Bitter as it is to accept the results of the November election, we should have reason for some optimism. For many years now we have preached "the gospel," in opposition to the philosophy of so-called liberalism which was, in truth, a call to collectivism.

This is no time to repeat the shopworn panaceas of the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society. John Kenneth Galbraith, who, in my opinion, is living proof that economics is an inexact science, has written a new book. It is called "Economics and the Public Purpose." In it, he asserts that market arrangements in our economy have given us inadequate housing, terrible mass transit, poor health care and a host of other miseries. And then, for the first time to my knowledge, he advances socialism as the answer to our problems.

Shorn of all side issues and extraneous matter, the problem underlying all others is the worldwide contest for the hearts and minds of mankind. Do we find the answers to human misery in freedom as it is known, or do we sink into the deadly dullness of the Socialist ant heap?

Those who suggest that the latter is some kind of solution are, I think, open to challenge. Let’s have no more theorizing when actual comparison is possible. There is in the world a great nation, larger than ours in territory and populated with 250 million capable people. It is rich in resources and has had more than 50 uninterrupted years to practice socialism without opposition.

We could match them, but it would take a little doing on our part. We’d have to cut our paychecks back by 75 percent; move 60 million workers back to the farm; abandon two-thirds of our steel-making capacity; destroy 40 million television sets; tear up 14 of every 15 miles of highway; junk 19 of every 20 automobiles; tear up two-thirds of our railroad track; knock down 70 percent of our houses; and rip out nine out of every 10 telephones. Then, all we have to do is find a capitalist country to sell us wheat on credit to keep us from starving!

Our people are in a time of discontent. Our vital energy supplies are threatened by possibly the most powerful cartel in human history. Our traditional allies in Western Europe are experiencing political and economic instability bordering on chaos.

•  As the stock market tanked, the President informed us that he didn't worry mcuh about the "daily gyrations" of the market because it is nothing more than the equivalent of a daily tracking poll.
• Again, as the market was dropping like a hot rock, President Obama went out and encouraged people to buy stock!
• We have a Treasury Secretary who cannot fogure out how to use Turbo-Tax and cheated the government out of taxes he obviously owed, who defrauded his employer of the stipend they gave him to pay the taxes, and whose "plan" to stabilize the banking sector had the markets running for the hills.
• We have a Secretary of State who is giving out stupid gifts to the Russians, even as they continue to try to remake the old Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. She also declined to even mention the human rights abuse that are rampant in China and has signalled her willingness to engage in "diplomacy" with the terrorist sponsoring state of Syria.
• We have a Homeland Security Secretary who has an open borders attitude and allowed the city of Phoenix to become one of the kidnapping capitals of the Americas. Yet the drug fueled violence on the borders that have spilled over into our nation are only seen as "concerns" for us to be aware of.
• In the space of 50 short days, we have seen an orgy of spending that makes the Republican Congress of the Bush years look like Scrooge McDuck hoarding money. In the space of 50 days a deficit of $500 billion (pre-TARP) has had well over $1 trillion added to it...with more to come.

As I have made my trek through the system of higher education, I have known that mine was going to be a lonely existence on the college campus. It was going to be lonely because in the sea of liberal thought and ideology that permeates the universities in our nation, I self identify as a conservative. And it was going to be doubly so because I am a black conservative at an HBCU.

I started out at a community college and I had some experiences with liberals there. I had a history teacher whom I still much admire who believed that socialism could be workable…if just the right people were to try it. But she never tried to push her liberalism into the classroom, unless she was asked what her personal views on a subject or issue were; at that point she was allowed to answer freely because she never pretended to be the academic when asked those questions. She made sure that she always stressed the fact the personal views she shared with us were just that; her personal views, and not those of the college. That was honorable.

I had another professor there who was a professor of political science, a practicing lawyer, and an active Democratic politician in the community. He also never allowed his personal feelings to seep into this lectures about the American system, and he managed to never let slip one insult towards George W. Bush in any lecture. In fact, he admonished several students who did so by reminding them that no matter their feelings, Mr. Bush was the President of the United States and in his classroom that position would be treated with respect. He was honorable as well.

Here at WSSU, in this semester particularly, things have been far different than what I experienced at RCC. I have one professor who, not knowing that I was a Republican stood in front of the class and announced that Michael Steele was simply a token and that most black Republicans were ashamed of it. I sat there stunned and amazed at how brazen that was, and how uninformed. But in the spirit of being a student respecting the position of the professor, I said nothing. A couple of weeks later during a class discussion, one of my classmates who knew I was a conservative Republican from a discussion in another of our classes asked me to give the Republican view of the “stimulus” bill. You could have heard a rat peeing on cotton; it grew so quiet in the classroom. And it was even quieter when I finished explaining that the “stimulus” was actually very light on anything that would immediately help the economy and was simply a liberal “holiday tree”. Since that point the blatant Republican bashing in class has stopped, although my new class nickname has become “Republican”. But I can deal with that.

In another of my classes I was asked whom I voted for in the election after I said that the “stimulus” bill did a lot of creating jobs for government workers and making work for everyone else, but that it would not in the end pull us out of the tailspin we are currently in. After being asked why I voted for McCain, and if I was “For all the stuff McCain was for”, I answered that in a situation where I had to choose between someone I could never agree with and someone I could occasionally agree with, I chose the latter. I was then asked by my professor why I would vote for a Republican, and my succinct answer was “Because I am a history major.” When pressed on it, I laid out the sordid details of the Democrats racially divisive history from the days of Thomas Jefferson to the presidential election of 2008. When I was finished, my professor then asked me this, “But don’t you think people can change? Don’t you think the Democratic Party has changed since then?” And I pointed out that while I believed people can change, I see no real evidence that the Democrats have changed when a former Klansman still sits in the Senate, and both the current Sec.State and VeeP have been caught making jokes about Indians and 7-11 and service stations. And from that point on my professor and classmates have shown a new respect for conservative ideas when they are presented. That was my teachable moment, and I took advantage.

