In the fifth article for the BHM blog take-over, Leon Alleyne-McLaughlin discusses his thoughts when Black History Month is countered with the question of a "White History Month".
1. Ah, you're one of those
2. Really?!
3. Ok, I suppose you can go fuck yourself then
4. Oh well, at least you're polite enough to announce your fucking awful personality to the rest of the world
5. Now I don't have to waste time getting invested in you as a person
6. Imagine managing to survive to adulthood and complaining about there being a black history month
7. *Remembers that this describes a good chunk of Government MPs, media 'personalities' (never have a set of quote marks been doing more work), and CEOs*
8. Thousands of innocent children die of preventable disease every year, but you're alive! FML!
9. Like, I believe that every person is deserving of a basic amount of human dignity, but fuck me, you're pushing it
10. Seriously, go fuck yourself, you fucking waste of organs and tissue!
11. Actually, you know what! I've changed my mind. I'll take that bargain
12. We'll talk about nothing, but white history for all of October and then you can shut the fuck up for 11 months!
13. For 11 glorious months, every historical narrative would only centre people of colour
14. Not one school child would be forced to learn about Henry I, or spend weeks on just the wives of Henry VIII
15. No historically illiterate WWII takes (or low key pretending you fought in it even though you hadn't even been born)
16. Yeah, it's not sounding so great now is it
17. No more lazy comparisons to Nelson, Wellington or Churchill in the tabloids from November to September
18. Can you imagine? You'd go out of your tiny white mind before you even got to Christmas
19. And then you'd still have to cope with a Christmas nativity complete with a historically accurate Palestinian Jewish Jesus
20. Face it. You don't have the strength of character for a white history month
21. You couldn't deal with not having 'your' history front and centre for most of the year, you whiney fuck
22. Because that's what black people have to deal with
23. But you begrudge us even that short amount of time each year
24. You miserly fuck! 25. But honestly, fuck you!
26. You pretend you care about history, but you don't even understand
27. Our own history is a common shared inheritance
28. And it doesn't fit into clearly delineated categories
29. What you think of as 'white' history, 'your' history, involves us, affected us, still affects us today. You just don't see us in it
30. And Black history is exactly the same
31. So much of who you are and the society you live in was shaped by or built on the backs of people who look like me
32. And you ignore so much of it
33. Why?!
34. Because it might give too much emphasis to people who don't look like you?!
35. Because it puts people who look like me at the fore?
36. Fuck you, you ignorant bastard!
37. Fuck you, small-minded prick!
38. Fuck you, you intellectually deficient troglodyte!
39. And once more, just fuck you!
Leon is the Secretary of the Young Fabians. He can be contacted at [email protected].
He tweets at @leon_alleyne