Page 2 of 2 INTERVIEW A Japanese, born in the US of
A
an alternative
reality - one in which my body resembles that of
the rest of the population but my mind does not -
whereas the reverse is true for me here in
America.
EM: Do you find
that many Americans have little knowledge of
Japanese internment in the United States during
the 1940s? Are you afraid of historical erasure or
amnesia?
DM: I would say
[that] when I speak on college campuses, only
about 50% or less of my
audiences - which are self-selecting - know about
the internment camps.
The historical
amnesia related to the camps fits into a familiar
and troubling pattern in the way our culture
depicts our history. We are not very inclined to
remember the disturbing aspects of our past,
particularly when it comes to race. Only a few
people know, for instance, that Dillon Myers, who
headed the Wartime Relocation Authority, went on
after the war to head the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, a connection native Americans might find
both expected and revealing.
One key
aspect of the internment was the suspension of the
writ of habeas corpus. Japanese-Americans
were not given a trial in which they could prove
their innocence. We are now seeing similar
suspensions or violations of civil liberties today
with regard to Muslim Americans. If people were
more cognizant of what happened to the
Japanese-Americans, then people might be more
reluctant to suspend civil liberties when dealing
with the current threats facing our country. They
might think twice and come to conclusion that we
should avoid making the same mistakes we have made
in the past.
Of course, despite the
government's official apologies to
Japanese-Americans during the [Ronald] Reagan
presidency, there are now conservatives who have
tried to argue that the internment camps were
justified. But my sense is, if the internment
camps and the experience of Japanese-Americans
were common knowledge, such arguments would be
exposed as fraudulent and ignorant and as an
attempt to erase or justify a great racial
injustice.
I should make clear here that I
am not saying that the threat posed by the
Japanese-American population in 1942 is the exact
same phenomenon as the threat posed by possible
terrorist activity today. These two cases are
obviously different. But I do feel that the
reluctance to grant non-whites the same civil
liberties as whites is still present in American
society, and it continues in part because we don't
know our history.
EM: Could
you discuss the cultural implications behind your
poem "Minneapolis Public" in your book Angels
for the Burning [Boa Editions, 2004]? What
does it say about the future of race relations in
the United States?
DM: The
poem plays on the image of Minnesota as Garrison
Keillor's "Land of Lake Wobegon" - ie, white. Even
Chris Rock remarks in his comedy routine,
"Minnesota? The only two black people there are
Prince and Kirby Puckett." Yet currently there are
150 first languages in the Minneapolis school
system and more than two-thirds of the students
there are of color. My poem deals with the school
my kids attend. The school has no majority and
contains not just black and white kids but kids
from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds -
Somalis, Tibetans, Bosnians, Mexicans, native
Americans - and of course biracial kids like my
own, who are half Japanese-American, three-eighths
WASP [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant] and one-eighth
Austro-Hungarian Jewish.
In other cities,
these various racial and ethnic groups might be
more segregated geographically. In my kids'
school, this diverse population has grown up with
each other; many have known each other since
kindergarten. As a result, there's more
interactions between races and ethnicities both
inside and outside the school. They go to dances
and parties together; they play basketball with
each other; they date across races and
ethnicities.
This is the future of
America. It is part of what makes this country so
creative and innovative; it is what makes our
culture - as opposed to our foreign policy - so
intriguing to the rest of the world.
Of
course there are still many problems to be
overcome. In high school, as the kids get older,
there tends to be more racial separation. The
students of color as a whole tend to do less well
academically than their white counterparts. There
are ironical tensions between native blacks and
immigrants from Africa. My daughter's high-school
yearbook this year contained memorials to two
students killed in gang violence.
Meanwhile, conservatives rail against
illegal immigration and anything that might be
offered their children, in the process forgetting
our history of anti-immigrant movements.
(Recently, I was asked to do an article about
Minnesota for a book similar to one The Nation
published over 75 years ago, where Sinclair Lewis
observed the presence of those strange new
immigrants, the Swedes.)
Still, the
potential for a new future is there. Whether we as
a society will pay enough attention to the
education and needs of our increasingly diverse
population of young people remains to be seen.
EM: Is it fair to compare a
Muslim in today's military who might not want to
go to war against Muslims with the conflicts faced
by Japanese-Americans during World War II?
DM: Such comparisons can be
made. Whether they are fair or not depends upon
the spirit in which they are made.
During
World War II, there were a small number of
Japanese-Americans who refused to enter the armed
services. Some of these, most often kibei
who had been educated in Japan, did not want to
fight against Japan. But many of these, called
"No-No Boys" for their answers on a loyalty oath
given by the US government, saw their answers as
an act of civil resistance. They were protesting
the government's actions toward the
Japanese-American community. (The protagonist of
my forthcoming novel, Famous Suicides of the
Japanese Empire, is the son of one of these
men.)
On the other hand, those
Japanese-Americans who agreed to serve in the
armed forces wanted to demonstrate their loyalty
to America. Indeed, the division of
Japanese-American soldiers, the 442nd, was the
most decorated in Europe, and American generals
even fought over making this division part of
their forces. Japanese-American translators were
instrumental to the success of the US armed forces
in the Pacific theater and the occupation of Japan
after the war.
Personally, I feel that the
current case of Lieutenant Ehren K Watada, who
refused to go to Iraq because he believes it is an
illegal and unjust war, ought to be seen against
the backdrop of this history. His position as a
soldier and his actions of civil protest reflect
the legacy both of the 442nd and of the No-No
Boys.
E Ethelbert Miller is an
award-winning poet, the director of the African
American Resource Center at Howard University, and
the board chairman of the Institute for Policy
Studies. His interviews are a regular feature of
Fiesta.
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