Black History Month & the 70th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066 -- why both matter, together

It is Black History month, a time when we (as a nation) remember the significant contributions to American history, culture, and society of people of African heritage to the United States. At Southern University there has been additional programming highlighting various aspects of African American history, culture, and people/communities. While there are some who criticize the idea of "heritage months" because there is no "white history" month (to which I say, isn't everyday white history month?) and there are those who say why single out single month when we should be acknowledging African American contributions to U.S. society everyday (to which I say, well of course, but a month of programming and remembering is still a good and worthy thing), February is none-the-less the month in which those of us who care about issues of race, racism, white privilege, white surpremacy, and most important anti-racist practices, recognize the importance of honoring and celebrating African Americans.

And 70 years ago today, February 19, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which nullified the constitutional rights of every single person living on the West Coast of the United States. It allowed for the military to interpret and restrict who could remain on the West Coast--and the military, under the auspices of EO9066, targeted one and only one ethnic group: people of Japanese ancestry. There was no mention of race in EO9066--which is significant because it gave great power to the military to interpret who was a threat and who needed to be evacuated from the West Coast due to "military necessity."

By now, many people have debunked the idea of "military necessity" surrounding the Japanese American internment/incarceration, and I have written about this issue many times before, especially in this post. So I won't rehearse all of the standard reasons why it is important to remember the 70th anniversary of this infamous date (although I would encourage people to go to this link to an article in Colorlines Magazine).

But I do want to note a connection between EO9066 and Black History Month. Because I think there are more things that unite Asian Americans and African Americans than divide them, despite ridiculous recent comments by Floyd Mayweather and Jenny Hyun. The Afro-Asian connections and points of solidarity are ones that Dr. Sarah Jackson has tweeted about (click here). Asian American activism (of which the Japanese American Internment redress movement was part of) owes a debt to the modern civil rights movement for African American enfranchisement. Asian Americans and African Americans can and should join together to confront issues of white supremacy and white privilege -- and should join with all others who want to be anti-racist allies.

Social justice issues should give us all an opportunity to recognize the intersections of oppression and the possibilities for solidarity across racial lines. We should celebrate Black history month and recognize the injustice of Executive Order 9066 and the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanaese Americans during WWII--and we should continue to see why we are stronger thinking of both together rather than separately.

Adopting a culture and an identity: Scott Fujita

In the different blogs that I periodically read, there are often debates about how appropriate it is to show your love and respect from a culture/ethnicity not of your own heritage. When does your fondness cross a line from appreciation to appropriation?



I was reminded about these kinds of conversations and debates when I first heard about Scott Fujita [tip of the hat to Angry Asian Man]. Fujita is a linebacker with the now Superbowl champion New Orleans Saints. And while it might be surprising that someone with the last name Fujita is large enough to be a lineman, what is more surprising is that Fujita is the adopted son of a Japanese American man and a white woman, with no biological or genetic ties to Japanese ancestry whatsoever.

[Aside: 2/8/10, 5:02pm: In re-reading the above sentence, I'm cringing at the stereotype I just evoked of Japanese (and/or Asian) Americans as being small or at least not large enough to qualify as lineman status (which I associate with being over 200 lbs). As anyone who is familiar with sumo culture in Japan knows, there ARE Japanese men big enough to be linebackers. Sigh. My apologies for this blunder--again, it just goes to show you that as much as you think you are savvy and sensitive to issues of race, even the best of us flub it now and again]

Yet, in countless interviews he has claimed that while he may not look Japanese or be biologically Japanese he identifies with Japanese culture and feels Japanese. Or, as he says in this piece below: he is Japanese in his heart.



What I find most intriguing about Fujita isn't just his cross-ethnic identity, it's his fight for social justice issues, especially ones that do not seem to be part and parcel of being an NFL player. Like his support of LGBTQ issues (last year he supported the National Equality March) and against anti-choice activitsts, most recently he spoke out very directly but respectfully against the Superbowl PSA sponsored by Focus on the Family that had an anti-choice message at its heart (click here and here to read about Fujita's principled stances).

Perhaps it's being a graduate of Cal-Berkeley--after all, Berkeley, even if you're a walk-on football player, is still a hotbed of liberal-progressive-radical beliefs (at least most of the country would like to think so. I don't think's it's as radical as others make it out to be, although there was the Naked Guy who went to class there in the late 1980s, and that was definitely left of mainstream). But really, I think it was the example of his family and their internment during WWII. His grandparents married quickly in the days leading to Executive Order 9066 so that they wouldn't be separated when they put people in camps (unlike in Canada, the U.S. actually did try to keep families together, somewhat). His grandfather ended up enlisting in the famed 442nd regiment (the most decorated unit of its size with one of the highest attrition rates) and his father was born in Gila River Internment camp in Arizona. Because of the war, the Fujitas couldn't pay the mortgage on their family farm in Ventura County and lost it. As I've written elsewhere, the Japanese American internment is one of the most shameful and under-recorded/unknown points of American history. Scott Fujita clearly understands how his family has been impacted by the internment and clearly feels the injustice of what happened to his family. But what seems remarkable is that he also seems to have channeled that sense of injustice into a larger sense of social justice for others, as an ally.

