Black History is American History.

Growing up first-gen Japanese American, I was privy to stereotypes that culturally stained our lifestyles.

One was the stereotype of Black people.

Another was the stereotype of Chinese people.

Little do people know of the bigotry that is deeply engrained in my ethnicity. Hell, we made Christians swear they’ll worship the emperor. No different than the English King’s own religion was created in response to the Roman church.

Japanese culture is often fetishized, viewed to be idealistic, and often free of its past horrors.

Google Japanese occupation in South-Eastern Asia and your biases will cloud a little.

This is how I see American History. We erase what makes us look bad. We want to remove the smeared pictures that reveal our bad side. But we wouldn’t be the country we are without the Black narrative. Without it, we wouldn’t have such a generation full of altruists that are SICK of repeating history.

We learned. We know it was wrong. It can’t happen again.