“We Cannot Remember a Day of Infamy While Forgetting its Racist Aftermath”
“The bombing of Pearl Harbour was not only a horrific attack that killed both American military personnel and civilians, but it sparked an immediate and aggressive racial fear and intolerance for America’s Japanese community. Japanese American families, some who could claim generations of living as citizens on American soil, suddenly found themselves treated with suspicion and hatred, suspected to be foreign spies for no other reason than their shared skin colour with America’s declared enemies. Politicians who had already staked their careers on a platform of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant policies decades earlier declared vindication. The US Government issued official propaganda posters that likened Japanese people to terrifying yellow-skinned monsters. Historians document that American soldiers viewed Japanese enemy combatants as “animals”.
The rising crescendo of American xenophobia and anti-Japanese bigotry culminated in the forcible incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese American citizens and Japanese nationals. Those incarcerees lived under military gunpoint behind barbed wire fences for years before they were finally released, and given little more than a bus ticket in exchange for their freedom.”
Some days, it is hard to feel included in Americanness as a non-white person.
This is making me think about the purpose of “American History” curricula, and the stories that are told in school about what this country is and what it has come from and what that means. Like. whose story is it? In many ways, we are taught the experiences of white people in this country and told that this leads us to a sufficient understanding. If students learn about the internment camps at all, they learn about them from an external perspective that is deeply contextualized by the (white) political environment and (white) wartime culture.
But imagine if the chapter about Pearl Harbor was communicated from the perspective of Americans of Japanese descent. What would it do to students’ perceptions of Americanness to centralize these narratives? What would it mean to have an understanding of American history that didn’t protagonize white people and occasionally dot in their interactions with people of color?
Because right now, this era, I really hope this is recorded in the context of American people of color facing complex social and political realities. Instead of how white people and white social structures reacted to world events and “racial activism”.
