"Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin...Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II...Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year...The brief counters that the ruling “overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a ‘fundamental injustice’ warranting an apology and the payment of reparations.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/nyregion/03detain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
this story is so much American history, and the repeated narratives that occur when we learn about history as though it doesn't say anything about the present (or fail to learn history at all - I am confident that there are many students who never learn about the Japanese Internment Camps, or who are only taught in the context of seeing "how far we have come").
Also this - "Since the law also forbade Japanese immigration after 1924, the United States had been home to all of them for at least 17 years on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor." - was a detail I was never taught in what I think was an above-average education on Japanese Internment Camps. (I attended an Elementary School named after a man who hid people on his farm during the 1940s so they wouldn't be forced to go to the camps)
(Credit to CT)
Related: "Is the next civil rights leader Asian-American?"
No comments:
Post a Comment