We all know Harvard. At least, we think we do.

Even someone who never sets foot in the Yard knows the place. It’s where presidents come from, where the smartest students study, where leading academics toil away in labs. These are the dominant narratives here. No matter if we’re praising Harvard or pillorying it, they are the stories we have at our immediate disposal. The thing about dominant narratives, however, is that by nature they make little room for nuance—for nuance complicates things.

I want to talk about Black History Month.

In 1926, Carter G. Woodson—a Harvard graduate—founded Negro History Week, the precursor to Black History Month. An educator, Woodson envisioned Negro History Week as a means to reeducate whites, as well as blacks, on what it means to be a black American. In the Journal of Negro History, Woodson writes that racism is “the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.”

For Woodson, not only were blacks marginal in the telling of our American story, but they were also mischaracterized. If blacks were to be treated as equals, Woodson maintained, the incomplete narrative of slavery and family dysfunction had to be nuanced. With a certain idealism that befit a man who was both the son of slaves and a graduate of Harvard, Woodson believed that telling of the accomplishments of individual blacks during Negro History Week would change America’s dominant narrative about blacks as a group. Yet, a century and a black president later, the dominant cultural tropes—thug, welfare queen, baby mama—subsist despite the veritable parade of remarkable individuals contradicting them. A simple accounting of extraordinary individuals has, perhaps, proven insufficient.

The dominant narrative about Harvard—the one about professors and presidents and bright students—suffers from a similar problem to the one Woodson tried to rectify. It has no color to it. It is not a white narrative, per se, nor a narrative that intentionally excludes women or people of color. But what is the norm, what is average, what is expected, tends to be white and male. Study after study reveals the preferences our culture gives to white men. To tell a colorblind story, then, is often to tell a white story.