According to Joseph C. Phillips, Black History Month is a noble idea that continues to place Black people on the margins of American society.

Black History Month Treats Our Contributions to America’s Narrative as an Asterisk
By Joseph C. Phillips 

Each year during the month of February, Americans gather together to celebrate the significant contributions black people have made to this nation. We call it Black History Month or the now more politically correct National African-American History Month.

The idea by Dr. Carter G. Woodson is a noble one. For far too long, black contributions to our national culture were marginalized. The black presence in the American narrative was all but absent. As the great Flip Wilson observed, “Why should they invite us to the party when we’re doin’ all the cooking?” But if pushing black folk to the margins by ignoring our contributions made us second-class citizens in the past, keeping us on the margins as a way to celebrate our contributions is to continue to see being a black American as being an American with an asterisk.

One of the rationales for the creation of a Black History Month was the correct observation that the continued presence of that asterisk separated black people from an American history and American cultural values that we had earned through sweat equity. Alas, that asterisk also opens the door to the influence of ideas and philosophies that are counterproductive to continued American success and black success in America.

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