The Japanese American Story Should Make You A Patriot

The Japanese American tragedy reminds us of the wisdom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and our duty to uphold it.

Dorothea Lange. Residents of Japanese ancestry appear for registration prior to evacuation. Evacuees will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration. San Francisco, California, 1942. https://www.archives.gov/

My dear correspondent,

I wish you well since our last exchange of letters. I take it that you have been anticipating the story of my family’s incarceration.

To begin, I’ll share with you some words from California’s largest newspaper.

The Los Angeles Times, presupposing collective guilt over American citizens according to race, published this allegory:

A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.

This popular sentiment — to judge my adolescent American-born grandmother as a Japanese spy — grew at the peril of her family after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This hysteria, coupled with existing alien land laws and anti-interracial marriage laws, represented a democracy exhausting all of its precautions. Our founders had forewarned of such tyranny of the majority.

In the face of these democratic impulses, our Constitution failed to uphold its oath of protecting minority rights.