Whenever Black History Month comes around, I experience mixed feelings stemming from its celebration in the Department of Defense schools that I attended during my childhood. It was always a time of shame and mockery mixed with defiant force for us. We weren't permitted to sit it out, we were commanded to celebrate, which took a lot of the fun out of it. I always wondered why the history of black people had to be confined to a single month instead of being inside the history books along with the rest.