We've been taught many things as we've aged. We learned our ABC's and how to count, we also learned a lot of white history. I have to specify white because that's always the perspective we're taught in. The United States has an overall curriculum that has an extremely white, heteronormative, cisgender, male, ableist shadow cast over it.

Black history starts at slavery and ends at the civil rights era. There's not even anything in between, we discuss how black people were slaves, talk about the Civil War and praise Lincoln, then we talk about the Martin Luther King Jr. and that is the end of what we learn in school. If I want to learn about the first African American doctor I have to find that on my own (Dr. James McCune Smith) or learn about Black Wall Street and how it was burned down over a fabricated story of a black man assaulting a white woman.

LGBTQ+ history isn't even taught in schools! I learned about Stonewall and Marsha P. Johnson on my own, but that's not where their history starts. There are countless huge points in history that exclude the queer community. We never learned about Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966. The idea of great historical figures possibly being queer is always covered up or ignored. The Billie Holiday is a bisexual queen, James Dean was gay but had set up dates with women to throw people off.

Indigenous people aren't even given a real background in the education system. We learn of how the settlers used them to gain knowledge and then have a class potluck for Thanksgiving. We never learn of the genocide and how it impacts them today, we don't learn of their histories and tribes, we don't learn of their chiefs and families or how they're still being mistreated today.

We learn about things by their proximity to the majority. When celebrating things we never say the first white doctor or the first straight anything. We have a very narrow view of the world that limits our way of thinking. We view each minority outside of history, never the center of the conversation around how society is the way it is now. The world is not a book with a white, cis, straight, abled, male who is always the hero- yet that's how we write most of these stories. Rewire your way of thinking, dig a bit and do some research on minorities, find out their beautiful stories. You'll see the world a little differently.