[Blank] History Month With Black History Month and Women's History Month recently over, I figure now is as good a time as any to point out one thing that irks me. Now it's not the celebrations themselves. I know during my days in school that history of the non-majority was scarce at best. Ask a kid to name five famous women not in the entertainment industry and not famous for being married to a famous person, and you won't get a lot of answers ("Carry Nation? Doesn't he host The Price is Right?"). In fact, most people are willfully ignorant about history in general. So YAY! to history months because any history is good history. No, my beef with the various history months is... well, let me tell a brief story. Picture it: 1994 (or maybe 95). Upper Montclair, New Jersey. I'm in the hallway waiting for a deaf Child Psychology graduate student to get out of class (She, the student was deaf. She wasn't studying the psychology of deaf children.)** So I'm wandering about the halls of the "B" building when I came upon a board celebrating Black History Month. On the board were descriptions of over sixty pioneering African-Americans. So I'm going through the various accomplishments and I notice something odd: Everyone of them is listed as either "the first African-American to" or "the first African-American woman to". Not a single person was listed that didn't have that qualifier to it. And I realized then that more times than not Black history is presented in such a manner. Granted, I'm looking at this from the skewed perspective of 35 year old white guy ("I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me." - Homer Simpson) but it seems a bit odd. There was no mention of people like Dr. Charles Drew, who helped develop techniques for storing blood; or Garrett Morgan, the man who invented the fireman's gas mask. But there sure were plenty of articles for people like Maggie Walker, who was the first African-American woman to estrablish and run a bank. Understand I'm not discounting the prejudices that the "first African-American to" and the "first woman to" people didn't have then nor the limited opportunites offered to them. But it all just comes off as very condescending. It's like someone is saying, "A black person running a bank? You don't say! Gosh darn it, that's just amazing. And a woman, too? With all those complicated percentages and numbers and things? Well that is just super-duper for their kind of people." To put it another way, is Amelia Earhart being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic so historic considering that other people had done it before her? So to all of the teachers, authors, and people who design McDonald's placemats for the months of February and March: I'm asking that we focus less on minority and/or female innovators and more on innovators who are minority and/or female. Otherwise I'm going to start demanding that we subdivide every set of accomplishments until there are commemorative plates celebrating the achievements of ambidextrous, transgendered Canadian senior citizens. ** About this deaf graduate student, I was the flattest of brokes and was looking to find a part-time job. A guy in the same dorm as me said the school was paying him to transcribe sessions she had with kids in pursuit of her degree. He was sick of it and handed me the transcription machine, tapes of her sessions, and contact info. I didn't realize what I was getting into. She wasn't completely deaf, she was able to kinda-sorta make out what her kids were saying. There were more than a few times would be a back-and-forth between the kid and her about trying decipher what the kid saying. Occasionally, she would assume she was right and, for example, repeatedly ask a kid why he was mad when in fact he said he was sad. Another hurdle was that her disablity also affected her speech, which as you can imagine can cause confusion and frustration in your average 6 year old kid trying to decipher what's being said (as well as your average transcriber). At least a third of the hours upon hours I transcribed on my poor Windows 3.1 machine was in someway related to miscommunication between the grad student and the subject. I applaud her tenacity but it was clearly out of her skill set - in much the same way I don't have the skill set to become a ninja (A devil-may-care loose-cannon supercop? Yes. But not a ninja.) In the end, I never got paid for all those lost hours and I own a transcribing machine that hasn't been used in a decade.