Kristopher Aguayo

Ms. Emily Ehrlich

English 131
23 January 2015
Research Analysis (Edited)

The initial attempt was to write a research paper on the systematic

racism that is prevalent in the United States, but as new information arose
my attention was caught by a different issue that was on a global scale and
also national scale. That issue being that here in the United States we dont
talk about our dark history.
When I refer to the dark history of American I refer to slavery and the
assimilation of Native Americans. It's a topic we teach about in schools, but
it's one that we don't generally dont talk about. My claim is that we still
haven't come to terms with our history. It's important to come to terms
because the system of slavery led to the system of racism we have in the
United States. It was this oppression that created tensions between different
groups of people in America. This oppression led to violence and inhibition of
opportunity for many.
In the process of researching I felt it important to fairly compare and
contrast the differences between the different ethnic problems especially
when there are time-space differences in the locations where these atrocities
happened. I started my research by focusing on looking for countries that

also had a dark history. Towards the beginning I knew of one for sure country
I could talk about and that was Germany. As many know, horrific acts against
humanity occurred in Germany. I began looking more in depth into the
subject. In the process I gathered information of a country that has
successfully dealt with its past.
The next step in my research was to find a country with a similar dark
history. For years I heard about the Rwandan Genocide but I never actually
knew what had happened. After I found out about the events I knew that
there was a clear biased over what we get taught about at school.
I began to go in depth on how Rwanda is coming to terms with their
recent past. I found a paper written by an anthropologist who did field world
Rwanda. He interviewed Rwandans and asked them how things where before
and immediately after the genocide. He came to the conclusion the people
where choosing to forget for the sake of being able to walk by their
neighbors homes.
To further on my knowledge I asked many adults what memorable
events they could remember from the 90s and what they knew about the
genocide. I was surprised when they recollected seeing footage of it on the
news. My Chinese teacher remembers watching the news and seeing a
tractor shoving the bodies of children into mass graves. She said that the
new stations brushed off the information, as if it wasn't major news. She said
that she saw that when she was still living in Moscow. I also asked my human
geography teacher and she gave me a similar response.

Doing research for this upcoming paper was unlike any other research
I've done. The process was a lot harder but not because of the work load, but
because the topics where a lot harder to accept. One would expect that after
we've seen the manifestations of prejudice we would try to not fall back to
our demons but here in the US we seem to be falling towards them but not in
the form of genocide, but in the form of the systematic racism. Research only
made writing the paper much more important.