How to Make Every Day Black History Day

When people say that they would rather celebrate ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and any other factor every day instead of during a designated month (or week, or even day), I’m on board. It’s ridiculous to not include so many amazing Black (or women, etc.) inventors, leaders, revolutionaries and visionaries within our history books. It’s repulsive that Christopher Columbus has his own holiday when there are so many unsung legitimate heroes that truly deserve to be honored.

To celebrate Black history today and every day, here are a few ideas.

Include diverse authors in your daily reading. Pick books that represent people of color. Use traditional-oriented stories, such as Papa Do You Love Me? by Barbara M. Jossee as well as modern ones like Barack by Jonah Winter.

Try African-oriented dishes. If you already have a Chinese night and a Mexican night, add on an African night. Get a regional cookbook, such as The Complete South African Cookbook, and experiment with it.

Explore the web together. The History Channel has some awesome activities, stories, and photos about famous Black heroes. Videos, timelines, fact sheets, and more are all available at the site.

Visit an historic site. If you have any historic places near you, such as the John Coltrane house, plan a visit. You can find an entire listing of Underground Railroad sites here. It’s also important to not gloss over details when you visit major historic sites; for example, when you visit Mount Vernon, point out that it took a lot of slaves to run Washington’s home. (Washington inherited ten slaves alone by age ten; when he died, there were 316 working on his land.)

Explore Black cultural events. Whether it’s a play, music performance, or a festival, you and your family can have a lot of fun finding out things about Black culture that you probably never even knew. Simply integrate these activities in with your regular family events.

Bring up race. Whether or not you consider it a taboo subject, it’s an important subject. Children—particularly White children—may not understand how important President Obama’s election was. Depending on your child’s age, talk about how feelings and polices about race and privilege have changed over the years, and about how America was the unfortunate product of slave labor. You can even discuss modern day slavery in the form of human trafficking, or even discuss a way to help stop it from happening.