As a company passionate about imagining and enacting a public school system that overcomes historic and persistent inequities, you might think that celebrating national cultural heritage months is a standard staff activity for us. It is not.
Don’t get me wrong. The West Wind staff agrees that these observances are important. Our dilemma is, what is what are we recognizing? What does it mean to celebrate groups based on certain shared physical or genetic attributes? When we try to decide we find ourselves with all sorts of questions: Which cultural heritage months do we observe? Which cultural/social attributes count: Race? Ethnicity? Gender? Is it an observation or celebration and what action do we take to observe or celebrate? By making these observances are we taking part in something that separates specific groups from the whole of American history and experience?
There is no obvious nor easy answer. However, with some discussion, we finally agreed that, as Ghandi said, “Action expresses priorities.”
We focused on a few key observances using the following rationale:
- We will use the observances recognized by presidential proclamation.
- We will recognize groups that are currently/persistently marginalized in our culture. As such, we will not recognize Irish American or Italian American History months.
Activities for each cultural observance include:
- We will use the same naming used in the presidential proclamation and as part of our observance will discuss/explain any variance to that naming we believe is appropriate (for example: while the presidential proclamation calls February African-American History month and we will too, we will likely note that it is our preference to call it Black History Month).
- We will create a graphic for the West Wind website to be posted for the month of the observation.
- We will convene a brown bag lunch to learn/understand/explore the cultural history and relevance of the group. During this lunch we will collectively write a blog post that includes such ideas as: why we are making the observance, commentary related to whether we discuss/deliberate naming, anything we deem of interest related to our discussion.
- We will share with each other opportunities to take part in observances such as lectures, performances, etc.
- We will consider having themed art or choosing particular artists exhibited in our workspace that represent the cultural heritage we are observing.
We are not entirely settled on our choices nor are we completely comfortable with what our choices mean. A major concern is how the individual observances impact the groups being recognized. While the intention is to honor the value of each group and its contributions to American history and culture, the risk of singling them out is that it further creates silos and emphasizes their separation from the majority. Our project associate, Mandi Bozarth, summed up what we all were struggling with, “I feel ambiguous about these months because they do silo U.S. history and make it easy to downplay the role of all Americans in our history. On the other hand, I wonder if we have come far enough into recognizing all history to where we no longer have to set aside time to think about the history of certain groups? I don’t know the answer.”
While we collectively aren’t sure we have the right answer(s), we have chosen to recognize some of the cultural heritages that impact our history by observing these cultural heritage months and in doing so our actions express our priorities.
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Month |
Observance |
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February |
African American History Month |
|
March |
National Women’s History Month |
|
May |
Asian Pacific American Heritage Jewish American Heritage Month |
|
June |
Gay and Lesbian Pride Month Caribbean American Heritage Month |
|
September |
National Hispanic-Latino Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15) |
|
October |
National Disability Employment Awareness Month |
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November |
National American Indian Heritage Month |