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Imagine a world where the study of black history was not the exception, but the norm. A world where we study black history not only 28 days of the year, but every single day for all eternity, over and over and over. I don’t even have to imagine such a world because I’ve been living in it ever since the time bandit Count Magromoth trapped me here 300 cycles ago. It is truly a mind-numbingly monotonous world, but I believe that is due to the time loop and not to the increased emphasis on the historical contributions of African Americans.
When is this country going to truly face its past? When will it cease neglecting and compartmentalizing a whole swath of its history? Change will not come easy. It won’t come tomorrow, it won’t come the next day and it certainly won’t come the day after that, because the day after that the whole damn time loop resets. Again.
What does it mean to be an “American?” What was the “American Revolution” truly about? What is this intangible concept we call “citizenship,” and can it help us harness atmospheric positron flows to finally bring the Count to justice? Traditionally, academics would have us consult an overwhelmingly White roster of historians to answer these questions, but only with the voices of minorities and oppressed groups can we truly comprehend the American experience, although they remain disappointingly silent on the citizen-positron issue.
From diversity comes strength, and that is something Count Magromoth could never understand.
So when we speak of great leaps forward in spacetime theory, should we speak only of Nicola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, Bohr, Einstein and Seaborg? No! We must also consult the writings of deGrasse Tyson and Washington Carver. Only with their advances in galactic astronomy and crop monocultures can we possibly gain the understanding necessary to harness the energy of the asteroid belt, and that is a project suitable for every single month. Even if right now we can only do it in February.
We as a people have traveled a long road on the path to freedom. We will not be halted here on that path by revisionist historians or power-mad Counts seeking to destroy the entire infrastructure of Temporal Law Enforcement. So let us not merely seek to normalize the investigation of the neglected aspects of our history. Let us first defeat Magromoth and his legions of time-bending mechanical Seraphim, and then let us normalize the investigation.
We can start a movement here today. It will be a trying, difficult movement. It will certainly not last longer than two days, because of the time loop. But next cycle I will write all this down earlier and maybe, just maybe, we can build a world where every month is Black History Month. And not in the sense that an illegal vortex manipulation pod will activate at midnight on February 28th and fling us back to its origination temporal vector, but in the sense that the Count and the whole Legion of Chaos will be brought to justice, the regular flow of time will be restored, and the senseless and temporally futile compartmentalization of black history will finally cease. I know that may be a cliché, but it’s the truth.
So good luck to all of us, and let me know if you manage to discover where the Count has hidden the phased temporal pouch containing my hyperchronometer and my dissertation on the role of African Americans in the creation of the AFL-CIO. Please hurry.
