Yaa-Hemaa Obiri-Yeboah: Black History Is Everyone's History: Black History Month is not just for black people. In an ideal world, there would be no need for a dedicated month to mark black history -- and the significant contributions that blacks have made around the world -- because it would be on par and as well-known as History, i.e. the mainstream history that many of us learned in high school. I don't know how history was taught when you were in school, but in my school our teachers skipped over the chapter (yes, only a single chapter) on blacks in Canada and North America more generally.
Sure, I understand that there's much to cram into school curricula, but when we skip over or elide significant aspects of our country's past, we demonstrate what -or who - is important or unimportant in our society. These omissions -- which affect, of course, not only blacks, but also Asians, native peoples, and various other ethnic groups (women too lest we forget) -- skew our view of the world and lead to erroneous assumptions.
