Everyone stop what you are doing.

White people are angry. No, not because they realized that Ben Affleck won an Oscar for an ahistorical, pro-America fantasy. Taylor Swift hasn’t had any half black children. White people are, again, upset that they have had to sit through another February of black history month.

“Why don’t we have white history month?” (If you give them a whole month, they might want something else, like dignity and independence from whiteness.)

“I didn’t do any of that stuff.” (I just benefit from it happening, and I actually still do all of it, just with a brand new package.)

We’ve heard it all before, but this time, and probably only this time, I agree to a point. Let’s stop calling what we are collectively doing as a nation during the month of February “Black History Month”; its neither black nor historical. By the power vested in me by my internet soapbox, February shall here on out be known as (wait for it…) Integration Awareness Month. I can see it all now. We can make pins with black hands holding white hands overlaid with the phrase “I Have A Dream” in multi-color lettering. The best part is, we can keep on doing what we are doing and be honest about it. We are raising awareness of the need for integration one day. Best of all, raising awareness is such an open-ended goal, we can say we accomplished it every year by never defining what awareness means. Here’s a curriculum for teaching integration awareness month;

week 1: Slavery; a barely relevant bad thing from a long ago that started the conversation.

week 2: Lincoln; the white man decides its time to free the slaves.

week 3: MLK; bus boycotts, marches, and dream, oh my.

week 4: Obama; self high five, white people! we made it.

On Fridays we can celebrate black people who have bought into whiteness and have navigated it successfully enough to create works of art and culture that white people appreciate.

Inversely, black history doesn’t have to stop with the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and successful black capitalist. Black History doesn’t have to be sanitized to be palatable to white ears that so desperately want to believe that all black people need is more whiteness. Black history can deal with Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the New Afrika Movement, literally every other thing Dr. King said that wasn’t “I Have a Dream”, NWA, Bad Brains, Body Count, Charles Mingus, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Rob Williams, Asata Shakur, Mumia Abul-Jamal, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Sister Rosetta Tharp, Gil Scott-Heron, And the host of other black people who get left out of Integration Awareness Month because they question whiteness, patriarchy, and/or capitalism. With black history, we can even acknowledge Integration Awareness by being aware that the integration of lunch counters, public bathrooms and water fountains coincides with push to make all of these public services private.

Black History Month is, like the internet according to Prince, completely over. Its been over for a long time now. Let’s stop forcing blackness into their integration. This way black history can be a 365 day a year critique racist, sexist, holding corporation called America.