The impulse behind Black History Month is undoubtedly an honorable one. Moreover, it is a responsive one, an answer to the tendency of American education to ignore the role of black individuals in the making and development of our country. Yet, like most programs created with the best of intentions, it seems to me that Black History Month has become just another stretch of pavement on the road to subtle racism. I don't mean to say that dedicating a month to the study of black history is a racist enterprise-it isn't. However, it has been cleverly manipulated by wrong-minded people into a tool through which black people and their role in American history has bene isolated.

First, Black History Month has been warped into another complaint in the long list of grievances rattled off by ignorant people any time racial privilege arises in conversation.

It has, unfortunately, joined the ranks of affirmative action and any number of black-centered scholarships, programs and even entertainment venues in that sense. Mentions of Black History Month often seem to spark discussions rooted in the negative experiences of other ethnic groups.

The unfortunate fact of the matter, though, is that Black History Month now carries the baggage of every other ethnic group with a claim to American history, purely as a result of racist abuse of its existence.

Furthermore, Black History Month inevitably manifests itself in a series of shortcomings; after all, how can one endeavor to represent the history of an entire ethnic group in a single month?

Instead of an in-depth examination of black history, February tends to dissolve into a group of factoids about peanut butter and Civil Rights activists, especially in schools that would rather not be dealing with the subject at all, such as my old schools in Arlington, Texas.

The shortness of just one month only contributes to the truncation of what deserves to be a very long conversation that transcends learning about luminaries and celebrities to include the lives of ordinary black men and women.

Setting aside a single month for the study of black people in American history also has the unintended consequence of isolating the stories of blacks from those of other Americans, when in reality, their histories are inexorably intertwined. One cannot accurately tell the story of any American without telling the story of blacks, and to do so is to reduce the role of black people in the American epic.

There is simply no genuine way to present the story of this country, its economy, its history, its culture or its people without including black men and women every single step of the way, and singling out one month drives at goals opposite of that project.

This all concludes with a final point: The worst abuse of Black History Month has been to use it as a method of "getting off the hook." People with bad intentions simply set aside one chapter of the proverbial history book for February, go through the motions of discussing the role of blacks in America and then feel as though their obligation to black men and women past and present has been fulfilled.

In my high school, for example, black men and women were barely mentioned by name outside of February.

Educators with the wrong mindset feel free, after February has passed, to go back to a white-male-centric version of American history. This version has been sanitized of its ugly parts and elevated to near mythological status, complete with Founding Father Fetishism and all of the other nasty tendencies of American history viewed through a lens of privileged bias. This is perhaps the most heinous outcome of a tradition begun with the best of intentions and is a true testimony to the nastiness of which wrong-minded people are capable.

We can, as a culture, counteract this sort of behavior. To begin, we need to free February from its status as Black History Month and change our standards regarding the teaching of history at large.

If a single chapter in any American history book can be read without the serious, due consideration of the lives of black men and women, we can be sure that it is not a genuine depiction of our history. It is texts and traditions like those that we must denounce. Instead of a single chapter, a single month, one history project or a handful of factoids, we must commit to integrating the stories of black men and women into everyday history.