Critical Race critics object to teaching about Japanese-American internment during World War II

The Thursday Thoughts!

A day after the surprise Japanese military attack on the Pearl Harbor Naval Station in Hawaii that left thousands of American service members dead, hundreds of planes destroyed, and the crux of the U.S. Pacific Fleet burned and sunk into the murky and oily depths, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress and began his most famous speech by saying, "Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

While FDR laid out a list of grievances that supported his presidential call for war against Japan (soon followed by declarations of war against Japan's Axis allies in Germany and Italy), what he did not tell Congress—or the American people—was that on the evening of December 7th, the Federal Bureau of Investigations rounded up over 1,200 Japanese American citizens in what would eventually become a massive incarceration effort that remains yet another deplorable event in America's tortured racial history. 

Japanese American citizens at an internment camp in the Pacific Northwest during World War II

Yesterday, March 16th, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (406-16) to pass a bill sponsored by Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Ca) to promote public education about the internment of Japanese American citizens during the Second World War.

Kudos, Congress, on a measure that's long overdue!

But in case you were wondering, the 16 no votes were cast by Republicans, including leaders of the mental midget caucus like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Al.), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). These ones reticence to support the accurate teaching of American history comes as little surprise as each is a leading Critical Race Theory critic—and each has gone on record to support the rancor from the right that argues that an accurate teaching of history insults white people. 

Republicans Lauren Boebert (left) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene are two of the loudest Critical Race Theory critics in Congress.

Implicit within their racist demands to protect modern whites from learning all about what their white forebears did to subjugate, harass, and kill people of color is the fact that those people of color who suffered—and their descendants—don't really matter. Or, that in "making America great again," that such totally ignores that for people of color, things were never great—but nightmarish!

As a lover of World War II era history, I have often closed my eyes and tried to imagine how Japanese American citizens must have felt after the Pearl Harbor attack, as FBI and local law enforcement began rounding them up at gun point and placing them into holding cells—while concentration camps were being built far away from the homes that they owned in Hawaii, California, and up the Pacific Coast?

I have often wondered whether any of FDR's legal advisers ever pounded the table after he signed Executive Order 9066, the piece of parchment that authorized these shameful roundups, and demanded that the president rescind an order that violated these citizens' rights to equal protection per the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution?

I have often wondered whether the governors of states where over 100,000 Japanese American citizens were "relocated," states like Montana, New Mexico, the Dakotas, and Arizona, ever realized their shame in insisting that these citizens be locked behind razor sharp barbed wire due to racist fears that local white citizens would not approve of their presence? 

I have often wondered what it must have felt like to be a Japanese American man or woman who had worked hard to build a life for themselves and their family, only to be removed from their single family home to a communal dwelling with cots lined up in rows like prisons—replete with mass public showers and toilets that lacked any semblance of privacy and served as cauldrons for diseases? Similarly, I have often wondered what it must have felt like to be a Japanese American child who was forced to learn and play behind barbed wire and wonder why their freedom to live and explore was being usurped by armed guards who were ready to end their little lives without a second thought?

What's worse is that I have often wondered, and am wondering this very morning, whether FDR, or his Congress, cared even in the least that there were not only millions of German and Italian American citizens living in America who were NOT rounded up like Japanese American citizens and placed into concentration camps, but that there were white Nazi sympathizers in America who were free to do as they pleased—including a few famous ones like aviator Charles Lindbergh and Henry T. Ford (of the Ford Motor Company) who are still hailed as American heroes to this very day!

When I ponder these thoughts, I am left to conclude that America's insouciance about its deplorable record on race MUST be taught so that the present and future ages can at least try to avoid the same mistakes of the past!

The historian in me also understands that while Congress issued an apology to Japanese Internment Camp survivors in 1988—and a $20,000 check to about 80,000 of those who remained—that no apology or paltry sum of money could ever assuage the losses in property and dignity that Japanese American citizens experienced at the hands of their own American government during World War II. A government that, since its inception in 1787, was directly responsible for the enslavement, rape, murder of—and discrimination against—its Black citizens; the forcible and murderous removal of Native Americans from their ancient lands, or, the legislated discrimination against Chinese and Japanese legal immigrants and citizens. Teaching these true stories, and acknowledging all of America's past racial wrongs, are but the first steps in working to make America "right" for its current and future citizens.  

Thank you for subscribing to the Hobbservation Point—have a great Thursday!