This was very eye opening. I felt that I had a decent grasp on history, but I was egregiously mistaken. The only topics I even remotely knew about were the Flint water crisis and the Japanese internment camps.
The idea that the subjugation of all these groups that were not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants makes me sick to my core.
The only way that we will do better as people and as a group collectively is to share what we are learning and to help educate each other about what we are learning.
In addition to the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples, I think I was most horrified by the information about the medical experiments, gasoline baths, and children being taken away- really all of it. We have so much to learn.
One thing that I am struggling with as I think more about anti-racism and about US history is how much of this history gets left out of history education and even personal narratives. My mother grew up in southern California along the LA river, and most of the children her own age came from Japanese-American families. I remember her telling me about one day in 1942 when her mother had sent her to an adjacent farm with goat meat that she was going to swap for eggs; when she got to the next farm, she saw her friends and their families loaded onto a US Army truck. Soon after, Mexican immigrants came in to work on the farms. Now that I've watched the video, I wonder how many of them were part of the Brocadero program. All the farms were seized by the US government and resold to white landowners. In the 1960s, the whole area was paved over, becoming the horrible concrete scar that we see in films. I would never have known anything about this period of time in the US from my academic history. When I brought it up in high school, one of my teachers actually accused me of making up the story. But I grew up in NM, and no one ever talked about the Indian schools and the brutality of them or the treatment of immigrants at the border, or even the migrant laborer program in the 1940s and 1950s.