It’s hard to separate yourself from your hometown newspaper — or at least I have found — so I often check in on the comings and goings at The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., my former first-thing-in-the-morning read.

I was surprised to see one of the paper’s most-discussed item is this letter to the editor suggesting a need for a "White History Month."

I am both mildly appalled and (only very) mildly amused by the letter writer, who seems blissfully unaware of the fact that for decades, "white history" was overwhelmingly taught in schools. At least, that’s how it worked in my public education. We typically spent the first half of the year on the colonists up to the American Revolution, took February to discuss Black history (limited mostly to abolitionists that could segue into the Civil War or Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., depending on the teacher) and then crammed everything else in the waning weeks of school, when students’ fancy turned away from books and toward dreams of summer break.

I did not learn about Malcolm X from my public school education, or Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, the Black Panthers. History classes left a huge hole where the Japanese-American internment should have been, where I could have been learning about the Chinese in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, of the Trail of Tears, of People v. Hall in 1854, of the Chinese quarantine during the bubonic plague scare in 1900, of the Great Sioux Uprising, migrant workers, the Harlem Renaissance.

And literature classes were barely any different, as we digested the white, male European authors of the canon over and over, leaving little room for female writers beyond the token Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters and no room at all for any non-white writers. It wasn’t until years later that I began to discover Michael Dorris, Jamaica Kincaid, Richard Wright, Louise Erdrich, Lois-Ann Yamanka, and even now I feel there are too many authors I’ve yet to discover, too many experiences I have yet to share in through the printed word.

A White History Month? We’ve had years upon years of "white history" months.

What saddens me is that we must still make designations such as "Black History" and "Native American History" months for study.

A White History Month? What a sad thing to suggest indeed. Wouldn’t it be a better aim to reach for that someday when we might simply teach "history" instead of trying to cram the contributions of an entire culture into 30 days?

Yeah, maybe that does sound bleeding-heart of me, but what a stale, boring culture we would have if all these elements hadn’t combined. It would be a U.S. without flavor and spice, without the melding of language, music, art and ideals.