The Help

[rhoyaltempest]

Originally Posted by LaneSig

But the problem is, just because it was a "big part of people's lives" doesn't mean it was a big part of someone else's life experiences; even it was such a huge event in other's experiences.

Truly not being sarcastic, but people are raised by other people who may not emphasize certain aspects of history or other experiences. I honestly don't remember much being taught about the Civil Rights movement or the effects of Jim Crow laws when I was growing up. I think I went to the only high school in the U.S. that never read "To Kill a Mockingbird" - which, like it or not, gets some people interested in learning about Jim Crow laws and leads to learning about the Civil Rights movement.

Most people don't learn about:

- the discrimination that the Irish faced when they first moved to the U.S.

- the discrimination and anti-Chinese laws that existed in the late 1800s/early 1900s

- the Japanese experience in internment camps in WWII

-the early pre-Stonewall protests in the LGBT community to change discriminatory laws aimed at them

-how the U.S. government led a coup that ousted the Hawaiian monarchy and annexed what was a foreign country and the discrimination that the people of that country had to face in their own land afterwards

Before the argument starts: yes, I know that traditionally the African-American experience in the U.S. has been more discriminatory and had more laws against them (with the exception of the anti-Chinese laws).

My point (and I do have one) is that you seem to be taking offense with someone who is saying that they never really thought about something before and now they are. It wasn't in their experience in the past. Shouldn't it be a good thing that they are now thinking and want to learn? Look over my list. How much do you know about those experiences? And, yes, the people who had those experiences feel just as strongly about them that other people do about theirs.

It's not about individual life experiences; it's about being interested in the human experience, in the American experience specifically. I'm sure that the events you've listed are known to the people of those countries or they are at least interested in knowing more about them. Not learning about or discussing your country's history just because you didn't personally have an experience is crazy to me.