Member-only story
“White History Month” is Trending on Twitter
An Accurate Telling Isn’t What They Want
With the arrival of Black History Month celebrations in February. The inevitable calls for a White History Month have arisen on Twitter by those who feel somehow neglected, as if every month of the year wasn’t already dedicated to white history. The truth is a lot of white history has been left out of the books, and Americans of every color need to be aware.
The white history we’ve been taught is mostly a fallacy. We were taught that George Washington had wooden teeth, not the reality that his false teeth included teeth taken from enslaved people, those he owned. George Washington treated his slaves like every other enslaver of the time, tearing apart families long before Donald Trump and authorizing beatings to maintain order.
Washington’s will stipulated if he died before his wife Martha, the enslaved people he owned (as opposed to those she held) would be freed after her death. Martha ended up freeing his slaves once she realized they had a great incentive to speed up her death and thus gain their freedom. She released them not from the goodness of her heart but in fear for her life.
We know Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, most famously Sally Hemings, with whom he had a decades-long relationship as she bore him six…
