Why there should be a White History Month

Rubin Stacey, lynched victim, hanging from a tree, surrounded by onlookers, including girls, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (July 19, 1935)

There should be a White History Month in America. That way we can teach all about the things White Americans have done in history, like:

1. Cherokee Trail of Tears
2. Japanese American internment
3. Philippine-American War
4. Jim Crow
5. The genocide of Native Americans
6. Transatlantic slave trade
7. The Middle Passage
8. The history of White American racism
9. Black Codes
10. Slave patrols
11. Ku Klux Klan
12. NYPD
13. The War on Drugs
14. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
15. How white racism grew out of slavery and genocide
16. How whites still benefit from slavery and genocide
17. White anti-racism
18. The Southern strategy
19. The rape of black slave women
20. CORE
21. Madison Grant
22. The Indian Wars
23. Human zoos
24. How the Jews became white
25. White flight
26. Redlining
27. Proposition 14
28. Homestead Act
29. Tulsa Riots
30. Rosewood massacre
31. Tuskegee Experiment
32. Lynching
33. Hollywood stereotypes
34. Indian Appropriations Acts
35. Immigration Act of 1924
36. Sundown towns
37. Chinese Exclusion Act
38. Emmett Till
39. Vincent Chin
40. Islamophobia
41. Indian boarding schools
42. King Philip’s War
43. Bacon’s Rebellion
44. American slavery compared to Arab, Roman and Latin American slavery
45. History of the gun
46. History of the police
47. History of prisons
48. History of white suburbia
49. Lincoln’s racism and anti-racism
50. George Wallace
51. Fox News
52. Tea Party
53. Cointelpro
54. Real estate steering
55. School tracking
56. Mass incarceration of black men
57. Boston school busing riots

And so on. No fear of running out of topics: there is more than one a day! I am sure my commenters can come up with tons more, probably some big ones that are not coming to mind at the moment. I did not list things that often do get covered in history class in America, however poorly, like Lincoln or Reconstruction.

White History Month should be in November, the same month as Thanksgiving, the holiday which observes the supposed beginning of White America.

Schoolchildren can do reports on:

• John Brown (required)
• Andrew Goodman
• Michael Schwerner
• Thaddeus Stevens
• Jim Zwerg
• William Lloyd Garrison

Suggested reading of White American authors:

Howard Zinn: “A People’s History of the United States (P.S.)” (2010)

James W. Loewen: ”Lies My Teacher Told Me” (2007)

Thomas J. Sugrue: “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit” (2005)

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic: “Critical Race Theory” (2001)

Morris Dees: “A Season of Justice: The Life and Times of a Civil Rights Lawyer” (1992)

Virginia Foster Durr: “Outside the Magic Circle” (1990)

Lois Stalvey: “The Education of a WASP” (1989)

Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky: “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988)

William English Walling:“Race War in the North” (1908) – out of print

Abraham Lincoln: “Speeches and Writings : 1859-1865”

Henry David Thoreau: “Civil Disobedience” (1849), “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1860)

Harriet Beecher Stowe: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852)

I used to say there was no need for White History Month in America because it is the month that never ends: American history is taught year-round from a white point of view and makes white people the heroes, the good guys. But, as we know from the Texas school board and James Loewen, it is not a true history that is being taught but rather Caucasian Mythology (white supremacist propaganda).

See also:

• White History Month – in which I argue against the need for it
• History in Texas schoolbooks
• American history books and racism
• Books banned from Tucson classrooms
• If you like this blog you might also like… – more suggested reading, but mostly by black authors
• White in America – a spoof on CNN’s “Black in America”
• How White America got rich
• reading while white: history and news