WITH BLACK History Month -- the shortest of the year, it is often pointed out -- drawn to a close, we bid a fond adieu to public radio tributes to African-American icons and gaze one final time at heartfelt billboard salutes from car manufacturers. In grade-school classrooms across America, timeworn photographs of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and Jackie Robinson are being removed from bulletin boards, tucked away to slumber for another year.
And as winter gives way to spring, the absence of a month that might make all the difference in this racially stratified nation is more glaring than ever.
White History Month.
I speak not of a period of celebration but one of excavation.
White people are everywhere, but whiteness itself -- as an identity, a shared set of assumptions, a state of economic and institutional empowerment -- is perhaps the largest uninterrogated concept of all. ( Read more...Collapse )
