My high school had two programs for us “gifted” kids to participate in as freshmen. I was in the one that was more arts and history based, where at the end of the year the class wrote and performed a play about a Supreme Court case. My year the case was Buck v. Bell. 1/?

I’m fuzzy on the details since this was 16 years ago and I haven’t thought about the case since (until recently) but Buck v. Bell was about forced sterilization and eugenics. The case took place in 1927 and was taught to as a Bad Thing that had happened a Long Time Ago... (2/?)

As soon as the school year was done, I forgot all about it. If you had told me at 13 years old that I would find out at 30 that our government was still participating in such horrendous acts against people of my ethnicity I wouldn’t have believed you. (3/?)

This was 2003, and the US (especially my relatively conservative city) was very much still in the thralls of post-9/11 patriotism. We were the Good Guys and while maybe we did a little eugenics in the Old Times we had learned our lesson and we were Good now, right? (4/?)

Anyway. I don’t really know what the point of this thread is. I’m just still processing the lies that were taught to us, especially in a very white school with white teachers. (5/?)

What’s especially illuminating is the fact that the history teacher we had was pretty much worshipped by most of us students. We didn’t have the term “woke” back then but I think if we had, he would have been one of the “woke” teachers. And I still respect him now (6/?)

But in hindsight, how much was he really challenging our worldview? How much was he pulling back the curtain to how our society really is? After a year of being in his class, I still started the next school year thinking we were always the good guys. (7/?)

(Full disclosure: it was technically a world history class and the only US history discussed was around the supreme court case, but the context we were given wasn’t very critical of our government or atrocities that our nation has committed) (8/?)

I’m also realizing as I type this out that it is very odd that our world history class ended with a play about a US Supreme Court case...the program kinda combined our history class with our language arts class but it still probably shouldn’t have ended with US history... (9/?)

Anyway, the world is fucked. It has been fucked. Our government has done a lot of shitty and evil things. And I wish that we had actually been taught about it. How they managed to teach us about eugenics in the US while still worshipping the US is shocking in hindsight (10/10)