One of the things that I've felt strongly about, both in watching the module's videos and in other research, is just how recent everything is, and how it's all still in play currently. It's a little mindblowing to me that some of those angry white people yelling at Ruby Bridges are still alive! That segregation was still around when my parents were young! When it doesn't feel like it directly affects you, it's easy to relegate those things to the history books.
Some of history plays out with less acute, more insidious things, like societal norms that we (speaking as a white person) don't even recognize as harmful until we do our due diligence. Other things, we see on the news as actively happening still. Every time I think of our current US-Mexico border situation, my heart hurts, and yet I don't know what I can personally do to stop it. I liked the comment about (and I'm certainly paraphrasing), "Do we have to wait until it gets as bad as the Holocaust, to compare it to the Holocaust?" How can we as a nation allow atrocities to occur on our own soil? Will it get so bad as to needing a foreign power to come liberate the people in the camps -- and... what country or coalition of countries, in 2020, would possibly have the military might to stand agains the USA on our own turf?
In a previous job, one of my coworkers was of Japanese descent, and would sometimes tell about her family's history. Her family had gotten split up and taken to internment camps in the western US, and their property was confiscated. They had owned land before that had been taken from them and given to white people. As her grandfather hadn't trusted banks, they had kept money and things of value in their basement, which they never got back. And yet, her family was more privileged than others, as members of her family were highly educated and were able to regain personal wealth and regard through their occupations. However... why did they have to work so much harder than white people to regain a foothold that they never should have lost? How would her family's history be different if the US hadn't decided that all Japanese-Americans had forfeited their rights because people who looked like them had bombed Pearl Harbor? And how can we as a country even begin to atone for our sins?
