"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."

http://reappropriate.co/2015/12/we-cannot-remember-a-day-of-infamy-while-forgetting-its-racist-aftermath/

Some days, it is hard to feel included in Americanness. It is so important that we are looking at the histories of violent prejudice in America, and loudly and visibly pointing out the way this is still part of the status quo.

FB: "Our yearly remembrance of Pearl Harbour should not just be a day of patriotism. We should look deeper into this Day of Infamy and its aftermath, and remind ourselves of how this horrific attack became our justification for an indefensible mistreatment of our neighbours and other fellow humans. We should solemnly remember not only the lives lost in Pearl Harbour, but also how our nation’s unchecked xenophobia grew slowly like a cancer into the rationalization of increasingly unthinkable acts."