Ethnic cleansing, “resegregation,” Jim Crow, the Yellow Peril, the “Protocols of Zion,” the Chinese Exclusion Act, “wet backs,” vigilantes against “replacement” and countless other labels, words, ideas and slurs I cannot bring myself to write or say all describe the same phenomenon: that in whatever from it takes, hate is the product of the “unexamined life” and parasitic spawn of fear.
It’s a universal and fundamental law that the frightened, angry and emotionally inept turn their self-loathing into blame, project their inner disgust onto others whom they persecute as the final victims of their terrors and inadequacies.
This was certainly true three months after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, undermined by waves of rage and horror, issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 that began the imprisonment of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry who lived on the West Coast. It would turn out to stain Roosevelt’s administration as a clear act of reflexive racism and racial profiling. The same was also true two weeks ago when a 21-year-old Georgia man admitted to murdering 8 people, six of them Asian massage therapists at Atlanta spas, claiming that he was trying to heal himself of his pornography-induced sex addiction. It was also true of the paranoid man who claimed he was being stalked by imaginary enemies and went on a rampage murdering ten people in a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket last week.
Whether it’s caused by racist fear or paranoid delusions, hate is the siren’s call of injustice, the coward’s pride and the bully’s sadistic sneer. Hate is the essence of most of what’s wrong and fated to fail in the world. And it becomes very personal to all of us who have friends or family members whose looks or associations happen to match one of the stereotyped targets of hate. That’s why I have such admiration for two Americans of Japanese descent, Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi, civil libertarians who defied Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 and refused to willingly submit to being imprisoned in “Japanese” internment camps because their creation was motivated by racism.
As we’ve come to understand, hate can happen to anyone in America, and anywhere else.
Hirabayashi, who was born in Seattle and was a sociology graduate of the University of Washington, registered for the draft in World War II as a conscientious objector. As a Quaker, and a man of profound moral courage, he defied internment and turned himself in to the FBI in 1942 and was eventually convicted of breaking curfew laws. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Hirabayashi was such an honorable man that when court officials couldn’t transport him to prison because of a wartime lack of funds, he hitchhiked to a federal facility in Arizona and turned himself in, serving his sentence doing hard labor in a camp outside of Tucson. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) eventually took his case and fought his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him, citing wartime crises, in 1943.
Hirabayashi served another year in prison when he refused induction into the military on the grounds that a form letter sent only to Japanese Americans volunteers, requiring that they renounce any allegiance to the emperor of Japan, was racist and discriminated against him. He was an American after all, he argued, and had no fealty to any foreign ruler.
After the war, Hirabayashi earned his Ph.D. and became a college professor. Finally, in 1987 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Hirabayashi’s convictions on new historical evidence that the government knew internment was useless and unnecessary and had lied about its efficacy to the U.S. Supreme Court.
American to his bones, Gordon Hirabayashi was quoted later in an interview as saying, “There was a time when I felt the Constitution failed me. But with the reversal in the courts and in public statements from the government, I feel that our country has proven that the Constitution is worth upholding.…(I)f you believe in something, if you think the Constitution is a good one, and if you think the Constitution protects you, you better make sure the Constitution is actively operating … in other words ‘constant vigilance.’ Otherwise, it’s a scrap of paper. We had the Constitution to protect us in 1942. It didn’t because the will of the people weren’t behind it.”
Fred Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, to Japanese parents who had migrated to the United States in 1905. As an American citizen and a civil libertarian, he also refused to submit to internment and went into hiding. He was eventually captured and sent to jail in San Francisco. He is quoted as saying, “people should have a fair trial and a chance to defend their loyalty at court in a democratic way, because in this situation, people were placed in imprisonment without any fair trial.” He and his family ended up being placed in a horse stall at the Central Utah War Relocation Center in Topaz, Utah where he worked as an unskilled laborer for $12 a month. The ACLU took Korematsu’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him also.
In 1983, a U.S. District Court judge vacated Korematsu’s conviction. He told the judge, “I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color.” Many years later, Korematsu used his reputation and risked his safety after 9/11 by filing amicus briefs in cases of people of Middle-Eastern descent being held too long without a trial, in his judgment, at Guantanamo Bay. Three years before, President Clinton had awarded him the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom
With the murdering of Asian women in Atlanta recently, the whole terrible and sordid history of violent racism against Asian people in our country has started to be revealed and remembered once again — from 19th century massacres of Chinese people in Los Angeles and Wyoming, the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, which were not repealed for 60 years, to Korean shopkeepers caught up in the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and the KKK terrorizing Vietnamese shrimp fishermen off the Texas coast after the Vietnam War.
Racism and misogyny are curses plaguing the well-being of anyone trying to live a peaceful, productive and happy life in America. But maybe many people who wished to believe that the hatred of bigotry only happens to “others” are finally beginning to realize again that virtually all of us are either directly hated and stereotyped ourselves or are related to, or love, people who suffer that abuse. No one is safe from the Poison Rule. And we all, at some time in our lives, will be called upon to actively oppose it like Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi did not so long ago.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Photo by Dorthea Lange of children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.)
Such an eloquent powerful column, V. B. Thank you again and again for each week putting into words the lessons our history teaches us as it unfolds.
This is a powerful column. I did not know the names of either of these two men. I remember walking through the FDR memorial in Washington, probably during the second Bush administration, and admiring the quotations, wishing we had such a powerful leader again. It is good to be reminded that even leaders we admire had failings and that it is easy to be influenced by public pressure and opinion to make unethical decisions.
Some of your finest work, old son!