A friend of mine is reading up on biographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.  It somehow strikes me as a flimsy selection, though an obvious and important point of historical fissure and conflict to read up on — both of them.  I half want to ask if this was spurred by, quote-in-quote, “black history month.”

Which gets me to this perennial reminiscence.

I was going to post an entry on February 28th (I guess I still could) entitled “Black History Month K-12 Educational Simulation”, wherein I post a link to a wikipedia article about black soldiers in the Civil War, and thus make fun of the tokenism that greeted me with Black History Month through my public schooling. That goes back to my Freshman year of high school, where on the final day of February the teacher showed us… a film about black soldiers in the civil war… and it was a last minute schedule change on the part of the teacher, who evidentally had a “Holy Crap! This is Black History Month!” moment. A test that students may or may not have studied for was thusly delayed.

to finish that sentence: “A test that students may or may not have studied for was thusly delayed until March” — I think past the February ending weekend.

It’s fashionable to mock the way “Black History Month” works out.  Things could be worse.

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