I Cannot Remember Learning About This American History in School...

When I think about many of the atrocities that have occurred throughout history - the Holocaust, for example - I think the ones that have happened in the U.S. for some reason tend to be overlooked.

Case in point: the Japanese internment during WWII. I hardly remember a mention of this fact during U.S. History. Ed Wakayama, one of the people born in these internment camps, has been a very close friend of my family since I was a kid; here is his story.

And something I really do not remember ever being mentioned during history class, is how minority, low income, and other people declared "unfit to breed" were forcefully sterilized in our own country, not all that long ago. As in, some of these people are my parents' age. BBC News has a very interesting article on this topic of eugenics in the U.S. currently.

Take a look at this list from the BBC article of people that the North Carolina Eugenics Board was petitioned to sterilize in 1950 - only a few years before my parents were born!

• An 18-year-old girl, separated from her husband who had "manifested anti-social behaviour"
• A black 25-year-old rape victim who showed "abnormal sexual tendencies"
• A 16-year-old girl who had earlier been committed to a state institution for "sexual delinquency" and whose aunt "signed consent"
• A white married mother of three, whose family had been "finally dependent for many years" and has "a history of inter-marriage with Indian and Negro"
• A 15-year girl deemed "feebleminded"; parents reportedly consented

These facts just make me very sad to think about the history of injustice in my own country.  It makes me really upset to think about what the Chinese government has done to the Tibetan culture and people, or what the Nazis did to the Jews, Gypsies, and others, but we also have our own history to remember. We have a lot of work to do in our own country to try and make up for these injustices.