I know that there are folks from all ethnicities who will be troubled by Scott Fujita claiming a Japanese American identity. But take a step back and think about the radical potential of not just what his adoption shows but why he identifies as he does. His adoption of a Japanese American identity isn't just about eating white rice (as he says in the above video) or about having Asian aesthetic objects in his home (as this ESPN piece was surprised that he doesn't, until getting to his home office and seeing a large sculpture). Scott Fujita's adoption of a Japanese American identity seems as much rooted in a history of social justice causes as a celebration of culture, born out of his deep love and connection with his family.

And that is, perhaps, what makes Fujita's identity of being Japanese American one that has transformative potential. Because it's not just about the food. In the articles and interviews done about him, it's clear that he understands that it's about the history. Fujita seems to really get that that because of what you look like or who you love or your gender you could have basic rights taken away and that's simply wrong, and this seems to be a lesson he learned, in part, from his Japanese American family.

T.G.I.F.: Fred Korematsu

In two days it will be December 7--the day that FDR said would always live in infamy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And I thought it would be a good opportunity to remind us all that while Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into WWII was a historic moment and a time when many Americans came together in national unity, it was also a time of racial hysteria that led to the unconstitutional incarceration of an entire race of people based on an irrational and unfounded fear that their enemy-alien race would lead to treason and disloyalty.

I am, of course, referring to the Japanese American Internment, a topic that I've blogged about in the past here and here.

The Japanese American internment was and is a matter of national shame. However, the redress and reparations movement that emerged in the decades that followed is a lesson in the greatness of America. One man crucial to that movement was Fred Korematsu.


[This is Fred back in the early '40s]

Fred Korematsu was one of four U.S. citizens who fought the U.S. government and had his case argued in front of the Supreme Court. He is one of three men whose cases were denied and thus he, along with Min Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi, were approached, decades later, to have their cases taken up again--to try to correct the wrong that had been done when their cases were first argued in front of the Supreme Court.

A fantastic documentary, Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story, documents Fred Korematsu's story. Here's an excerpt from the film's website:

Born in Oakland, California in 1919, Fred Korematsu is the son of Japanese immigrants. Until December 7, 1941, Korematsu had been living the life of a typical American man: he worked as welder in the San Francisco shipyards, owned a convertible and was very much in love with his girlfriend. However, as he was enjoying a picnic with his girlfriend on the eve of December 7, news of the Pearl Harbor attack started pouring out of his radio. Although he didn't know it at the time, Korematsu's life would never be the same again.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered the internment of all Japanese Americans. The Korematsu family was taken to Tanforan, a former racetrack south of San Francisco for processing. Korematsu decided to stay behind because he did not want to be separated from his Italian-American girlfriend.

Korematsu refused to relinquish his freedom and tried to remain unnoticed, to no avail. On May 30,1942, Korematsu was arrested and sent to join Tanforan. Later, all the detainees were transferred to the Topaz internment camp in Utah.

Persuaded by Ernest Besig, then Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, Korematsu filed a case on June 12, 1942. The premise of the lawsuit was that Korematsu's constitutional rights had been violated and he had suffered racial discrimination. However, the court ruled against Korematsu and he was sentenced to 5 years probation. Determined to pursue his cause, Korematsu filed an appeal with Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, later, to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, in December 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against him, stating that Korematsu "was not excluded from the military area because of hostility to him or his race."

Years later, a legal team headed by Peter Irons and staffed by largely young and idealistic Asian American attorneys, uncovered evidence that

"clearly showed the government concealed evidence in the 1944 case that racism — not military necessity — motivated the internment order. More than 39 years after the fact, a federal judge reversed Fred Korematsu's conviction, acknowledging the "great wrong" done to him."

A quote from Fred Korematsu sums up a simple but powerful sentiment that we would all be wise to heed:

"If you have the feeling that something is wrong, don't be afraid to speak up." - Fred Korematsu


Fred passed away on March 31, 2005 at the age of 86. He will always be remembered for his courage to speak truth to power during a time of enormous social and global pressure to stay silent and not to question authority. His life truly is a lesson in the Great Impossible Feat.

Help Wanted: Allies -- all races encouraged to apply

I am a firm believer in allies. When I teach the novel Donald Duk, I point out how Frank Chin, a man renown for his ethnic-nationalism (as well as his misogyny) and one who is quick to bash white racists, has carefully crafted the character of Arnold Azalea, the rich, white best friend of the eponymous protagonist, Donald Duk. That Frank Chin, of all people (Mr. Yellow Power himself) recognizes the importance of white allies in the fight against discrimination should be a signal that allies are seriously needed and wanted for all types of reasons, causes, movements, and paradigm shifts.

And I have written about allies elsewhere in this blog. And I want to return to the topic of allies because I think for some people, the idea that you can cross lines of affiliation, be they ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, class, or religion is impossible. In other words, as a straight woman I can't possibly understand the discrimination that a queer person experiences. True. I probably can't. But that doesn't mean I can't fight on behalf of queer people. And really, it's not so much, for me, fighting on behalf of queer rights as it is fighting on behalf of my own rights as someone who embraces a social justice worldview. Their fight IS my fight.

