[In response to “Black History Month racist” in the Feb. 13 issue.]

Although I am French, Irish, Cherokee, Choctaw and Cree Indian, when people look at me, they see a white female. I think that it is important to note that this article had an impact on me, even though I am not black.

Black History Month is a vitally important month for several reasons. The strongest one is that the month is not just about what happened in the Civil Rights Movement or what happened when slavery was abolished. Black History Month is about recognizing what has happened, about who has been involved, about who are all the populations that have been affected, and about what the effects still are today.

Black History Month is not just about Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X or Angela Davis. It is also about what is still happening today – all of those issues that we don’t talk about such as racial, economic, and religious intolerance twelve months out of the year.

I understand that the writer’s piece was a commentary and an opinion to which she is entitled. I’m even willing to bet that she had good intentions for the “equality of all people” for the sake of being American alone. However, it is culturally insensitive. It is historically unfounded. It is severely slanted and biased. I do not walk down the street and experience the world the same way as a black man or a black woman or a Hispanic woman or an Asian man. We see first and act second.

I will never strip someone of their identity just because they are part of that “good ‘ol melting pot.” That takes people’s histories away from them.

Turner believes that singling out a specific population for one month segregates black people instead of opening our multicultural American arms to them. The reality is that we are talking about people, some of them who are still alive, who were dragged behind trucks, attacked by dogs, violently beaten, had their homes burned, and had their family members murdered because of the color of their skin while hoping that basic rights someday would be a reality.

This reality needs to be acknowledged, deserves to be remembered, and demands our honor. That all people across all demographics still are not equal needs to be acknowledged and demands to be discussed and dealt with. If we didn’t have Black History Month, more often than not all of this would be forgotten and glossed over.

Within the first two paragraphs of the commentary, the writer said “(Black History Month) is seen as a way of setting people of color equal to the white people who supposed discriminated against them.”

Supposedly?

Turner quotes the Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1892: “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” In 1892, who was the “all”? They were those who founded this country for one population alone: affluent, land-owning, white, straight males. The Pledge was before the Civil Rights Movement began in 1955 and before the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Japanese concentration camps in the 1940s, and the GLBTQ Rights Movement.

Unfortunately, this country was not truly founded on equality and that reality is still infused in many areas within our society, especially in our K-12 education system across the nation. People who are poor and from marginalized populations within society still deal with discrimination. This needs to be acknowledged and addressed, and if it takes the existence of Black History Month to make people yet again see what is the truth of our past that has created our future, then so be it.

­– Christina Brewer, Pierce College student