Sadly, Detaining Innocent People Based on Race IS NOT a New Government Policy
I do not own the copyright/license to the visual content below. I use them here as part of an educational demonstration, and not solely for personal gain.
Executive Order 9066 relocated people, separated families, and placed innocent Americans in detention camps unfit for human habitation.
On December 7, 1941 Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. For my grandparents’ generation, it was to be their 9/11. The attack sent a ripple of shock through the country, and the shock was later followed by outrage. It forced the United States to enter World War II. My grandfather and his brother would serve in the South Pacific in segregated units as young men. They would later return home to face more hatred, violence, and racism than they left behind, but that is another post.
This is the story that we all get in United States History II class in high school: The reluctant Roosevelt was forced to take his part in the second great war by a few Japanese war planes. The story that we didn’t get from US History II is the outrage directed at United States citizens of Japanese descent. We didn’t get that unless we signed up for the OPTIONAL minority studies class under the great Ms. Mae Eva Chambliss. I did.
The picture above is originally downloaded from history.com, and it is slightly nicer than the ones we saw in Minority Studies. After the 12/7 attack, Americans’ outrage at the attack turned in on its Japanese citizens. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, about 1300 citizens were rounded up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had their assets frozen, and were relocated to Montana, New Mexico, and North Dakota. Many of them had no opportunity to alert their families or tell their families where they were going, and many remained until the end of the war in 1945.
This picture. That’s it. That’s the one that I remember from years ago (I can’t tell you how many years! A girl has to care about her age.) while I sat in my all-Black high school listening to Ms. Chambliss, my Black Minority Studies teacher, explain that American-style racism can often drive policy. And these policies are almost always aimed at people of color. For while the United States at war with Italy and Germany, no such order was passed to round up Italian or German Americans. They were of European descent, and detaining them was simply not as popular in the country.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, military zones were established in West Coast states — namely California, Washington, and Oregon. In order to handle the chaos of more than 10,000 people who were at least 1/16 Japanese, as the law demanded, VOLUNTARILY registering at centers for the law, a civilian organization was set up: the War Relocation Authority. From the War Relocation Authority centers, the families were relocated to internment camps or “assembly centers.”
I am not impressed with the semantics. Whether they are called “internment camps,” or “assembly centers,” does not matter: the fact remains that thousands of innocent Americans were rounded up, some given less than six hours to gather all of their belongings, and placed under arrest with no probable cause and no due process.
Those around Roosevelt, mainly John DeWitt, leader of the Western Defense Command, used A COMPLETELY FALSE narrative that painted Japanese American citizens as spies, criminals, and saboteurs on behalf of the Japanese government. The same people who built the Transcontinental Railroad, the narrative reasoned, were there to tear America down and make it a subsidiary of Japan.
This falsity, coming from a Lt. General, worked. Roosevelt went along with the plan. At first, Japanese Americans and immigrants were asked to register voluntarily with their families. Then they were taken away from their homes. Though some of these camps were relatively decent, many of them were overcrowded. Some “holding places” for Japanese Americans were no more than animal livestock spaces. Some Japanese Americans were shot to death if they came to close to the boundary lines or exits to these camps. In order to arrive at one camp, families had to march more than two miles with their elderly, handicapped, and babies.
Several of these camps were located on Native American lands. The tribal elders and councils objected to these camps, but the United States government violated the sovereignty of Native American nations and overruled them. Some in the camps were “sent” to work on farms. According to history.com, about 4,000 were allowed to leave and attend college. Keep in mind that these “centers” were surrounded by barbed wire and had armed guards on towers. The word, “camp,” or “holding center” does not matter: this was detainment complete with a quasi-convict lease system.
While we celebrate President Franklin D. Roosevelt in history class for his accomplishments as an unprecedented four-time president, we do not learn of how racism drove one of his policies. Under President Roosevelt, the United States committed one of the worst violations of human rights since the legalization of slavery, the support for the American Holocaust (that’s another posting), and the Trail of Tears.
Now, racism is currently driving one of our policies. The country is not only detaining innocent people and justifying it with a completely false narrative, it is now going beyond Executive Order 9066 and actually separating children from parents. At least by 1942, there was a way to register families and try to keep them together (though this was not always the case). Then, Japanese Americans and immigrants lived to see their home country bombed twice with a new, ultra-destructive atomic bomb — though Germany and Italy were not hit with the atomic bomb and the country was at war with them, too.
It seems even strategies of war are dictated, at times, by race.
The last internment camp was closed March 1946.
As always, if you like this post, clap back (press the hands). Though I’m sure Ms. Chambliss is retired by now, I don’t do a bad job myself in African American Studies. I’ll see you in class.
