Lest We Forget

A memorial shrine at the site of a detainment camp in Manazar, CA, where Japanese-American civilians were confined for four years.

 

Blindsided by an unexpected attack on its soil, Americans are sad, fearful and angry. Thousands of fellow countrymen’s lives have been cut tragically short. The nation is gripped by a spasm of national hatred and rage; the media gladly fuels the flames of xenophobia. War is declared. The president calls for Americans to rally around the fallen, and says we must stand by our nation—and the freedom, liberty, and justice that it stands for—more than ever before.

As much as the tragedy unites Americans, it divides them as well. Friends, co-workers, and neighbors have overnight become a security risk and a “fifth column” not to be trusted. Wary stares and bricks through windows become common occurrences for those unlucky Americans. History has a funny—and tragic—way of repeating itself.

Americans were jarred awake on the morning of December 7, 1941 to learn of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and found their country suddenly plunged into war. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were viewed with everything from suspicion to outright hatred. American citizens of Japanese descent, previously touted as model immigrants, were spit on in the street, their stores firebombed. FBI agents barged into homes in the middle of the night to detain and question Japanese-Americans for an alleged lack of loyalty to the United States.

“Model immigrant” became “permanent foreigner” became “enemy alien.” Every day, Americans and politicians alike accused Japanese-Americans of pledging their loyalty to the Japanese Emperor over the United States. Apparently, anything could compel the untrustworthy Japanese-Americans to turn traitor. No one raised the point that their seeming inability to “prove their loyalty” had less to do with their culpability and more to do with the audacity of the accusation itself. No one bothered to notice that they were just as shocked and enraged by the attack on their country, especially because the attackers hailed from their ancestral home. Three months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 into law: 120,000 American citizens were torn from everything they knew and shunted away to the desert wastes of the American West.

60 years later, Americans on their way to work stared at television screens in disbelief as passenger planes smashed into the World Trade Center. By the time President Bush solemnly addressed the nation, setting the stage to declare a “War on Terror” nine days later, 2,996 people had been killed. In the subsequent days, reports of hate crimes against Muslim-Americans and anyone else deemed “the enemy” skyrocketed—a trend which continues to this day. As in 1941, innocent Americans faced insults, arson, assault, and murder because they looked wrong. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American, wore a turban—stereotypically associated with Muslims—as his religion prescribed. He was brutally murdered five days after September 11th because his murderer mistook him for a Muslim.

Suddenly, the fact that Muslim-Americans are among the highest educated, most productive members of our society was irrelevant. The specter of the untrustworthy foreigner, unwilling and unable to assimilate into American society, raised its ugly head as it did in 1941. Muslim women wearing headscarves discovered that a piece of cloth made them a magnet for raised eyebrows and a surprisingly large number of random screenings. As The New York Times uncovered, NYPD officers were shown Islamophobic propaganda films as part of their training. The Associated Press recently reported on the NYPD’s illegal 24/7 surveillance program over entire neighborhoods, solely because they contained Muslim communities.

Who knew when Muslim-Americans would heed the call of jihad and fly a plane into a building? High-profile politicians—Republican Senator Rick Santorum comes to mind—have called on American Muslims to publically renounce terrorism and radical Islam, whatever that means. Until they had done so, they were not to be fully trusted. Why is this cohort of Americans guilty until proven innocent? Why is the bar for proving loyalty to the country higher for an ethnic and religious minority? These difficult questions have been avoided, the tragic results of which can be seen in Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

As a Japanese-American, I vividly remember first learning about Japanese internment following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hearing that thousands of Japanese-American families like my own were given 48 hours to abandon their careers, lives, and communities for shacks and horse stables was, to put it lightly, sobering. Encouraged by popular resentment towards Japanese people, the federal government stripped the civil rights of citizens in a wholesale, discriminatory manner. Even my 14-year old self had trouble reconciling this dark phase of our history with the American ideals taught in civics class of equality and opportunity for all. Today I feel the same disgust, the same sense of disheartenment as I witness Muslim-Americans besieged by institutionalized discrimination, normalized racism, and legal curtailment of their rights in the same way that hundreds of thousands of Americans faced after Pearl Harbor.

The truest test of a nation’s commitment to the rights of its citizens is when it is the hardest to abide by them. After Pearl Harbor, after 9/11, these rights were quickly dropped in favor of a cynical pragmatism. Hence, Japanese-American internment. Hence, Guantanamo Bay, where American and international civil protections are mere impediments to be tossed aside and legal recourse to torture (sorry, enhanced interrogation) is nowhere to be found. What does it mean to be fighting for freedom when back home, civilians are penned in a camp for four years, or when suspects can be indefinitely detained without due process? Answering these questions forces us to consider how honestly we stand by the ideals of the United States. The very reason that generations of immigrants, Japanese, Muslim, whatever, came to seek a better life in our country is at stake.

Do not argue that these are necessary evils in an uncertain era: just as in the entire four-year period of internment, not a single Japanese-American was charged with treason or conspiracy, administrative detention today has proved a flop. The ACLU reported that among the thousands of Muslim-Americans illegally detained in the months immediately after September 11th, not a single detainee was found to have a connection to the attacks or to terrorism in general. Contrary to what you might have seen in the newest Islamophobic blockbuster, Zero Dark Thirty, Senator John McCain has stated that information acquired from waterboarding and other forms of torture did not provide any intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden’s killing.

Systematic, institutionalized discrimination does not develop in a vacuum. Its legitimacy and apparent necessity are dependent on maintaining suspicion of the enemy “other”. Politicians, eager to capitalize on anti-Muslim sentiment to gain votes, feed this suspicion. Just as officials warned against the conniving Japs’ designs to sow disloyalty among Japanese-Americans, Representative Michelle Bachmann has declared that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the American government. Bombarded by the fear-mongering claims of government officials, armed with racist preconceptions about Muslims, it is not surprising to expect many Americans to respond, “I knew it all along,” rather than question the motivations of such alarmism. And so it comes as no surprise to me that in this culture of fear and distrust, a fellow student will flippantly crack a racist joke about Muslims but would never dare to make one at the expense of African-Americans or Jews, new NYPD recruits receive anti-Muslim indoctrination, and mosques such as the one in Joplin, MO, are burned to the ground.

Dazzled by great victories like the Civil Rights Act, or the election of a black president, many insist with smug confidence that institutionalized and politically-motivated racism is but a memory in the United States. In the case of Japanese-American internment, perhaps President Reagan’s 1988 apology to internees and their families, and the $1.6 billion in reparations payments proves that we have moved beyond those dark pages in America’s history.  Reagan admitted that “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” led to Japanese-Americans’ rights being trampled. Are we going to hear a future President of the United States apologizing to wronged Muslim-Americans in 2070? That is not progress. That is not American.

The purpose of an apology is that the offender truly feels remorse, and recognizes the harms done in such a way that similar offenses will never occur again. In launching the national crusade against Muslim-Americans, the American government has failed spectacularly at apologizing to Japanese-Americans, to generations of Americans like me; it is a vile insult to the memory of those who suffered. For the sake of all Americans, for the very foundations of what this country stands for, we cannot let the dark legacy of those bleak years be lost in vain. Lest we forget, the suffering of one generation of Americans is enough. Let us not add another.

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