Let me also be clear--I'm not talking about appropriating someone else's cause or speaking FOR a community (I don't know that I could even speak for Asian American female academics, a community that I do identify with, but who am I to make pronouncements for my peers?). I am talking about being an ally. On educating yourself on topics, not because you want to fetishize or save the world (and here I'm thinking in particular of the disturbing narrative that emerged at the RNC in September of Cindy McCain "rescuing" a poor little orphan girl in an impoverished third world country, saving her from a life of destitution by bringing her to the bountiful bosom on the U.S.), but because you feel you are part of the larger world and because your commitment to being a world citizen requires you to understand others regardless of your subject position.

Which brings me to a little plug I want to make on behalf of a playwright who recently left a comment on my post on Yuri Kochiyama. The commenter has written a play about Kochiyama and other Japanese American girls who wrote letters to Japanese American soldiers fighting in the 442nd/100th battalion during WWII (largely on the European front in Italy, although there were other Japanese American soldiers involved in intelligence and translation in the Pacific theater during this time). The commenter noted that she was hesitant to write about the history of the Japanese American internment due to her distance from the subject as a Russian-American-Jewish woman, but then she was inspired by the example of Yuri Kochiyama herself, because she had expressed similar apprehensions before meeting Malcolm X, and certainly Kochiyama's life is an exemplar to us all of how to be an ally across multiple lines of affiliation.

So. If any of you are reading this and live in the Bay Area, let me share some information with you about the one-act play Bits of Paradise (click here for original notice in Asian Week):

Play Excerpts to Honor Freedom Fighter Yuri Kochiyama

San Francisco’s Marsh Theatre will host excerpts from the one-act play Bits of Paradise, based on the letter-writing campaign between Japanese American girls and women in U.S. concentration camps and Japanese American soldiers during World War II, at their Monday Night Series Nov. 17 and Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. Known as “The Crusaders,” the internees were led by then-20-year-old Mary Nakahara, who went on to become a prominent civil rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Yuri Kochiyama.

Together they proved the saying that “Occasions do not make heroes, they simply unveil them.” Playwright Marlan Warren directs the young, all-Asian American cast that includes Chanelle Yang, Pisha Wayne, Linda Wang, Connie Kim, Wesley Cayabyab, Jean Franco, and Wilton Yiu. Kochiyama will attend, along with other original octogenerian Crusaders. Tickets are $7.00. No reservations. For more info, contact 415-202-0108.

Go out and see it--and write back and leave a message for all of us who aren't able to take in this performance.

Repeating history with a difference (and a vengeance)

[Waring: this is a LONG but IMPORTANT post about a current court ruling that EVERYONE should know about. Feel free to skim the first part of this post, but PLEASE make sure you read the last part]

I know it's a cliche to say that history repeats, but sometimes cliches have grains of truth that are hard to ignore. And while I find it hard to believe that we won't learn lessons from certain historical events by NOT repeating them, I do think that we do repeat patterns, we just do them with a slight difference, and in the case of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, with a particular vengeance.


As some of you regular readers know, I'm working on a book chapter about the Japanese American Internment/Incarceration. For people whose knowledge of this particularly shameful period may be a bit scanty, in a nutshell FDR signed Executive Order 9066 which allowed the military to designate portions of the nation as military zones and allowed the military to target people they believed were threats to national security--pretty much carte blanche. There is NOTHING in the language of Executive Order 9066 that claims a particular region of the U.S. (or the world for that matter because we went into South America to detain people we thought were a threat and we brought these people to the West Coast) and there was nothing in the language that designated ethnicity or race. Of course, as MANY academics and other researchers have uncovered, there was really one and one and only group of people that the U.S. had any intention of detaining, evacuating, and incarcerating: people of Japanese ancestry.


Yes, German, Italian, and Japanese nationals (largely men) were all rounded up and put in detention centers. But no other ethnic group was rounded up en masse: men, women, children, citizens and non-citizens, young, old, infirm, pregnant, and mixed-race people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast of the U.S. (or in parts of Alaska and South America) were targeted and put into concentration camps, many for the duration of World War II.



[By the way, if you are curious about my use of terminology, like "concentration camp" and "incarceration" you can read this post from a few months back. And a great site for a more thorough look at the Japanese American Incarceration is Densho.]

OK, fast forward a few decades. There is an active reparations and redress movement underway--Japanese Americans and other allies band together to demand an apology from the U.S. government, to acknowledge the unconstitutionality of Executive Order 9066, and to receive monetary retribution for the pain and suffering and humiliation of this HUGELY SIGNIFICANT event that was a trampling of the constitutional rights of ALL PEOPLE LIVING IN THE U.S. DURING WORLD WAR II. Because while the government decided to only target people of Japanese ancestry, the truth is, the military could have decided that Italian and German Americans were also a threat and detained and incarcerated them as well.

HR442 passes; Ronald Reagan signs it and issues an official apology; Japanese Americans still alive receive reparation payments, but perhaps even more importantly, there is an official apology--an acknowledgment that what the U.S. government did was WRONG, and there is money set aside to educate the public about this shameful part of U.S. history.

Now, you may ask, what does this history lesson from the past have to do with me NOW?


This is taken from The New York Times yesterday:

"President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision."