But more recently, in fact just yesterday I was denounced in class as attacking someone as if I were Fox News and of smearing someone with unsubstantiated charges. I would have been angry, but it was all too funny to me because I saw it coming. My class was assigned a book by John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to read as part of an international relations class. I was suspect of the book to begin with because this class has been less about international relations than about the evils of American foreign policy, as seen through several different IR theories. So, I read the book (which I do not recommend, by the way) and in my review I ripped it apart. It lacked any specifics on how all the developing world was being ripped off by the bad old Americans; it read more like a bad John LeCarre novel than an honest memoir, with it’s talk of CIA assassins killing everyone who opposed US foreign policy; and the rehashing of the Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Bush-Saudi, and Iraq saving Venezuela from being invaded conspiracy theories. As I wrote it, I knew that no A was forthcoming, unless I joined the mush heads in class who loved it so much, mainly because all they know about IR they have learned in class. So I got my B and my anonymous denunciation and took it in stride, because I knew it was coming…but that’s okay. I can handle it and I could never trash my country just to get a good grade from a professor who came here from Africa to enjoy the fruits of freedom, yet spends an inordinate amount of time savaging the freest country on earth. What sort of idiot would I be to sell out to go along with that?

But as I go on through the trials of being a lone conservative voice in the liberal wilderness of the college campus, I want you guys to keep me in your thoughts and prayers. I am getting close to the finish line and I will not let the liberals deter me now!

Every February we celebrate Black History Month here in the United States, and every February like clock work we hear people attacking the very idea of Black History Month, which often morphs into complaints about HBCU's, BET, and any other organization or celebration that focuses on Blacks as a group. And sadly for me some of the loudest complaints come from my conservative brethren. So today, I am going to explain to you why Black History Month still matters, and why it is so important to all of us...and especially Blacks.

When Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week, America was deep in the throes of Jim Crow segregation. Blacks were never taught that they had any history besides one of alleged barbarity in Africa and deprivation as slaves and share croppers in America. The Harvard educated Woodson knew better, not because he had been taught about it at Harvard, but because he had done his own research and found out that Blacks had much more to look back on than slavery. There were great kingdoms in Mali and Ghana, great university cities like Jenne and Timbuktu, glorious rulers like Mansa Musa and Menes, great cities like Menefer and Kilwa that no school was teaching to its Black students. So Mr. Woodson, seeing this appalling lack of knowledge of the history of Blacks in society, took it upon himself to set aside one week every February to teach that history to anyone who wanted to learn it and to make sure those Blacks understood that there was glory in their history and not just misery.

And the same lack of knowledge that so appalled and inspired Carter G. Woodson exist to this day, in spite of the morphing of Negro History Week into Black History Month. Sure, all throughout February there are school lessons about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and now I am sure that Barack Obama will be included in the pantheon of heroes as well. And there is talk of Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods as well and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem lies in the fact that even now Black history is either largely ignored, or is taught in the same tired timeline...slavery to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement to the election of Obama. Period. But that is not all that we are.

I have found that the people who regularly frequent this space are some of the more intelligent people out there, so I want to ask you a few Black history questions in an attempt to make my point...feel free to use a reply post to answer the following questions:

1. What is the significance of the year 1482 in Black history?
2. What is the significance of the year 1619?
3. Who was Mansa Musa, and what was his importance?
4. Who was Menes and what was his importance?
5. What is the significance of the years 1803-04 in Black history?
6. Who were the Moors, and what is their significance?
7. Identify Benjamin Banneker and list one notable accomplishment.
8. Who was Jean-Baptiste DuSable?
9. How many Africans fought in the Revolutionary War, combined?
10. What did the Constitution of the United States say about the slave trade?

That's ten simple questions, and I would wager right now that the majority of the people who respond to this little quiz, without the aid of the internet, would likely fail. And not just White folks, but Black folks as well. And the reason is that we are not being taught! It is not some covert conspiracy to shut Black history out of history curricula, it is simply that the same incomplete history is taught from generation to generation and becomes the accepted history. And it happens at all educational levels and at all types of schools. I am a history major at an HBCU, have taken all of the prescribed African American history courses, have gotten A's in all of them, and in only one have we looked at the history of Blacks extending from Africa to the present. The rest followed the same time line that I laid out earlier, with a few extra details added in for flavor.

But it is during Black History Month that we get the opportunity to have a broader horizon of Black history opened up to us, when we really take the time and have an opportunity to get deeper than just a surface view of the subject. And until the accepted history of Blacks in America can be revamped, and curricula are changed to offer a more holistic view of Black history then Black History Month will continue to be needed. You see, Black History Month isn't just for Blacks. It is for all of us to be able to take a closer look at history and to see where Blacks come from, to expand our horizons and knowledge base, and to gain an appreciation that Blacks have a history beyond slavery and Jim Crow. It allows us to appreciate the history of the Moors, of Askia Muhammad, and Richard Allen and to share that history with the entire American society. It allows us to all come to the realization that Blacks have just as rich a historical heritage as the Italians, Greeks, or English and that history is just as wonderful. It allows us to get a sense of where Blacks come from, where we are, and how we got here. It is not to shut out anyone, but is an invitation for you to join in our celebration of our unique history.

Black History Month remains important because it is not just for us Blacks, but is an opportunity for all of us to learn, grow, and appreciate one another. And that is why we should all happily celebrate Black History Month.