When my daughter, Leah, was about five years old, a family friend gave her a doll as a birthday present. It was a gift that would lead to one of the worst arguments I ever had with my little girl. The doll was black, but it had long, straight hair. I did not want my daughter spending hours combing—and pining after—something she, as a little black girl with short hair, did not have. So, I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the doll’s locks.

Leah was livid. “Why did you cut her hair, mommy?” she cried. “I wanted to comb it.”

I was, of course, wrong to do what I did without talking to Leah first. After trying, for more than an hour, to explain myself to my grieving child, I held her hand gently and walked her over to the mirror. I asked her to look at her beautiful self and make up her mind, in that moment, that she would always love all that she saw when she looked at her reflection.

I have nothing against long, straight hair. What I am for is loving who we are. That is why, as a mother of black children, I have always liked the fact that the celebration of black history comes in the same month in which we celebrate Valentine’s Day—and love. It reminds me that the yearly celebration of the achievements of black people should be about more than recalling historical dates and facts. Our celebration of Black History Month should be about something much more radical: helping a people, who have been taught to hate themselves over the course of nearly 400 years, to love themselves again.

Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month, was also the author of The Mis-education of the Negro, a ground-breaking analysis of the problem of self-loathing in the black community. He knew that the institution of slavery in the United States had been designed to make black people feel inferior. The African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called it “one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life, and religion.” Woodson knew that the myth of black inferiority had been internalized in the minds and spirits of black people. “When you control a man’s thinking,” he wrote, “you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and he will stay in it.”

Barack Obama is the president of the United States and Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the media industry. But we have not yet rid the world of the poisonous idea that black people are not as beautiful, lovable, capable, and worthy as white people. One of my most important responsibilities as a black mother has been to fight the forces of history that undermine our ability as black people to love ourselves and each other--and to be intentional and assertive about helping my children fully love themselves.

A few years ago, Leah, who is now a grown woman, gave me a birthday card in which she simply wrote: “Thank you for helping me love my hair.” Black History Month, the yearly focus on our achievements, should be a way of helping us recover a sense of our crucial place in world history, yes. But, mostly, it should be about love.

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Enola G. Aird is the president of Community Healing Network, Inc., a nonprofit organization working to build a national grassroots network of self-help groups focused on overcoming the myth of black inferiority and the emotional legacies of slavery and racism.info@communityhealingnet.org