That's right. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the President of the United States has the right to detain, indefinitely, any civilian captured in the U.S. and to hold that person without producing any proof of WHY this person should be held, other than the desire to do so. NYU Law Professor, Jonathan L. Hafetz called the ruling "deeply disturbing" and observes that

“'This decision means the president can pick up any person in the country — citizen or legal resident — and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial.'”

[To read the article in full, click here. To hear about it reported in NPR yesterday morning, click here]

Are you worried? You should be. And I'm not saying that you should be worried because someone is going to knock on your door any minute now and drag you from your home. You should be worried that the government is doing this AT ALL to ANYONE.

We are living in uncertain times, but this DOES NOT mean we give up our ideals. And it doesn't mean we forget history. We did this. We rounded up people and we put them in concentration camps and held them for an unspecified period of time. And we did this, not because they posed a real military threat but because there was public approval for doing so. Because it was reassuring to many in the U.S. at the time that the government was doing something that showed it was serious about securing borders and keeping Americans safe.


In his book Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II, scholar Tetsuden Kashima writes about two architects behind the Japanese American Internment/Incarceration: Edward Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit and Attorney General Francis Biddle:

"In the 1985 interview, Ennis talked about his personal views on the internment episode and maintained that Attorney General Biddle had also taken this perspective. Ennis claimed that both he and Biddle were reluctant to pursue the internment policy but justified their actions on the basis of what he felt was prevailing public sentiment. He asserted that some measures had to be taken against the Japanese and Germans in America. The rationale for the arrests and internment is a significant part of his statement--not such earlier claims as the individual's alleged dangerousness or the prevention of espionage and sabotage, but rather public relations" (53).

Journalist Jane Mayer has recently written a book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, in which she notes that about 1/3 to 1/2 of the detainees at Guananamo are NOT terrorists--they are men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or men who simply were of the right ethnicity and nationality and religion for the U.S. to target, to arrest without cause, and to bring to Guantanamo.

[To hear Mayer's interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, click here]


And it's not just men. And not just men from Arab and Muslim nations in the Middle East who were being targeted. Women and children were also rounded up in days following 9/11--American citizens of Arab and Muslim descent. One such tragic family tale is recounted in performer and filmmaker Cynthia Fujikawa's extremely moving documentary short, Day of Remembrance.

And here's where we come full circle. Cynthia Fujikawa's father, Jerry Fujikawa, was incarcerated in Manazanar until his induction into the 442nd regiment. Years later, in an effort to uncover a family secret and to discover aspects of her father's life that remained clouded to her, Fujikawa developed her one-woman performance piece, Old Man River, which was eventually filmed and made its way through the film festival circuit. But what she did following 9/11 was to link the events of WWII and the Japanese American Internment/Incarceration with the abuse of civil rights against Muslim and Arab Americans, and she came up with a very moving documentary, Day of Remembrance, which you can see in full (it's 8 minutes long) by clicking here (you'll need to actually double click on the image of candles on the right to get the film playing).


The Enemy Combatant Ruling is something you should know about. And it's something we should all educate ourselves about and to take action on. To let others know. To write our legislators. To say, this is not OK. I do not want to live in fear. I believe in civil rights for all. And I will stand up for everyone's civil rights because their rights are intimately connected to mine.

Tuesday's History Lesson: 1983 report on the findings of the aftermath of the Japanese American Internment

The following excerpt is taken from page 111 in the book Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress by Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H.L. Kitano, and S Megan Berthold. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999:

"The commission [Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, abbreviated to CWRIC] released its unanimous findings in February 1983 in a 467-page report entitled Personal Justice Denied. The major finding of this report concerned the nature of the incarceration:

The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity. . . The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan. A grave injustice was done to American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded, removed and detained by the United States during World War II.

The CWRIC documented the extensive economic and intangible losses Japanese Americans suffered. The commission estimated that the total losses of income and property incurred by Japanese Americans came to between $810 million and $2 billion in 1983 dollars. The commission also recognized the 'physical illnesses and injuries,' 'psychological pain,' and 'unjustified stigma' resulting from the camp experience."

[Update--July 9, 2008: For further information on the Japanese American Internment/Incarceration, see my post from April 11 (which will give you a link to the DENSHO site)]

Not too late to do the right thing

On Sunday, May 18, 2008, about 200 Japanese American UW students, who were forced to leave the university and face incarceration during WWII, were granted honorary degrees.


[Tip of the hat to Angry Asian Man]

Most of the graduates are now in their 80s, but as Norm Mineta, the keynote speaker who was former Secretary of Transportation and a former internee himself said, it is never too late to do the right thing. Here is an excerpt from his commencement speech:

"It's never too late to do the right thing. It's never too late to rejoice that the right thing has been done. It's never too late to be grateful to people who do the right thing."

For more on the graduation, click on this link. I had tears in my eyes when I read it. Because it's true--it's never too late to do the right thing. It's never too late for us to remember that we CAN do something--we don't have to just sit back and say, "There's nothing I can do." The faculty and staff at UW who helped make this graduation ceremony possible should be commended. Because they didn't have to do this. But it was and is the right thing to do. Which makes me wonder, will our current administration ever be brave enough to admit its mistakes and apologize? Will we recognize, much later, the harm we've done to others--the racial profiling we do to anyone of Muslim or Arab descent--anyone who "looks" Middle-Eastern?

