Seriously Though, When Is White History Month?

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It’s just that damn, every month feels like black history month. Black people get everything. Why is it wrong to feel white pride? Black people also get their own TV station–they have BET while white people only have ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the CW, and the hundreds of other television networks. It’s ridiculous that we’re going to have to hear about black people for a whole 29 days of the shortest month of the year. That doesn’t seem fair, man. It just doesn’t.

I mean, we like black people, mostly, but we don’t want to have to think about them or anything, not for a whole month, that is just too much. Also, it’s pretty obvious that white people accomplish far more and greater things so, you know…. Can you imagine the “fits” black people would throw if white people had a history month other than January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December?

Also, black people have a president and they are no longer slaves. Are they ever satisfied? When you think about it, it is rather racist that black people get a history month and Hispanic people get a history month while white people only get a white history year, every single year, since beginning of time. It doesn’t matter that history as a cultural concept has historically been synonymous with white history. The word “year” has fewer letters than “month” so it is just is not fair at all.

But we are not racist, okay? WE ARE NOT RACIST. Just sayin’.

So yes, this  lament over the lack of a white history month is really a thing.


Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger forthcoming in 2017. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. Roxane was the founding Essays Editor and is a current Advisory Board member for The Rumpus. You can find her at roxanegay.com. More from this author →