The Case Against Month-Long Observances: Division, Distortion, and the Need for Abolition!!!!
Month-long observances like Black History Month, Gay Pride Month, and Women’s History Month are often hailed as tributes to overlooked groups, aimed at correcting historical neglect. Yet, they erode equality by fixating on race, gender, and sexual orientation rather than individual merit, perpetuating victimhood narratives, and splintering society instead of uniting it. They marginalize numerous groups, mislead both national and global audiences with skewed histories, and suggest that non-white, non-male individuals need white male intervention to succeed—a notion inherently racist and sexist. By inventing adversity rather than honoring real achievements, they fracture national history into identity silos instead of forging a shared legacy. They also peddle economic fictions like gender and racial wage gaps, misrepresenting earnings differences as discrimination when wages are equal across roles. Built on flawed logic and selective facts, these observances reinforce the biases they purport to dismantle and must be eliminated to create a merit-based, cohesive society that celebrates all individuals for their contributions, not their labels.
Segregation Fuels Division, Not Cohesion
Premise: Dedicating months to specific identities (e.g., February for Black history, March for women, June for LGBTQ+ pride) presumes that isolating recognition by group promotes unity.
Evidence: Black History Month Spotlights African American slavery and civil rights, often eclipsing Asian American feats like the Chinese-built transcontinental railroad (1860s) or Indigenous contributions such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy’s impact on U.S. federalism. Globally, it misleads by applying U.S. racial lenses to contexts like Japan, where Hideo Shima engineered the Shinkansen bullet train (1964) without identity-based framing.
Achievements: George Washington Carver, a Black scientist, pioneered crop rotation and peanut innovations in the early 1900s, transforming agriculture through intellect, not racial designation. Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-American inventor, co-created frequency-hopping technology (1942), the backbone of Wi-Fi, relying on her ingenuity, not gender campaigns. Alan Turing, a gay mathematician, decoded the Enigma in WWII, shaping modern computing without leaning on his orientation.
Reasoning: Carver, Lamarr, and Turing thrived on personal ability, not segregated months. By prioritizing some groups—Black history over Asian or Indigenous—these observances suggest a pecking order, clashing with evidence of collective milestones like the multi-ethnic Apollo moon landing (1969). They divide history into fragments rather than weaving a unified tapestry, misrepresenting global realities with a narrow lens.
Conclusion: Segregation breeds division, not unity, subverting equality by valuing group identity over individual worth—a premise contradicted by merit-driven successes.
Victimhood Distorts Progress, Not Enhances It
Premise: Casting groups as defined by past oppression (e.g., slavery, patriarchy, homophobia) implies their worth lies in suffering, not accomplishment, needing external aid.
Evidence: Black History Month dwells on slavery, sidelining broader truths like the 1 million Europeans enslaved by Barbary corsairs (16th-19th centuries) or white indentured servants in colonial America (50-75% of early Virginia settlers, per Richard Hofstadter). Women’s History Month stresses suffrage, overlooking male hardships like the 2.7 million Vietnam draftees (per Selective Service). Globally, it misleads by pushing Western gender norms onto places like India, where C.V. Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for light scattering (1930) unburdened by such narratives.
Achievements: Madam C.J. Walker, a Black businesswoman, amassed a fortune by 1919 with haircare products, rising from poverty through grit, not racial crutches. Jonas Salk, a white male researcher, invented the polio vaccine (1955), protecting millions across races without identity props. Virginia Woolf, a lesbian author, crafted To the Lighthouse (1927), a literary gem, fueled by creativity, not orientation.
Reasoning: Walker, Salk, and Woolf succeeded through real challenges—poverty, disease, cultural norms—not fabricated victimhood. These months mislead by conjuring adversity (e.g., all Black success tied to slavery), ignoring universal struggles like modern slavery in Mauritania (403,000 enslaved, per Global Slavery Index 2023). This pseudo-history distorts reality, suggesting merit needs a boost when evidence proves otherwise.
Conclusion: Victimhood narratives hinder progress by gaslighting communities into seeing identity as a handicap, not a strength—a distortion evidence refutes.
Favoritism Breeds Inequity, Not Inclusion
Premise: Elevating race, gender, and sexuality over other struggles creates an uneven playing field, implying selective value.
Evidence: No month honors the 61 million Americans with disabilities (per CDC), 5.2 million Indigenous peoples (per 2020 Census), or religious minorities facing 2,717 anti-Semitic acts in 2022 (per ADL). Black History Month’s prominence drowns out global ethnic plights like the Rohingya crisis (700,000 displaced, per UN), while Women’s History Month’s anti-male slant ignores male tolls like 100,000 coal miner deaths (1900-1950, per CDC).
