WATCH: 5 things you probably didn’t know were invented by African Americans
Black History Month lessons leave out so much of our rich and nuanced history. Here's my supplement VIDEO
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Our nation’s problem with accurately depicting the black narrative has not been a secret, which is why no one should really be surprised when many students are forced to learn a condensed version of black history every February — ironically, the shortest month in the year. Those horrible lessons given to our students normally go like this: Africans were bought to America as slaves, contributed nothing to society and had no role in the nation’s rise to super-power status, mainly because they were dumb and lazy, until about two days later when Abraham Lincoln ended the not-so-bad institution of slavery (or what some might call an “internship”) all by himself. Then Rosa Park was too lazy to go to the back of the bus, so she was arrested for sitting in a white bus seat while being black, making Dr. Martin Luther King super angry — so angry that he buried his own laziness and marched on Washington and that made it possible for Barack Obama to become a not-so-lazy president.