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Years ago, a chain email went around during Black History Month.
It wasn’t just annoying. It was a weapon.
The whole point was familiar:
If Black people get a history month, why don’t white people?
Then came the grievance list: scholarships, parades with black bands, black-leaning universities, “special treatment,” white people being “punished,” white people being “left out.”
That email ripped through my high school friend group first. Lifelong friendships cracked and ended overnight. People took sides. People revealed themselves. People defended themselves with hurt feelings and outrage over pushback.
Then it landed in a family group conversation, spread among white family members like a secret.
The problem: not all the family members were white, and eventually the email and its intent leaked.
It broke our family in a way that sounds dramatic until you’ve lived it. People stopped speaking. Not for a week. Not for a season. For years. Long enough that death made it too late to mend.
So I’m not interested in pretending this shit is just a conversation starter. It’s not “just an email.” It is not just an innocent question. It’s an ideology delivery system. It is the coded language of white fragility.
Here is the truth: we do not need a White History Month because white history is already the default.
In schools, “history” is—for the most part—white history. Presidents, wars, inventors, explorers, philosophers. The camera stays on white people unless it needs a supporting character or a problem to solve. Black history and Indigenous history show up as units, sidebars, or tragedies. Never as the core story.
Black History Month exists because Black history was deliberately excluded, minimized, and sanitized. It is not a bonus. It is a correction.
The “White History Month” argument pretends it’s about fairness, but it only sounds fair if you ignore the entire setup. If one group’s history is treated as normal and universal 11 months of the year, and everyone else’s history is treated as optional, then a dedicated month is not special treatment. It’s a counterweight.
Also, let’s be super-clear:
Whiteness is not a culture. It’s a power arrangement.
Irish history is a culture. Italian history is a culture. Polish history is a culture. Celebrate those, absolutely. But “white history” in the way that email meant it is not about heritage. It’s about dominance. It’s about keeping the spotlight where it’s always been and calling it oppression when someone else steps into frame.
And here’s what I wish more white people understood: celebrating other cultures is not charity. It benefits you.
It gives you a truer education.
It gives you context, not mythology.
It makes you harder to manipulate by grievance politics.
It frees you from the fragile, exhausting belief that sharing is losing.
Because the reflex behind “Where is my month?” is not pride. It’s panic. It’s what happens when you’re used to being centered and equality feels like erasure.
So, no. We don’t need celebrations of whiteness and white dominant culture. We need white people willing to grow up.
We are not being punished because we don’t have a White History Month. We are being invited, for once, to practice the skills of a shared world: humility, honesty, and the ability to witness someone else—without making it about us.
And when that chain email shows up again, in whatever new packaging it wears, I’m not interested in polite silence. Silence is how this spreads. Silence is how families rupture and then call it “politics” like it’s a harmless hobby.
Politics are lived values. They decide who counts. They decide who is protected. They decide who is allowed to be fully human.
That email didn’t just break relationships. It revealed what some people needed to believe in order to feel okay.
So, if you’ve read this far and are still feeling sad and left out, here is another inconvenient truth: BLACK HISTORY IS WHITE HISTORY UNABRIDGED.
And that’s why we don’t need a White History Month.
We need the truth.
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