By the time they invented Black History Month, I was out of public schools. I was working at a library, and my introduction to the month was an unceasing parade of resentful white kids asking for one of our three books about Frederick Douglass. They were out of luck, as some resentful black kids had checked them out already.
That was my first impression of Black History Month: children, born to both black and white mothers, reaching across the racial divide to share their common hatred of history and library clerks. It was beautiful, really.
I also remember being puzzled, as I thought I remembered "separate is inherently unequal" as being a critical part of black history. I wasn't opposed to the month, really; I was just skeptical that this was the best way to get more black history into textbooks.
Soon I taught my own class, in Eastern Washington, which at the time was damned near the headquarters of the Aryan Nation. I got to see first-hand the resentment that BHM and the Black Studies major cultivated inside these illiterate little pricks. They openly declared their resentment. Poor, put-upon blond-haired, blue-eyed white guys. I'm sure that but for the horrible indignity of BHM, they'd all have interracial posses and children. By this point, my only concern about BHM was that it wasn't nearly long enough.
Which brings us to 2009, when my team's black coach, one of the three black head coaches in my division of four, was just congratulated on his Super Bowl win by President Obama. And it occurred to me right then and there: if a separate Black History Month hasn't gotten kinda silly already, it's certainly about to.