Achievements: Charles Drew, a Black surgeon, developed blood banking in the 1940s, a universal lifesaver born of expertise, not race. Ellen Ochoa, a Hispanic female engineer, became the first Latina astronaut (1993) and patented optical tech, thriving on skill, not gender platforms. Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor, wrote Night (1960), a raw testament to endurance, not reliant on special months.
Reasoning: Drew, Ochoa, and Wiesel excelled without favoritism, yet these observances suggest their feats needed white male aid—like suffrage pinned on lawmakers, not Anthony’s activism. This misleads by implying non-white, non-male success requires handouts, a racist, sexist fiction belied by their achievements. It sidelines others—34 million in poverty (per Census), 19 million veterans (per VA)—fracturing history into haves and have-nots.
Conclusion: Favoritism fuels inequity, gaslighting society with a false pecking order that denies equal merit—a premise evidence dismantles.
Selective Framing Sustains Bias, Not Truth
Premise: Narrow historical lenses paint groups as uniquely oppressed and dependent, not self-reliant.
Evidence: Black History Month Links Black success to slavery, overshadowing Walker’s self-made wealth. Women’s History Month credits the 19th Amendment (1920) to male lawmakers, not Marie Curie’s solo Nobel wins (1903, 1911, for radioactivity). Gay Pride Month touts Stonewall (1969), downplaying Turing’s codebreaking (1940s). Globally, it misleads by ignoring feats like Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement (1977), planting 51 million trees in Kenya without identity hype.
Achievements: Percy Julian, a Black chemist, synthesized cortisone (1940s), easing pain worldwide through science, not racial battles. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a white male engineer, designed the Great Western Railway (1830s), a marvel of innovation, not gender edge. Frida Kahlo, a bisexual Mexican artist, painted The Two Fridas (1939), a surrealist triumph, rooted in vision, not orientation.
Reasoning: Julian, Brunel, and Kahlo shone through merit, not invented struggles (e.g., Curie “battling” male science when evidence shows brilliance won). This framing has split history—shared breakthroughs like penicillin (Fleming, 1928) fade—pushing a dependency myth their records disprove. Its gaslights by valuing labels over deeds, entrenching bias with half-truths.
Conclusion: Selective framing distorts history, misrepresenting success as identity-driven, not merit-based—a flawed narrative evidence overturns.
False Fixes Mask Real Issues
Premise: These months tout identity-based awareness as a fix for systemic woes, including debunked wage gap myths.
Evidence: Corporate stunts like Nike’s themed shoes persist, yet the gender wage gap is a myth—women’s 82 cents to men’s dollar (BLS 2023) reflects earnings, not wages. Women favor lower-risk roles (e.g., 92% of female teachers, NCES, vs. 98% of oil rig workers male, BLS) and take maternity leave (e.g., 12 weeks unpaid, FMLA, per DOL), cutting total pay, not hourly rates. Nurses earn $77,600 (BLS 2023) regardless of gender, while truck drivers earn $48,310—choice, not bias, drives gaps. Racial wage gaps are fiction too—Black workers at 76% of white pay (BLS 2023) tie to regional economics, not race. Mississippi’s median income ($49,111, Census 2022) lags Massachusetts’ ($96,505) for all; Detroit’s 33% poverty (Census 2022) hits Black and white alike in downturns (e.g., 2008 recession). Modern slavery (50,000 trafficked in U.S., per Polaris) spans races, yet is ignored. Globally, Women’s History Month misleads by hyping Western feminism over Tu Youyou’s artemisinin (1970s), a malaria cure sans gender framing.
Achievements: Patricia Bath, a Black female doctor, invented the Laserphaco Probe (1986), restoring sight through skill, not identity aid. Norman Borlaug, a white male scientist, bred high-yield wheat (1960s), feeding billions via the Green Revolution, not race or gender props. James Baldwin, a gay Black writer, wrote The Fire Next Time (1963), a piercing critique, fueled by intellect, not orientation.
Reasoning: Bath, Borlaug, and Baldwin overcame real hurdles—access, hunger, prejudice—not fabricated ones. Observances mislead by implying their wins needed white male “breaks” (e.g., Williams’s tennis as barrier-busting, not talent), a lie their feats disprove. Wage myths—gender gaps from job choice (teachers vs. rig workers), racial gaps from geography (Mississippi vs. Massachusetts)—and ignored realities (e.g., trafficking) fracture history with fake inequities, sidelining shared wins like the internet (1980s, multi-ethnic teams).
Conclusion: These months gaslight with symbolic fixes and economic fictions, failing to address real issues while distorting merit-based progress.
Overlooked Enslavement: White Forced Labor in America and Beyond
Premise: The enslavement of white individuals in America and globally is a significant yet frequently ignored aspect of history, overshadowed by narratives that focus solely on race-specific suffering, implying that slavery was a uniquely non-white experience.
