Happy Mardi Gras! (26 photos)

minority history/heritage months are a way of making up for what's still lacking at all other times in our mainstream cultural, educational, and other societal settings — that is, a fully integrated and proportionally accurate representation of racial and ethnic minorities… A lot of white people just don't think it's right or fair that it's widely considered okay for people who aren't white to get together under the name of their race or ethnicity, but it's not considered okay for white people to do that. Black history month is a way of reasserting, and even repairing, something about a racial group that white supremacist ideology and practice has long denigrated, and damaged. Throughout the history of the U.S., and of the West more generally, the very concept of whiteness itself has been all about dominance of other people and extraction of their labor and resources. As a result, white people are still the group that's generally on top, which means that there's no corrective reason — nor a good celebratory one — for white people to gather together as members of their race.