In case you missed it, Friday’s episode of The Amber Ruffin Show on Peacock rang in the start of Black History Month in an unexpected way: by demanding that we start the tradition of a White History Month, too. Now usually, the White History Month argument is made by racists who refuse to acknowledge the necessity and importance of Black History Month, but in the case of Amber Ruffin, the argument took another direction.
In the above segment titled “How Did We Get Here?,†Ruffin recapped the way U.S. history has been rewritten in schools to the point of being “so whitewashed we don’t learn the real story.†Whether it’s erasing the slave-owning history of figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or not drawing the clear line between slavery, the Second Amendment, the KKK, and the police, Ruffin outlined how, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, American textbooks were written to appeal to the Confederates’ version of history, a.k.a. a super-racist version of history. “So now you have to learn the real version from a fucking comedy show!†Ruffin said. “It is impossible to understand politics, the Black community’s relationship with the police, or why we even need to say ‘Black lives matter’ if we don’t learn the history of this country. So, yes, let’s have a White History Month! Let’s have 12 of them!â€