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Jezibel, Buck, etc. All of these originated during slavery times. I remember writing a paper in which I contrasted these stereotypes with the ones formulated about the Jews during their internment in German concentration camps. Not only were some of the stereotypes similar (particular the “Sambo” one), but it wasn’t uncommon to find both sets of people actually fulfilling those stereotypes, thereby perpetuating them. Interesting stuff…
Most of my classmates in the course were black, unsurprisingly, but there were a few white kids thrown into the mix too. I think we all left the class with new information, and more importantly, new perspective. I think that’s what the study of history is all about. If anyone here has the opportunity to take a black history course–or any history course that’s beyond the mainstream–TAKE IT! It will make you a smarter person.
I don’t know about anybody else, but this seems a really strange way to measure history. The history of blacks in America is just as long as the history of whites. The history of American Indians is even longer.
Length of history, sure. But I’m thinking more in terms of sheer numbers, and that with the majority of the population, quite naturally most historic events are going to have a white domination. This doesn’t discount the rich contributions that minorities have made to our history and our culture, but if you measure quantity without regard to quality, then I believe athelas was correct.
Still not understanding you here. Because there are more white people, they had more history? The quality of history is dependent on how many people lived it? The history of American Indians is less because white people dominated?
Really, I’m having a hard time parsing what it is you mean.
Not trying to be difficult, but who wrote the constitutions, who led the armies into battle, who wrote the great novels, who made the great discoveries, who made the great inventions, who dominated the governments, who led the great explorations, who were the great philosophers, etc? In western history, by and large these were white people. Obviously there are notable exceptions but the great events of history were dominated by whites. Conventional teaching of history in the pre-civil rights era would lead you to think that even more the case, in recent years minority contributions have been more widely acknowledged. Not to say that minority culturea are not equally valid or just as rich, I’m limiting my argument to the major historical events of western history.
And what everybody else was doing while white people did everything that ever happened in all time is not history?
I think the problem here is a problem of definitions. You think history is what white people did and I think history is what happened in the past.
Mothchunks said, "You either honor ALL races or none ".
It’s not honoring a race. It’s honoring a race’s contribution to history. Your history. Why is that so tough for some people to wrap their brain around? This is basic stuff, man.
Not at all. I do believe that in 19th century France there were no blacks with the historical significance of Napolean. In the Roman days the most important historical figures were the emperors. There are no obscure Indian poets with the historical significance of Shakespeare. The great voyages of discovery were made by Spanish and Portuguese sailors. The Magna Charta was a product of white Englishmen. Certainly what non-whites were doing was history, but what they were doing was not, in the western world, causing as much impact. Certainly there were exceptions. But to now say that western history was not dominated by whites may be politically correct, but historically inaccurate.
You state that I believe that history is what white people did. This is incorrect. History is the collection of events, discoveries, people, and culture over time. And surprising as it may be, since the majority of the population of the western world has been white, the majority of historically significant events have been dominated by whites. I’m not saying that’s good, bad, or indifferent. That’s just how it was.
It’s not even about honoring someone’s race over another. It’s simply looking at one sub-catagory of HISTORY. Like you don’t just study History, you study say, 15th century Russian history, or history of Catholicism. We just choose to honor a certain area of history in a month. That’s ALL.
Sheesh!
I’m talking specifically about American history. In America, black history is just as long as white history and American Indian history is even longer.
When whites were writting the constitution, black and American Indians were there. They just didn’t sit around waiting for white people to shine a spotlight on them.
White people wrote the great American Novel? Funny, because even though white people denied blacks the knowledge to write great novels-- they still did. The fact that they were denied the knowledge is part of history. What did blacks do to combat this inequity at the time? How did this illiteracy affect the black population, the population as a whole? This part of our history. Our American history.
White people pioneered their way west. Guess what? The Indians were already there, with much history already in place. White people’s Manifest Destiny conquered our patch of the continent from east to west? Guess what? That great moment in history was accomplished by blacks and Indians and Chinese.
You’re theory of what is history reminds me of one of my children’s kindergarten classmates. The class was on a field trip to the library and on the way there they passed a group of people doing calistenics in the park. The little girl is shocked that one of those people is her mother.
“Mom? What are you doing here?” She was shocked. She couldn’t believe her mother actually existed outside of her experience of her.
White people don’t have more or better history. They just have the history that is told much more often.
I think that while MSU 1978 has a point in that a great deal of what’s considered “significant history” was largely committed by persons of “Caucasian” genetic heritage and European descent, several of his examples are flat-out wrong. In the very valid field of cultural history, for example, Dumas fils was a significant influence in 19th Century France. In Roman days among the most significant individuals came from North Africa and were of what’s traditionally called “Hamitic” stock – of which a good 20th Century example is Haile Selassie. There are a number of “obscure Indian poets” (and philosophers) with the historical significance of Shakespeare – but because “World History” has been considered “the expansion of European civilization to the rest of the world,” they are ignored by most texts, hence “obscure.” The “great voyages of discovery” would certainly have to include the Ming Dynasty naval explorations and the expansion of the Polynesian people if we weren’t so ethnocentric.
And, while I see Felix Eboue as a pivotal figure in how the Second World War played out, I do see the activities of (mostly white) Americans, Britons, Russians (and other Soviet nationalities), Germans, Italians, Canadians, French, Australians, as being key to the actual events of the war. The 442nd Infantry was famous for being unusual – Americans of Japanese descent fighting hard for their country against Italy and later Germany.
But, as biggirl brings up, how much of “history” is defined by “historically significant events” and how much of it by what people were doing as a rule during the time under consideration? The Crusades were led by a couple of significant kings whose names are mentioned – but what they led was a bunch of people who were willing to put their lives on the line to “free the Holy Land from the Saracens.” The first is personal, the second cultural.
I live in a county which boasts of having elected in 1866 a black man to the General Assembly (state legislature) who made the very interesting proposal (defeated by the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment) that out of the public treasury of the state be appropriated $1000 for every freed slave, $500 of it to give the freedman a start in free life and $500 of it to reimburse his former owner for his “loss of property.” But that’s mentioned only in an old local history book. Trivial, perhaps, since nothing ever came of it, but it says to me a lot about the mindset and attitudes that prevailed here in the Upper South immediately after the Civil War – things my history books when I was growing up in rural New York never mentioned.
Quick questions for you: What was the enduring historical significance of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix? What were Thomas Jackson’s views on education? What important roles did Lucius Q.C. Lamar play in late 1800s America? Who was the first man to set foot atop Mount Everest? Who was the second? What is Corinne Scott King’s view on gay rights? According to Greek legend, who was the first person of dark skin to have a major impact on European history? What church includes Kamehameha III of Hawaii on its calendar of saints, and why? Who was Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, and why is he significant? Why do I think that Felix Eboue’s actions had a significant impact on the eventual postwar settlement in WWII, and why is that significant in a discussion of multiculturalism?