Impossible to Please

Damn it, us racist whiteys just can't do anything right. Looks like having Black History Month, as well as discounting corn bread, is now racist. I wonder if it's more or less racist than NOT having Black History Month?

The author of the first article does touch on some points I might agree with, but still I have no real problem with having a Black History month. However, the author coughed up a few infuriating quotes I simply cannot let go unchallenged. They concern -of course- that damned school system of mine:

"What little we know about our nation’s past has been transmitted by Hollywood, so schoolchildren know that the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving, all Indians wore feathers and George Washington Carver invented the peanut".

"... giving us our own month of “Black History” makes matters worse. For one thing, it lets the academy off the hook, allowing textbook writers and history teachers to continue their superficial history lessons that gloss over Reconstruction and Jim Crow, ignore the 19th century’s black entrepreneurs and pretend that GI Joe was always white."

Good Lord woman, have you ever actually set foot inside an American school? Or have I just been living a bizarrely unusual school life? For years and years I have been indoctrinated with unremitting facts about slavery and Jim Crow and how the pilgrims screwed over that poor heroic Squanto. My present history class can't stop gushing about what a genius G.W. Carver was. 80% of my education concerning Vietnam concerned how corrupt rich whites left the fighting to downtrodden blacks. And, even more oddly, this same school system won't stop telling me that all throughout my years in school I have been indoctrinated with racist and overly patriotic propaganda, when the truth is that I can count yearly on having a somewhat moonbat-ish history teacher bemoaning the plight of everybody Whitey has ever wronged. Glossing over Reconstruction? I SPENT THE LAST TWO MONTHS ON THAT DAMN TOPIC!

People, slavery was evil, so was Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement is something this country can be damn proud of. Blacks have, historically, overcome massive obstacles fighting for equality. I recognize that fully - even if the media and the schools seem to want me to believe that I don't recognize this. Even if I've learned about nothing else in history class for the last near-decade.

However, on a side note, the ignorance of some of my classmates on topics of equal importance does frighten me on occasion. My present history teacher recently offended me greatly by saying that myself and my classmates were to young to remember either 9/11 (Not even eight years ago!) or the Abu Ghraib scandal. For the record, I can remember exactly what I did, saw, and even said the morning of 9/11, and I blurted out right there in class that "YES, we remember Abu Ghraib". However, I quickly realized that everyone sitting nearby was looking about confusedly, with one or two whispering, "Abu Gray-ub? What's that?"

Sad. Very sad.