Loaded words and contested terms

You can imagine that as an English professor I believe that words matter, that language matters. And that what you call things matters quite a bit. Take, for example, my preference for using "Asian American" to refer to people of Asian ancestry/descent rather than "Oriental." It's actually not just my preference; a whole movement in the late 1960s was formed, in part, around wanting to affirm the place of Asians in America and to dismiss the notion of people as objects (because remember: only rugs are Oriental).

Two of my most recent posts have touched on the issue of loaded words and contested terms. The April 11 post about the use of the term "Concentration Camp" to talk about where Japanese Americans were detained during WWII has sparked some interest from another blog, "Is That Legal?," where Eric Muller (remember Professor Muller? I gave a plug for his excellent book American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty during World War II) provides more nuanced examination for thinking through the use of the term "concentration camp"--particularly its charged nature and yet why it IS an accurate term to describe the situation of Japanese Americans during WWII--click here for the link to "Is That Legal?"

[If you are reading this Eric, thanks for plugging my post/blog on your blog--I'm honored!]

And in the April 12 post asking when Asian immigrants become Asian Americans, a commenter and fellow blogger, John B. of "Domestic Issue," began an interesting exchange with another commenter about the use of the phrase "miscegenation."

Now, I don't know if any of you were reading my blog this summer, but that exact phrase came up in my August 2 post relating a racist comment made to me by a woman about purity and Asian Canadians. I said in the post: "That word has such a controversial connotation--rooted in a history of race baiting." This is the history of the word:

Originally coined in 1863, the word first appeared on a hoax pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” Conceived by two New York journalists, David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, the pamphlet was an attempt to depict the Republican party explicitly as proponents of inter-racial marriage and implicitly with the propagation of mixed-race children. By doing so, the hope was that voters would reject President Lincoln in his re-election campaign, for the man who supported the emancipation proclamation was also obviously in favor of promoting not only equality of the races but inter-mixing as well. Thus from its inception, miscegenation was a word linked with political propaganda and fear mongering for the purposes of supporting segregation and defying racial equality

[taken from a talk I gave five years ago at Southern U.]

So here's the question for you, dear readers: Can loaded words and contested terms be rehabilitated? Can they escape, in the case of "concentration camp" the tragic and overwrought associations with one of the worst genocides of the 20th century? Can we use a term, like "miscegenation" to simply mean "inter-racial" without invoking its etymological roots in race baiting and its historic use as a word associated with negativity, rancor, and hatred (because whenever "miscegenation" was invoked in the mid to late 20th century it was usually done in the context of "anti-miscegenation" laws, ie: laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage, or white racist Southerners invoking the fear of "miscegenation" as a rationale for school segregation.

I suppose a few more questions to consider are:

*Why is this loaded word or contested term being used in current, contemporary usage?
*What is the purpose of this rehabilitation?
*Who is trying to use this term and for what purpose?
*Is there another term that is as accurate/precise in its meaning as the contested term? Why is it important to use the contested term rather than the less loaded word?

I'd love to hear from anyone out there with an opinion...anyone???

Japanese American Internment/Incarceration/Concentration Camps--which one is it?

Yesterday I went to a talk given by a visiting scholar, lets call him Professor "X," on a portion of his latest research about the Japanese American internment. There were about a dozen people who gathered for his talk, including one I'll call Older American Historian (OAH), who declared at the onset of the talk that he would probably disagree with Professor X since OAH was writing an essay called "The Myth of Japanese American Concentration Camps."

You see, Professor X had dared to include the phrase "Japanese American Concentration Camp" without the scare quotes around the term concentration camp.

Let me pause here by saying that there is an on-going and long-standing debate about whether to refer to the period of WWII in which Japanese and Japanese Americans were racially targeted, detained, relocated, and held in camps throughout the Western and Southern portions of the U.S. as either Japanese American Internment, Japanese American Incarceration, or Japanese American Concentration. Usually this gets even thornier when talking about the actual locations--as in, were these internment camps, detainment centers, relocation centers, incarceration camps, or concentration camps?

Most scholars throw out detainment and relocation. It doesn't get to the magnitude of this mass removal and racialized dimension of what happened. Internment has become the default term, it seems, although many, particularly those who experienced this period, believe this term is too neutral and too inaccurate to describe the inherent racism of this period and the devastating legacy of this period. Incarceration gives more of a feel to the ways in which Japanese American citizens were imprisoned against their will, although I have read some scholarship that believes that incarceration is inaccurate, as well, since Japanese Americans were not truly prisoners, although Densho: The Japanese American legacy project, prefers this term. That leaves us with concentration camps, which is actually the language used by FDR and the other architects of Executive Order 9066 to describe the ten different centers used to house Japanese Americans during WWII.

So here's the thing: when you hear the word "concentration camp" what immediately comes to mind? The Holocaust? Nazi genocide of Jewish people in Europe? You bet. It's the reason I've usually avoided the term in my own writing on the Japanese American internment.

