not-your-cute-little-asian-girl:

The language that we use to talk about Japanese American Internment is so unacceptable to me. Read any article/textbook, and it makes it all sound so minor. The specific wording is so interesting: it’s ‘evacuation,’ not ‘forced imprisonment.’ It’s ‘Japanese,’ not ‘Japanese American,’ bc it’s so much easier to erase history and forget that the majority of these people had never even been to Japan and were born US citizens (not that it would have been justified even if they weren’t, but this was just used as another tool to dehumanize and distance us). We learn they were given ‘accommodations’ in camps, but not how they were subject to extreme temperatures with inadequate protection in stables and roofless stalls filled with manure, or how people were shot on the spot if they were even suspected of trying to escape, or for disobeying orders. Some were shot just so the military guards could show their control. We learn that the JAs were eventually freed and allowed to return to society, but not how anti-Japanese sentiment was so strong that most could not return to where they had lived before, and that many returned to find any property and belongings had been looted or even steamrolled by the government. Those who returned were beaten or even lynched. We don’t learn about home raids, or asset freezing, or deaths as a result of illness from communal living an no health care.
My history teacher even tried to tell us EO9066 was issued for THE SAFETY of the Japanese Americans, as they’d have been lynched by the public otherwise. Roosevelt himself even said this! In school we barely learn anything at all about internment, even though I live in an area w a high concentration of JAs.
Also notice how little detail we receive about camps in school. Did you know, at the time that this was happening, the camps were called concentration camps by the government? And that people were sent by the trainload in cattle cars? Sound familiar? Of course, I don’t mean to compare the histories of Jewish Germans and JAs, but this country has made a very conscious effort to hide and erase so much history of the camps because of associations that might be made, so we can more easily brush it off as merely a small blemish in history, barely worth mentioning.
Probably the most enraging thing to me, though, is that the JAs who were interned are routinely talked about as if they just calmly and submissively, docilely, ACCEPTED what was happening to them, and that they were peaceful and ~zen~ about the whole thing once in the camps. Read the true accounts of internees and you’ll discover the truth: people were enraged. People fought. Round-ups could turn violent. Internment was not calmly accepted and quietly endured. To quote a poem from Poston camp, “We’re trapped like rats in a wired cage/To fret and fume with impotent rage.”
So of course you get all these people suggesting we need something like registration and  internment camps for Muslim Americans and Syrian refugees today. No one’s learned from history because no one was really taught it in the first place. And that is fucking unacceptable.

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