Evidence: In colonial America, estimates suggest 50-67% of European immigrants between the 1630s and the American Revolution arrived as indentured servants, many under duress. Kidnapped children from London’s slums were shipped to Virginia’s tobacco fields, where life expectancy averaged two years, while convicts and “vagabonds” faced forced transport under schemes like Sir John Popham’s 17th-century efforts to populate New England. Beyond America, the Barbary slave trade enslaved over 1 million Europeans from the 16th to 19th centuries, subjecting them to brutal labor or sale in Ottoman markets—a reality rarely highlighted.
Closer to home, the Shanghai Tunnels in Portland, Oregon, from the 1850s to the 1940s, saw white men—drugged or beaten in saloons—shanghaied onto ships for Asia-bound labor, with thousands perishing at sea, uncounted and unmarked by memorials.
British “press gangs” in the 18th and 19th centuries similarly abducted white sailors into naval bondage, tearing apart families with no recourse.
The Highland Clearances in Scotland displaced 70,000 people in the 18th and 19th centuries, forcing them into servitude or exile, while the Ottoman devşirme system conscripted Christian boys into lifelong military slavery.
Even within America’s slavery narrative, white forced labor intersects with overlooked complexities. Anthony Johnson, a Black man from Angola, arrived in Virginia as an indentured servant in 1621. By 1635, he gained freedom, and by 1651, he owned 250 acres and five servants—four white, one Black. In 1655, he won a lawsuit to keep his Black servant, John Casor, for life, setting a legal precedent for permanent slavery in the colonies. Johnson’s ownership of white servants and his role in codifying lifelong bondage reveal a blurred racial line in early slavery, with specifics—his arrival (1621), freedom (1635), land and servants (1651), lawsuit (1655)—showing his ownership of white servants and role in establishing lifelong slavery which was carried on into the establishment of the United States of America, broadening the narrative beyond white-only perpetrators, yet this is sidelined in favor of a monochromatic tale.
Achievement: Individuals tied to these overlooked histories still left marks of resilience. Garrett Morgan, a Black inventor whose ancestors navigated America’s complex labor systems, patented the traffic light in 1923, enhancing safety through ingenuity, not racial framing. Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-American whose European roots connect to the Barbary trade’s reach, co-invented frequency-hopping technology in 1942, foundational to Wi-Fi, driven by intellect alone. These achievements show that human potential transcends bondage narratives, white or otherwise.
Reasoning: The breadth of white enslavement—indentured servitude, shanghaiing, press gangs, Highland Clearances, devşirme—and Johnson’s ownership of white servants and establishment of lifelong slavery challenge the oversimplified story peddled by observances like Black History Month. By burying these cases, we’re left with a pseudo-history that gaslights us into seeing slavery as a one-race tragedy, ignoring its universal brutality. Johnson’s case, in particular, flips the script: a Black man enslaving whites and shaping slavery’s legal roots, yet omitted to preserve a victim-only lens. Highlighting these isn’t racism—it’s a call for unfiltered truth. Selective erasure distorts reality, implying white suffering doesn’t count and Black agency can’t include perpetration, both of which misrepresent history’s complexity and humanity’s shared struggles.
White enslavement, from colonial fields to Johnson’s Virginia plantation, wasn’t an anomaly—it was widespread and brutal, yet it’s sidelined to fit modern biases. This also predated North America breaking away from British Colonial Rule. Authentic history demands we acknowledge all forced labor, not just the parts that align with today’s narratives. Ignoring these truths—or branding them taboo—perpetuates a cherry-picked past that undermines equality and honest reckoning.
Fallacies That Divide and Deceive
These flawed logics mislead and marginalize:
False Cause: Segregation (e.g., Black History Month) doesn’t unite—Asians (Shima’s trains) fade.
Appeal to Pity: Victimhood (e.g., slavery) conjures adversity—Julian’s cortisone overlooked.
Special Pleading: Race/gender favored — disability (Bath’s tech) ignored.
Suppressed Evidence: White servitude (Brunel’s kin), male tolls, wage truths hidden—history splits.
Examples: Asians (Tu Youyou), Indigenous (Maathai), whites (Borlaug), men (Drew)—sidelined, their merit dimmed.
Abolition of these Month-Long Distortions is The Rational Choice
Premise: These observances’ flaws are foundational, not fixable.
Evidence: Segregation divides (e.g., Asian exclusion), victimhood misleads (e.g., Curie’s “struggle”), favoritism skews (e.g., no Indigenous month). Globally, they push U.S.-centric tales, not shared wins like Raman’s physics. They frame identity over merit—Chisholm as “Black woman,” not leader—ignoring real adversity overcome (e.g., Walker’s rise). Wage myths (e.g., nurses equal at $77,600) and racial fictions (e.g., Detroit’s shared poverty) fuel false divides.