But I have to say, after the exchange between OAH and Professor X, I'm ready to jump on board the Japanese American Concentration Camp bandwagon, because Professor X made a very intelligent, reasoned, and astute argument for why we should understand the camps as concentration camps and why we should use accurate terms to describe particular historic situations. And OAH came across as a cranky, slightly crazy, and most of all incredibly PRIVILEGED white male academic. And those guys drive me NUTS.

You see, right after Professor X finished his talk, OAH immediately launched into a series of questions (because, as he declared to everyone, HE had to leave EARLY). The first one was asking Professor X to compare Japanese American concentration camps to German concentration camps. You know, the ones used to exterminate over 6 million people of Jewish descent.

AGHHHHH!!!! I HATE this question. It's one that appeared in the early stages of Japanese American internment scholarship. Particularly among people who wanted to discredit the legitimate claims of redress and reparations of Japanese American survivors of internment/incarceration. Professor X was very deft at handling OAH's question--he began by saying that it was futile to compare the two, because German concentration camps were actually death camps, and even the ones that were "labor" camps were designed with the Final Solution in mind (ie: Jewish Holocaust/genocide). And then Professor X went through the history of the phrase concentration camp--a phrase that predates WWII by about 50 years (first usage was in the late 19th C. with respect to South Africa and Cuba). Concentration camps, in Professor X's belief, are accurate because they were designed with the purpose of involuntarily concentrating the majority of an ethnic group into one location--for detainment of an indeterminate length. And that's what the U.S. government did to 120,000 Japanese American people--they were targeted, relocated (twice), and detained in camps solely based on their ethnic identity--their visible ethnic and racial difference from white America. No charges of espionage were every discovered among Japanese or Japanese Americans. And as Ex Parte Endo proves, the Japanese American interment was an unconstitutional act that the U.S. government had no business in perpetuating.

But perhaps my desire to jump on the concentration camp terminology bandwagon has as much to do with my antipathy towards OAH as it does with my admiration of Professor X's scholarship. Because the kind of strange refutations that OAH kept making--focusing on the fact that mass numbers of Japanese Americans didn't DIE as a result of being in these camps and that the quality of life for Japanese Americans in the U.S. was demonstrably better than their German/Jewish counterparts. Well... DUH! The U.S. did many dishonorable things to people of Japanese ancestry--but they did not implement a system of genocide against them. The only reason to bring up this false comparison is to discredit the very legitimate hardships faced by Japanese Americans and to discredit the very real racism used by the U.S. government to disenfranchise an entire group of people based on nothing more than irrational and unsupported ethnic bias.

Older white male academic privilege...it leaves a rather bad taste in one's mouth.

[Addition--July 17, 2008: If you found your way here because you are looking for more information about this period in history and/or connections with current abuses of civil rights, click here for my July 17, 2008 post]

Some links to look at

I'll be in blog-silence for a week since I'm leaving for Jamaica tomorrow (read the above post--I'm doing a two-fer today) and I thought I'd leave you with a few links to look at--things I would have, essentially, blogged about/commented about if I were around.

And since I won't be around, this also means that if you do leave a comment between the 15th and 21st of February, it will sit, unmoderated, for a week, but I do promise to publish it and respond when I return!

OK, here they are (click on the name of the blogsite/website to get to the link):

*For all you political junkies, a great post by What Tami Said about the respective post-Potomac speeches by Barack Obama and John McCain (with video links to their speeches). Great analysis by Tami about the messages embedded in their words.

*Part I of a Rachel's Tavern post on "Myths About Intra-racial dating"--I like the way she turns the perspective on its head--it's something I always try to do myself when thinking about a problem or controversial issue.

*A call on C.N. Le's site for white fathers of mixed-race children to participate in a podcast on "Mixed Chicks Chat"--it's the first time I've heard of this site, so I can't vouch for it, but it looks interesting, and they did an event at the Japanese American National Museum, which is a site I really like.

*Speaking of the Japanese American National Museum, I'm sure that they are preparing for events and exhibitions to commemorate Executive Order 9066, which FDR signed on February 19, 1942, the order that allowed the military to enforce the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans to internment camps on the West Coast. There is SO MUCH to say about this topic...I can't even find the right adjectives to express my sorrow, dismay, anger, disgust, horror, and shame that this happened and that TOO FEW of us know the details about the internment. For instance, there is no mention of race in the language of Executive Order 9066--it was up to the military to interpret WHO they deemed to be a military threat, but the order effectually suspended the constitutional rights of every person, citizen and non, living on the West Coast of the U.S. after February 19, 1942. The fact that the military chose only to target people of Japanese ancestry for mass forced removal/incarceration is, of course, what led to HR442 in 1987--a federal recognition and apology for the illegal internment and reparations (in terms of money but more importantly education) for the suspension of constitutional rights of Japanese Americans and the awful precedent that this has set.

Anyway, for more on the Japanese American Internment, go to the DENSHO site--they actually prefer the phrase "Japanese American Incarceration" and I respect them for that, but I have my own reasons for preferring "internment," imperfect as it is.

*In celebration of Black History Month, I thought I'd include this link to a history of African Americans in golf on the site Golf For Everyone. Especially note the "Caucasian Clause" which was in effect from 1946-1961. This timeline puts into perspective just why a figure like Tiger Woods is so important to the world of golf and the world of sports.

