I have class in a bit so I can't answer this as thoroughly as I'd like to right now -- I'll touch on the points that I miss later.
Like it or not, there is a concept called "white priviledge." Here's an article that gives you a pretty good idea of some of what it entails:
http://www.csulb.edu/~acargile/330/d...riviledge.html
If you can tell me that the majority of the items on that list don't apply to you, then great! You're one of the few white people who is rejecting their "white priviledges." But the rest of us 99 percent of white people have something to work on.
You can pay all the lip service you want to the ideals of "everyone is equal" but when it comes right down to it, whites have a lot of priviledges that people of color don't have in this country. Most of us who are white take these priviledges for granted and don't even notice them until they're thrown in our faces (which is basically what that article does). Until we're all ready to give up our "white priviledges," inequality in this country will continue to exist. And most of us aren't willing to do that because we've never lived without "white priviledge" so we assume that's the way it's supposed to be and that giving it up would be "reverse discrimination" . . . when in reality it would only be putting us on an equal playing field to what American people of color have always had to deal with. That's the long and the short of it.
As for "women's history"/"men's history" -- why do you think that women have achieved less than men? Part of it is because they were put in a position where they weren't allowed to achieve the way men do, but part of it is because women's contributions to society were regarded as unimportant simply because a woman did it! Why is the literary canon full of dead white males? Partially because women had a harder time getting published, but partially also because women weren't even "allowed" to write poetry (the more "serious" literary form than the novel) until the 1800s, and anything written by them before that was ignored. This was how it was in every aspect of society. Plus, in a male-dominated, male-identified, male-centric society (eeek, I'm getting all women's studies jargon-y now!), males were the ones who defined what was "important" -- if the world had always been ruled by women, what constitutes an "achievement" would probably be pretty different than all those crusades and wars and newly discovered continents and enslaved races.
Not to mention the fact that women's absences from the history books speak volumes. There is so much stuff that we are just now uncovering -- like, until the past fifteen or so years, there was essentially nothing written about the forced sterilization of women of color in the United States, and there are still so many people who don't know about things like that, or about female genital mutilation, or about the widow-burning in India that took place at (I think?) the beginning of the century . . . or SO many other things. If all that stuff is still being left out of the history books, imagine how much women have gone through that we now have no records of. In my opinion, that stuff is just as important if not more so than all the "in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" stuff . . . and the kids growing up today are not learning it.
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