Samantha Power, journalist and Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and head of the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, talks about how Rwandan Genocide defined her perspective:

“But on April 21, a wonderfully honest moment occurred. And that was that an American congresswoman named Patricia Schroeder from Colorado met with a group of journalists. And one of the journalists said to her, what’s up? What’s going on in the U.S. government? Two to 300,000 people have just been exterminated in the last couple of weeks in Rwanda. It’s two weeks into the genocide at that time, but of course, at that time you don’t know how long it’s going to last. and the journalist said, why is there so little response out of Washington? Why no hearings, no denunciations, no people getting arrested in front of the Rwandan embassy or in front of the White House? What’s the deal? and she said — she was so honest — she said, “It’s a great question. All I can tell you is that in my congressional office in Colorado and my office in Washington, we’re getting hundreds and hundreds of calls about the endangered ape and gorilla population in Rwanda, but nobody is calling about the people. The phones aren’t ringing about the people.”