Achievements: Garrett Morgan, a Black inventor, patented the traffic light (1923), boosting safety through smarts. Rosalind Franklin, a female scientist, mapped DNA (1950s), a biology cornerstone, not gender driven. Tennessee Williams, a gay playwright, wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a dramatic titan, not orientation led.
Reasoning: Morgan, Franklin, and Williams triumphed on ability, not identity props, yet observances suggest dependency—a racist, sexist falsehood their work debunks. Abolition ends this deception, uniting history with evidence-based recognition, not economic myths or invented barriers.
Conclusion: Elimination aligns with reason—division and distortion defy equality’s essence.
True Equality: Merit Over Myth
Premise: Recognizing merit universally builds unity.
Evidence: Celebrating Carver’s crops, Curie’s science, Morgan’s lights daily honors individuals. Shared feats—Salk’s vaccine, Borlaug’s wheat—forge a common legacy. Baldwin’s words, Kahlo’s art, Turing’s codes prove merit crosses all lines. Wages align (e.g., $77,600 for nurses, BLS 2023), debunking gaps with economic truth.
Reasoning: Valuing real challenges overcome (e.g., Franklin’s lab work) over fake ones (e.g., “male science”) mirrors reality, uniting rationally. Evidence of self-made success and equal pay trumps segmented months.
Conclusion: Abolition crafts a cohesive, merit-based story, free of gaslighting.
Finale Notes:
Month-long observances mislead by obsessing over race, gender, and orientation, not merit, splitting history into silos instead of a shared life saga.
They conjure adversity—wage gaps debunked by equal pay (e.g., teachers vs. truckers), racial gaps by geography (e.g., Mississippi)—over real wins: Carver, Lamarr, Turing, Walker, Salk, Woolf, Drew, Ochoa, Wiesel, Julian, Brunel, Kahlo, Bath, Borlaug, Baldwin, Morgan, Franklin, Williams.
They imply dependency, twist facts with fallacies, and sustain bias.
Abolition is the rational fix, honoring all for true achievements—not myths or labels—in a united human narrative.
Those who deny this truth are the ones intent on sustaining falsehoods for personal gain, diverting attention from individual and collective accountability for merit-based progress, and manipulating communities by stoking fear and resentment with contemporary myths. They are, in simple terms merchants of fear and hate and its long overdue we stop buying the garbage they are selling.
Half-truths, the deliberate selection of 'footage,' and the manipulation of facts through editing are not just distortions of reality—they amount to outright lies. Regardless of the source from which they originate or the emotional lens through which one might perceive them, these practices fundamentally undermine the truth. Presenting information in a skewed or fragmented way can mislead audiences, fuel misinformation, and erode trust in the pursuit of transparency. This remains true irrespective of personal feelings, biases, or intentions behind such actions. Truth, after all, is not a matter of subjective interpretation but an unyielding standard that demands honesty and integrity from everyone involved in its dissemination.
Censorship is more than just the act of blocking content; it is a calculated process of suppressing and filtering information to maintain control over what you see, hear, and ultimately believe. By restricting access to certain viewpoints or facts, censorship serves to create a curated version of reality—one that aligns with the agenda of those in power. This practice doesn't merely limit your understanding; it actively prevents you from critically evaluating the world around you, leaving you vulnerable to manipulation.
Through the systematic withholding of information, censorship fosters ignorance, ensuring that individuals remain unaware of alternative perspectives or the broader truth. This ignorance is not accidental; it is intentional, as an uninformed population is far easier to influence and control. When you are denied access to information, your ability to question authority, challenge narratives, and make independent decisions is compromised.
Censorship also promotes dependency on the approved channels of information, reinforcing a cycle where people accept what they are told without scrutiny. This filtration of content not only shapes perceptions but also steers societal discourse, silencing dissenting voices and reducing the diversity of thought.
In the end, censorship is a powerful tool for manipulation—a mechanism designed to maintain dominance by keeping people disconnected from the full spectrum of knowledge and ideas. It is not just an obstacle to free expression; it is a barrier to intellectual freedom and an affront to the fundamental right to seek and understand the truth.
Objective Truth exists independently of personal emotions or individual perceptions, remaining unaffected by how one feels about it. It is impartial and unwavering, grounded in facts rather than subjective experience. In contrast, the concept of so-called 'personal truth' is a misnomer. It is not truth in the genuine sense but rather a combination of personal experiences and opinions, shaped by subjective interpretation. While personal experiences have value, they should not be conflated with the universal standards of truth, which demand consistency and objectivity.
Achievement is a goal, action is a choice, failure is a lesson, disability is circumstantial, and excuses are acts of cowardice! I am not a fan of cowards.
~Raymond Foster, Founder of Druwayu~
Thank you for reading.