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The lesson of internment is relevant today

Thu., Feb. 23, 2017

The following editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, declaring parts of the United States to be military zones from which particular groups of people could be “excluded” for security reasons. The order set the stage for the relocation and internment, beginning the following month, of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens living on the West Coast.

To our lasting shame, here’s what the Los Angeles Times editorial page had to say about the matter at the time:

“This is war. And in wartime, the preservation of the nation becomes the first duty. Everything must be subordinated to that. Every necessary precaution must be taken to insure reasonable safety from spies and saboteurs so that our armed forces can function adequately and our industrial machinery may continue to work free from peril.”

And this, a year or so later, when some people were calling for the release of those who had been interned:

“As a race, the Japanese have made for themselves a record for conscienceless treachery unsurpassed in history. Whatever small theoretical advantages there might be in releasing those under restraint in this country would be enormously outweighed by the risks involved.”

That was another time, and another Times. This newspaper has long since reversed itself on the subject. Not only was some of our reasoning explicitly racist, but in our desperate attempts to sound rational – by supposedly balancing the twin imperatives of security and liberty in the midst of World War II – we exaggerated the severity of the threat while failing to acknowledge the significance of revoking the most fundamental rights of American citizens based solely on their ancestry.

In the 1980s, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found there had been no military justification for the exclusion and noted that no Japanese Americans had been convicted of spying or sabotage. The incarceration was a “grave injustice,” the congressional commission concluded. Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 Supreme Court decision that found Executive Order 9066 to be constitutional, has never been officially overturned, but it is widely viewed as odious and discredited, and in 1988, President Clinton awarded its plaintiff, Fred Korematsu, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

For Americans more generally, the mistreatment of innocent Japanese people and Japanese Americans (and thousands of Germans and Italians as well) during the war is particularly relevant as a new administration in Washington stokes fears of a surge in nationalism and xenophobia.

The simplest and clearest lesson from the exclusion and internment is that it is wrong to view entire populations as monoliths and attribute to all members of a group – be they Japanese or Muslims or Mexicans or Iranians or even Americans – the characteristics of a few. This is at the heart of what it means to not be prejudiced.