African-American history is American history

Abe Appel Communications major It is disappointing watching another Black History Month end while still being ignored and downplayed in the greater Euro-American culture. It is troubling watching another Black History Month end with most colleges, newspapers, government figures and civilians ignoring African-American history month, or relegating it down to something ethnically isolated. Again we choose isolation between histories, instead of making Black History Month a time to truly look at history. Again we refused to take this time to look at who was America, in order to find out who is America, in order to find out who America will be. By ignoring Black history we ignore American history itself. Black history is as much the history of Euro-America as it is the history of African-America�s struggle to free, structure, define and create itself in the American Diaspora. Black History Month is a mirror in which we are refusing to look. We don�t want to see the slave triangle, we don�t want to see slave masters, we don�t want to see Jim Crow and lynchings running through our veins, we don�t want to see Malcolm X as a hero, black panthers as American revolutionaries or Cornel West as one of the leading intellectuals. We don�t even want to see people like John Brown and the abolitionist doing anything necessary to end slavery as something absolutely positive. So we have decided instead to hide our heads in the sand believing that if we don�t see it, its not there. But it is there whether you look or not. By us ignoring African-American history we continue to ignore African-American present. In so doing we continue to either approve of, or perpetuate through our ignorance�s the divisions, pains, and Historic racism that is still creating apartheid in American schools, prisons, roads, housing, education, economics, entertainment, national, international and personal relationships. African-American history and black reality rests heavily on our collective and individual souls. We never healed. The wounds are still open. Companies and this very government became rich through slave labor and today sit in plush towers and leather chairs with corporate accounts while African-Americans-for example-in Harlem fight to not get arrested, so they can somehow get pass pre-conceived perceptions of them and get into college and then after graduation fight again to work at, let alone own, the companies in Manhattan. And still just like in the days of slavery we really appreciate African- Americans who sing or dance or compete for us, but refuse to let them lead, teach and spiritually guide us. We never paid back the debt; and so we still are building the debt. For instance Stanly Tookie Williams� execution (and the Governors disgustingly racist critique of such beautiful people as Angela Davis and Nelson Mandela in his decision to kill Tookie) is in direct relation to the ignoring of African-American history, which is American history unrecognized and forced to the flipside. Diversity isn�t all of us learning different histories. True diversity is all of our perspectives through history coming together equally to create �the History of us�. As each event this month that recognized and taught African-American history went unattended, uncovered, and untaught it formed a magnification within our smaller school culture of our national culture. And until history itself can be healed into one scar, the wound will remain open. And any talk of diversity will represent the watering down of �respect� to create an annoyance that we�ll hide within the word �tolerance�. American history can not be known as long as we have African-American history relegated into separate but equal times and places as something �for them� but not us. They are we, we are they.