The case for White History Month.

• Author: Stevens, Sabrina
• Position: PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN

What if just for a month, educators, public figures, and everyone else stopped erasing whiteness, and started talking explicitly about who, exactly, was responsible for the discrimination that the heroes of All-the-Other-People's-History Months faced?

Too many real-world history classes and textbooks omit white actors and focus instead on oppressed people's suffering. They let the passive voice cloak privilege and aggression like pointed hoods, hiding who is responsible for the oppression we're still working to dismantle.

This is dangerous. When teachers don't talk about who did what in our history, they give students the false impression that bad things just happen to people because of how those people were born, not because of how other people decide to treat them.

That's how generations of students come to believe that time itself must be responsible for oppression or progress, as though injustice has an expiration date that has fortunately passed. And...