Week 2 - Anneka Christie A02

My focus was drawn to this rather lengthy quote from “Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again.” 

During World War II,over 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were American citizens, were rounded up and sent to internment camps under the premise of military necessity.  Despite this disgraceful blemish on American history, it was not until 1980 that the United States government finally issued an officialapology.

Whenever the majority has perceived that Asians have done "'too well' [it] has resulted historically in political disenfranchisement and exclusionary laws in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, and in 'English-only' initiatives and more stringent curbs on immigration and foreign capital investment today.” 

The first paragraph touches upon the mistreatment of hundreds of thousands Japanese Americans and it stood out to me as a half Japanese young woman. My immediate family was in the US, they were never placed in internment camps because they lived in Hawaii (simply because Hawaii had a large Japanese population). However, I have several family friends who were born in the Japanese internment camp in California, Manzanar Internment Camp. Japanese Americans were placed in these camps out of fear and to completely eliminate “the threat” these Americans posed to America. It hits close to home and the fact that it has been a part of American culture that is often avoided makes it even more painful.

The last sentence agrees with the lesson in class on Thursday about how race is a social construct and that although how a certain race is seen changes, it is due to the political culture changing, not the specific race. For instance, the Japanese were not always seen as the enemy but the wartime politics sparked irrational fear of these people who did nothing wrong. They did not all of the sudden become Japanese but how the Japanese people were perceived changed. Not all examples are this drastic but I realize that it is an apparent trend for many peoples, not even just Asian Americans.

References:

Allred, N.C. January 2007. Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again. Asian American Law Journal. Pg. 79.