After U.S. entered World War II, a lot of black people moved into the city and worked in the defence industry side by side with the whites. Since Japanese people have been moved to camps by the government, black workers replaced them. The blacks paid very little or no attention to the Japanese as they were too focused on advancing themselves.
Most whites were discriminating these people because they were a person called a “White supremacist”. In both time periods, the Japanese/others and the Blacks were denied respect and civil rights because of something they can't help. The Japanese, although they assimilated the Americans culture, they were locked up and held in incarceration camps. In the same way that blacks were denied respect and rights that the whites had even though they to grew up in America. The women were even more at a disadvantage because they were banned from jobs and school so they would stay at home and tend to the family. Both the Japanese and the Blacks both were disenfranchised by being denied respect but also for different reasons.
The police shootings are stories about white police officers hurting black people and punishing them unjustly just because their skin color. Although there are many cases in which black people have committed crimes, many believe that the white police officers are the problem and black people are the victim. Because of these stories and propaganda, many people have been influenced into being more aggressive towards the police force in order to stop racism. Despite the cause they stand for, these people are often protesting against the wrong enemy. Similarly, the Japanese people in the novel were ridiculed for the bombing of Pearl Harbor that they did not cause. The American government decided the best way to stop this was to send the Japanese people to internment camps because the bombing of Pearl Harbor happened to be done by people of the same
Before WORLD WAR I, military service represented a source of black pride. Black educators, clergymen, and the press frequently referred to Negro heroes of America’s past wars. After the Civil War, the U.S, Army maintained four regular Negro regiments –the 9th and 10th Calvary and the 24th and 25th Infantry. These units included veterans of the civil war and the frontier Indian fighting regiments. Retired sergeants often became respected, conservative leaders in their communities. This history set a foundation for black support and involvement in America’s future wars.
A very interesting thing is a breakdown of the types of businesses persons of Japanese ancestry who were involved in the city of Seattle and in different cities along the West Coast. As Japanese immigrants came to the United States, they came to the West Coast because of the economic success awaiting there. They ran
They were treated differently. Many could not get a good job and if they did they were payed less. Any african americans moved to the city to get a job but never could. This not only was bad for the economy but it was bad for the city. The city was filled with the homeless. The word ghetto originated from this time because of the dirty streets filled with the homeless. There were many protest so president Lyndon B. Johnson passed the policy known as the war on poverty. The government started more job training and hired more black people on purpose to ease racial tension. From there on African Americans found many jobs with a decent wage to hold their own. Many of these changes were thanks to the many who stood day and night to protest for their rights as an American
Firstly, the Japanese-Americans relocation caused racism and hysteria. For example, in paragraph 4 it states “Our unjust imprisonment was the result of two closely related emotions, racism and hysteria,” says Edison Tomimaro Uno. This evidence supports my claim because after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans felt more racial hatred than any other race. The attack on Pearl Harbor generated this mass hysteria that put Japanese Americans in having to go to internment
At the time there was a large amount of racial tension going on. In 1943 many people came north in hope of escaping prejudice in the south. All they found were the exact same situations they thought they were escaping from, if not worse. Though prejudice wasn't directly only towards negroes, they were the ones who seemed to have it worst. While everyone was allowed to live in most places, black people were only allowed to live in the Brewster projects. The homes weren't all that great. Many lived in homes without indoor plumbing, yet they paid rent two to three times higher than families in white districts (Baulch and Zacharias 2). Black people were treated differently by police and weren't able to go to many places because negroes weren't allowed to be in many places. As the years went by things got worse, people from other countries began to take it upon themselves to start trouble against blacks as the Polish people did. Situations began to get worse at work places also as many workers began to protest working with black people or even using the same facilities as a black person. Black people began to form their own organizations such as the Black Legion.
For many African Americans, the war offered an opportunity to get out of the cycle of crushing rural poverty. Black joined the military in large numbers, escaping a decade of Depression and tenant farming in the South and Midwest. Yet, like the rest of America in the 1940s, the armed forces were segregated. The Army accepted black enlistees but created separate black infantry regiments and assigned white commanders to them. Of the more than 2.5 million African Americans who registered for the draft in WWII, about 900,000 served in the Army. But about only 50,000 African Americans were allowed to serve in combat.
During World War One, as America continued to grow in numbers, much of the new American population was made up of immigrants. America was still working on the path to grant freedom to all who considered the United States their home. Many immigrants primarily came to America in search of true freedom and to gain opportunities that they otherwise could not have access to in their homeland. World War One; however, made it extremely difficult for some immigrant Americans and African Americans to receive the true freedom that they came in search for. Not only did WWI make it difficult for certain groups to live in America, it also gave rise to contradictions between the language of freedom and the reality of restrictions made on individual freedoms. Immigrants were being treated poorly and protecting the U.S. from the enemy was becoming more important than providing all Americans with the individual freedoms that they had come to the U.S. in search for. On top of that anti-immigration movements were intensifying. The freedom the United States had promised to many, was either being limited or simply not being given.
Also, even though the Japanese are a main part of the story, they were portrayed as isolated and reclusive. They were very cold to other people, a result of a mindset of superiority. As they only associated with others of their race, they were untrusting and distant from others. Kabuo didn’t even trust the lawyer who was to keep him out of prison. As the book switches time frames, there were subtle or evident signs of challenges of racial tension everywhere. You could see how this theme had effects on everything in a slightly different manner, depending on the situation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new na-tion, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” a quote by America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, directly recalling how equality was the catalyst for the conception of America. It’s a universal right that should be known by all, but it was barely an option in our country for the African American faction almost a century ago. Chained, chastised and condemned, the African American had to surpass through radical odds to get to a mediocre amount of respect. When World War I first began, many citizens of America saw it as a seemingly distant European conflict that they couldn’t be bothered with.
Racism had been escalating in the United States since the 19th century. Anxiety between migrant workers and the white workers had been excessive for years as many bosses forced them to compete for jobs and land. By 1924, the U.S. government prohibited nearly all immigration from Japan. Numerous states banned nuptials between white people and people of Asian ancestry. The United States became full of fear and hatred after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Anxiety of more attacks by the Japanese on their cities, homes, and businesses was especially present along the Pacific coast of the United States. However, this event did not give the government or the whites the right to discriminate and violate the rights of loyal hard working Japanese Americans.
John Dower's War Without Mercy talks about the racial conflict in War World II towards the Japanese and how it affected the war and the reconstruction of the Pacific. “The Japanese were more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor. On this, there was no dispute among contemporary observers. They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart -- and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the 'good German' in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies." (8) Mostly he focused on the American atrocities than the Japanese atrocities during the Pacific war.
African Americans were discriminated against even though they were serving their country. Like we discussed in class, some African Americans were lynched in public while dressed in their military uniform. Many were severely beaten almost to death. They were treated with no respect. As I looked through my notes I found that African Americans were grouped together in combat and often were given missions that could have been considered suicidal. Although the blacks were treated poorly, it seems that the Japanese Americans got the raw end of the deal during the war.
After the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, life in the U.S. had changed. It was the first time in a long time that America was attacked on its homeland. This national security threat was a big shock to the people. The Japanese had to suffer the consequences of their attack. Just as the Germans developed concentration camps for the Jewish during World War II, the Americans set up "relocation" programs better known as internment camps to keep all the Japanese. The reason the Japanese were moved into these camps was because they were suspected of being spies. They were forced to live there for up to four years and were not able to continue with their own lives as they were before while they were living in these camps.