It’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (and my birth month xD) and although it’s coming to an end, we have to say thank you to the many Asian and Pacific Islander Americans who dedicated themselves and gave their lives for us to live the way we do.

This month, however, caused an old question of mine to resurface once-again: why do people act as if certain ethnic and cultural history and present doesn’t exist?

Think about it. In school, Black peoples get a paragraph or two that start with slavery (not to mention that not every Black person in America was a slave *facepalm*), maybe the Harlem Renaissance, skip to the Civil Rights Movement (maybe a pause for Black Power) and end with Barack Obama’s presidency as if it magically changed something. Nothing about the inventors, many of whom created things of utmost importance today, or our Caribbean brothers and sisters who were all up in this too. Hispanic peoples get grouped as only Mexican and even then we might be taught about Ceasar Chavez, but that’s all Latin America is, right? (*insert eye rolls*). All the history of our First Nations family is dumbed down to Thanksgiving, reservations, and casinos due to broken treaties. Then, for our Asian Pacific family, there is Japanese Internment and Pearl Harbor, Chinese immigrants (and not in a good way), and maybe some talk about Hawaii only?

Why are our histories so vague or half-true? Let me put it simply: because knowledge is power. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am not angry because, unfortunately, this is what people do and it would take more energy out to focus on the negative rather than to correct and create the positive. I knew, even as a child learning from all the old-heads, that I couldn’t take what I had been taught at face value. That there was always more to the story, especially when a certain people group was excluded from telling their own stories and creating their own media.

For those of you who don’t know, there is a reason behind May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It was to honor the first Japanese Americans who came to the United States on May 7, 1843, and mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. I’m highlighting these dates, too, because it bothers me that people still treat our Asian Pacific American family as if they didn’t exist as Americans until last year and didn’t add to the wealth of American culture and history. Watching Moana should not have been the first experience of children with Polynesian culture.

But that is a conversation for another day, another post (or feel free to hit me up on Instagram).

Back on the positive side, how did you celebrate this month? Did you learn something new that wasn’t in a school’s history book?