*Finally, a hilarious look on Racialicious on what NOT to do to celebrate Black History Month. I think too many of us know what it's like to be Caroline in this short video piece. Kudos to the filmmakers for this great send-up that uses humor to make an important social commentary and to also tackle white privilege.

See you next Friday!

Proud to be an American

This morning on NPR they interviewed three people along Highway 10, the very most eastern and southern portions of it, asking them about the upcoming presidential race and which candidates had issues that spoke to them. And then they were asked whether they believed they were leaving their children with a country that was better than when they had inherited it from their parents. One man from Jacksonville, FL said that although these times seemed pessimistic, he was proud to be an American and therefore believed that he would leave his children with the state of the nation better than when he had inherited it from his parents.

And I was struck both by his naive sense of optimism and his patriotism. Because I don't know what he meant when he said he was proud to be an American.

So here I am, asking one of those obvious questions: What does it mean to say you are proud to be an American?

I am asking this literally--in other words, I'd be interested in hearing various opinions on this. And for those of you who do not feel or may have never felt national pride, why?

Also, for any readers of this blog not from the U.S. (or for those of you who don't identify as U.S. citizens), what does national pride mean to you?

I must confess that I am not someone who readily or easily takes on group identities. I've never really been a joiner or a fan. The sports I played in high school and which I continue to play are largely individual ones: tennis, badminton, golf, running. Aside from rooting for my High School football and basketball teams, I've never really cheered for a sports team or followed a particular sport (aside from golf, and again, it's individual players I watch and I don't know outside of Tiger whether I truly root for anyone). I'm spending a lot of time on sports because I think that there is a link between patriotism and sports fandom. Each seems predicated on wearing colors and symbols of your team--and supporting that team in good times and bad. There are songs and uniforms and anthems and a "home" base. Is my lack of sports fandom related to my lack of patriotism?

I really am not a patriotic person--or at least not in the same sense as the Jacksonville man. I don't tell people that I'm proud to be an American (at least not without irony); the history of the U.S. is too fraught for me in many ways. For every national achievement there is a darker underbelly. Western expansion and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad? Yes, it opened up the continent and literally and symbolically united East and West coasts of the U.S. It also displaced several American Indian tribes and the Chinese men, whose labor was necessary for the Western portion to be built, were summarily abandoned in Utah, not even able to gain passage on the trains whose tracks they had laid (since the trains were not open for Chinese to ride in). And of course, if you look at that photo at Promontory Point Utah, the silver spike ceremony, you will see Irish laborers and Railroad barons but no Chinese men.

And yet, I also believe that the fact that I (and many others) can point to the many flaws and fallacies of the U.S. is, perhaps, the moment when I do feel the strongest connection to a national identity. I do know that the time I felt the most pride in calling myself an American came during an Asian American studies class that I took in college. The professor, a visiting scholar from UCLA who self-identified as hapa, in his case, half Japanese and half African American, on the first day of class read a conference paper he had written about the Japanese American internment. And as I listened to him I started to get so angry about the suspension of constitutional rights and the racism that Japanese Americans had faced during World War II. And when he was finished he turned to us and said that he was proud to be an American. Because he could read a paper to us criticizing a major governmental policy. Because as a hapa man he could teach us this history at a major U.S. university. Because in the U.S. we have the freedom to speak truth to power, to criticize our government when they are failing us, and to vote our conscious (even though the cynical part of me wonders what good it often does if we keep repeating our mistakes or the votes don't get counted).

It is a moment I'll always remember, and on my less cynical days, I do like to think that this freedom--to voice dissent--makes me proud to be an American.

Book Plug: AMERICAN INQUISITION

I know I said the next post would be about the difference between individual bigotry and institutional racism, but I just finished Eric Muller's book American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (UNC Press) and I just wanted to put in a plug for it. First of all, it weighs in at a slim 216 pages, which includes notes and bibliography, so it's just under 150 page pages of text. Second, it's extremely well written. Muller writes elegantly and with precision--I suppose it's his training in legal writing. What impresses me about this type of concise writing is that it's not dry. Particularly when Muller tells the stories of Japanese American people whose lives were irrevocably impacted through their internment/incarceration, it's a very moving account. And finally (but this should probably have been the first thing I wrote) it's an important book--because it systematically goes through the process that the various military and non-military agencies used to evaluate who was "loyal" versus who was "disloyal" and therefore, who was deemed a threat to national security and a danger to the war effort. Muller's work is important because he clearly lays out how arbitrary, in many ways, the various cases for "loyalty" were made by the different agencies and in the last chapter in particular, he makes clear that the idea of loyalty as a barometer for who is not dangerous, or to put it a different way, to equate disloyalty with someone who is dangerous or someone who will betray the country is based on faulty logic in many ways.

