As an actual history teacher, I don’t do anything particularly special for February because I teach about everyone all year long. However, this isn’t the case at every school so Black History Month can be a great opportunity to teach students about the contributions of Black people to the world they live in today. Yet, increasingly schools are not using this time to teach the full spectrum of the Black American experience. Instead, they are opting for what I call a Black Trauma Tour. This tour stops at exclusively the most painful memories in the Black history like slavery and segregation. This isn’t the way we should teach anyone’s history.

It is important to note that this isn’t some kind of anti Black History Month or “Critical Race Theory” rant. The aforementioned moments are scarred in our collective memory for a reason and we shouldn’t avoid teaching about them just because people say it’s “divisive” or creates awkward conversations. What I am saying is the opposite. Slavery, segregation, lynching and all of that should be a part of your curriculum but not the entirety of it.

Black Trauma Tours are not just a problem in the classroom. Actually, Black Trauma is an entire sub-genre of film. Go to your favorite streaming service. Click the “Black” category, and pick a film at random. Chances are you are going to get a modern Black tragedy like “Fruitvale Station,” or period piece set the deep-south, starring Black-British actors, like “12 Years a Slave.” None of these types of movies or shows are bad or even problematic in a vacuum. It’s the sheer volume of films in this category relative to others that give a distorted view. I personally don’t watch these films frequently, although they are typically good. Hollywood has the formula for historical adaptation down. Sometimes I just don’t feel like watching a movie or show about Black people overcoming racism.

Big Hollywood studios are pretty comfortable getting behind a Civil-Rights biopic or slavery period piece, but what about a nuanced coming of age story about a Black boy in suburban school? You will have to push a little harder.

This same phenomenon exists in schools too. It is easy to pick a book off your classroom shelf about slavery or Rosa Parks … for now at least. However, it will take more work on your end to find a book about Lonnie Johnson, the aerospace engineer, and inventor of the Super Soaker. Colin Powell is one the most accomplished members of the military ever, white, or Black, and his tenure as Secretary of State was extremely consequential to everything that happened afterwards. Just because the bulk of his career happened after the de-jure segregation period doesn’t mean that students shouldn’t know about him.

It is an inconvenient truth that much of the Black experience IS centered around oppression. The juxtaposition of Blacks relative to whites in social standing has been a central theme in history classes and it should be. However, Black people are more than just their spot on the social hierarchy and always have been. Your Black history curriculum does not have to focus solely on slavery, and the Civil Rights movement … and it shouldn’t.