Why History Is Important
I was born with skin the color beige…yet people say I’m white…
I’ve never understood why people can’t get my color right.
I did not know when I was placed into my warm, soft baby bed
that I wold have more privileges than if I was black, brown, yellow or red.
I was just a baby…I had only experienced a few setting suns…
I did not know, yet, just because of the color of my skin…I was a lucky one.
As I grew older and observed and studied…I began to understand
how atrociously we treated the Native Americans…how we threw them off the land.
How we took their children from their Mom’s and dads…we didn’t care if they made a fuss….
and sent them to cruel, inhumane schools…to make them more like us.
How we enslaved generations of people…people who we never intended to be freed
so they could do our bidding…and fuel our insatiable greed.
How we used whips, confined them in chains…knowing they could not escape them…
How we thought of them as less than human…making it easier to beat and rape them.
How, after Pearl Harbor, we gathered up entire families…children, Dads and Moms
anyone who looked like those who flew the planes and dropped the bombs.
These were own citizens…on whose rights and freedoms we so easily tramped…
How, out of fear and ignorance we sent them off to distant internment camps.
But these were horrors imposed on other people of other colors and not directly on to me….
so I had to learn the bitter truth by studying history.
Now I see there are people…people who mostly look like me,
who want to whitewash what we’ve done…to erase this history.
Please don’t let them do it…
If not for the people we have harmed…for our country’s sake…
for it is only by studying our history that we can learn from our mistakes.
So every future child born, not just those who look like me…
after not too many more setting suns…
will be able to feel, as I did,
that they too…are the lucky ones.
Copyright © Jim Yerman | Year Posted 2023
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