Japanese Day of Remembrance
Yesterday was Japanese Day of Remembrance, the day FDR signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, thereby incarcerating 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, the majority being American. Innocent until proven guilty does not apply, apparently, when non-white foreign attackers look like you. Families who had established lives and businesses were uprooted. Families that have been in the United States already for a few generations were sent to live in 10 concentration camps scattered throughout the west/mountain-west (one was located in Topaz, Utah, the state in which I live).
I reflect as a Chinese American today when assault on Asians, both American and immigrant, is on the rise. I was at the Museum of Chinese in America in NYC a few years ago where I learned of the propaganda that came out during that time to help white Americans differentiate between the Chinese and the Japanese, from the exact shade of yellow in our skin to the slant of our eyes. The message: This is how you can tell the “good ones” from the “bad ones”, planting the roots of the model minority myth to pit the “good races” against the “bad” ones.
And yet, less than a century before Ordinance 9066, the Page Act banned Chinese women from immigrating to the United States, expanding a few years later into the Chinese Exclusion Act banning all Chinese people from immigrating, the only U.S. law ever implemented that restricted all members of a specific ethnic or national group. We were the “bad ones”.