I also think the book is important for the links it makes, at the end, with what happened in the past regarding civil liberties and civil rights for a specific ethnic group and our current situation, post 9/11 for Muslim and Arab Americans. In particular, there is one quote from American Inquisition that makes this link clear, and it's in a chapter that describes a case brought against the U.S. military by an internee and Nisei, George Ochikubo, who believed that his exclusion from the West Coast and detainment in an internment camp was illegal. Here is a small excerpt from Muller's book:

"For the WDC [Western Defense Command], it seems the Ochikubo case was not really about George Ochikubo, or his loyalty to the United States, or the danger that he--or, for that matter, Japan--actually posed to the West Coast. The Ochikubo case was instead mostly about making law. It was about creating legal precedent favorable to the unfettered deployment of military power against American civilians on American territory, at a moment that the military deemed an emergency" (Muller 133).

If you are interested in reading more about the book or ordering it from UNC Press, you can go to their website here.

Take a look at it--or take a look at other books that talk about the Japanese American internment. I really do feel this is an important piece of U.S. history that we should ALL know about, wherever we are in the country or wherever we are in the world. Because the Japanese American internment, from the moment it was conceived and implemented to the reparations movement and formal apology, to the current day, is one of the most American stories I know--it's one we should all know and remember.

Repeating History

There is something, for me, about the stories of the Japanese American Internment that makes me get choked up. Or angry. Or both.

And I feel a similar sense of pain in hearing about stories that have emerged post-9/11 about the Arab and Muslim American community.

The convergence of these two issues, Japanese American Internment and Detention of Arab and Muslim Americans, esp. issues at Guantanamo Bay, converge in our contemporary political discourse, but perhaps one of the most moving examples is in this short film Day of Remembrance, which was produced by Cynthia Gates Fujikawa (who also has an excellent film called Old Man River)

Day of Remembrance is an 8 minute film clip--if you go to the website below and click on film #9, you can watch it:

Day of Remembrance (film #9)

Please, take 10 minutes to look at this clip. It's powerful. I've seen it at least half a dozen times, and I cry every time. And I get angry. And I want to act. What we need is organization and leadership for our actions, a place where we collectively can shout NO to the kinds of injustices happening around the world. Can someone please tell me where that place is...

Scenes from Seattle

In an effort to be less bare bones/text driven, I offer a few scenes from my trip to Seattle--a brief Asian American pictorial if you will.


First panel of mural at Pike's Place commemorating Japanese Americans' contribution to Seattle and the legacy of internment.



Last panel of mural at Pike's Place commemorating Japanese Americans' contribution to the area and the legacy of internment.



Lion dance in Seattle's Chinatown



Bruce Lee's gravesite (and the orange I brought him when I paid my respects)

Legacy of Internment

This is my last day in the Pacific Norhtwest. It has been a fruitful research trip, and an even more fruitful recharging the batteries trip. And unlike my recent excursion in West Virginia, nothing on this trip has really sent me into the realms of racial discomfort and paranoia, although there have been moments, in reading and researching about the Japanese America internment/incarceration, and in looking through the archives and handling original documents related to this piece of history, when I have been filled with a sense of deep sorrow and sadness.

I don't know why the Japanese American internment/incarceration has this effect on me--but I've always felt a strong pull to make sure people know the details about this period in U.S. history--that one of the worst flauntings of the constitution happened with Executive 9066--that Japanese Americans experienced the worst brunt of institutional racism and discrimination--one whose legacy is felt to this day, not only within the Japanese American community but in terms of our own governmental policies with respect to post-9/11 and Iraqi and Afghani detainees.

It always amazes me that more people don't comprehend the ramifications of EO9066--that the constitutional rights of ALL PEOPLE, INCLUDING U.S. CITIZENS, WERE SUSPENDED ON FEBRUARY 19, 1942 and the U.S. military chose to only incarcerate people of Japanese descent. Sure there were a few Italian and German men (almost all were immigrants and had not been naturalized) who were detained, but there was never a forced, en masse removal of German or Italian American people on the West Coast. And there was never a case of espionage by any Japanese American--so the conceit of "military necessity" was a myth that many historians have since proved in the aftermath of internment.

And again, as I wrote in an earlier post, the internment was never only about the Japanese American community. There have always been allies of various races who protested the internment. And there were certainly plenty of people of all races (including some self-hating Japanese) who probably thought it was a good thing. But I guess the thing to remember is that like it or not, we're all in here together. I'm not trying to plead a Rodney King "Can't we all just get along" mantra, but I do think that we need to remember the past and to understand that it's never just about one group--the legacy and ramifications of internment (like slavery and like the displacement and genocide of American Indians) affects us all.

Speaking Out

I'm in Seattle doing research in the University of Washington archives. They have a lot of materials about the Japanese American internment, and two of the files I looked through were of Seattle area attorneys, Austin Griffith and Arthur Barnett, two men who represented various Japanese Americans and wrote letters to various government officials in an effort to find exemptions for these people from internment, and in the case of Arthur Barnett, a member of the American Friends Service Committee, he was very active in working with the Japanese American community in helping them through the evacuation, relocation, internment and then eventual relocation back to Seattle. Barnett, was also the attorney who represented Gordon Hirabayashi, one of four people who brought lawsuits against the US Government alleging the unconstitutionality of the camps (he didn't win during his time but he was vindicated years later, along with Min Yasui and Fred Korematsu).

Which just goes to show, there have always been people who have protested injustice--there have always been white allies. And I think that's important to remember, we've never just stuck to our own.