Respect should last throughout year
I want you to close your eyes.
I want you to imagine you are a young black man who has just been shipped over to America. A whole new world. Your heart is racing, the sun is hot, your clothes are a mess, and people are staring at you. They are opening your mouth and checking your teeth, grabbing your arms and checking your muscles, checking everything. They are all over you.
All these people, with no color to their skin. They don’t look like you, or anyone you have ever seen before. You hear all these men spitting out comments, numbers and, finally, you are taken. Taken to a big house with lots of land and lots of people. You see people like you. They are your color, they sound like you, you have finally been returned to normal.
Then you see their faces.
They are all dirty, sweaty, hot, and they look ill. You finally understand why you have been brought here. Why so many people were arguing over you. You aren’t back to normal. Instead, you are even worse off than ever before.
Fast forward 20 years. You have been working the fields this whole time. You have been beaten, whipped, almost killed by the same man that got you the first day you came over here. You have watched others like you come and go. You never make it out. You spend your whole life there … and your life ends there.
Open your eyes. Think about all the pain and suffering you saw while your eyes were closed. You were forced to work under awful conditions, beaten if not done correctly for what seems like your whole life. What did you get out of it in the long run? A month. One month that remembers what you went through your whole entire life.
The poet Maya Angelou once said, “All great achievements require time.” I believe that statement with all my heart, I truly do. But African Americans have put in the time, and what have we gotten out of it? A month. A month of learning and focusing on the years of pain that African Americans have felt. I believe great achievements take time, but I also believe that African Americans have put in enough time and deserve to be respected throughout the year. Not just for one month.
Schools shouldn’t wait until February to teach students about black history. It should be offered throughout the year. It is an achievement to have one specific month dedicated to learning about black history, but after that month, it just stops. We stop learning and thinking about black history. We go back to our own ignorant ways of life, not giving a care in the world about what our ancestors went through. Not realizing that there are still problems we need to fix.
Yes, Black History Month is an achievement, but it isn’t great. One month to focus on years and years of pain and suffering. Does that seem fair? What if you worked at a company for years and years, and only got paid one month out of the year? This is not any different. As African Americans, we are still putting in the time, and still only getting paid for one month. We have been putting in the time since our great ancestors were shipped to America by boat and sold to people like cattle. Now, we are still putting in time, as our fellow brothers and sisters can’t even walk on the streets without being scared of not making it back home, getting harassed and beaten because of the color of their skin.
One month is not enough to make up for what our ancestors have been put through and what we are still going through. A whole year of learning about black history. A whole lifetime of learning about black history. Those are great achievements. Those are what we deserve. That is what we are going to get.
Ellis is a sophomore at Washington High School. This is one of two first-place entries in an essay contest commemorating Black History Month. The contest was sponsored by Washington Health System Teen Outreach.