CORRECTION
Following is a clarification from “The Legacy Continues” story that appeared in the June 23-July 1, 2021, issue. Author’s Note: The statement, “On May 6, 1942, Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt declared Portland as the first major city on the West Coast to be “Jap free,” first appeared in author Soji Kashiwagi’s Nichi Bei Weekly article titled, “Japanese American Museum of Oregon says ‘Tadaima.’” Credit goes to Kashiwagi for sourcing the quote.
David Inoue
It seems the greatest threat to our country right now is no longer Covid, it’s not the Jan. 6 insurgency at the Capitol, nor is it climate change. The greatest threat to the American way is critical race theory. And yet, it seems too few people can actually define critical race theory. It does not assert that we need to be ashamed of who we are as a nation or that white people need to be ashamed of being white.
Critical race theory is vitally important and core to what JACL has always done as an organization: shed light on how racism does impact policy and, as a result, people.
What we seek to do when we apply the concept of critical race theory is to see how racism often overtly discriminates, but also sometimes does so because of systemic prejudice. For JACL, this is core to understanding why it was possible to strip 120,000 people of their civil and human rights during World War II.
It allows us to look at how the racism today against Asian Americans is rooted in the same xenophobia against Japanese Americans in the early 20th century that also came from the racism of the Chinese exclusion act.
It encourages us to look at the dynamics of how Japanese Americans achieved redress over 30 years ago, yet Black reparations for the long-ago injustice of slavery remains unachieved.
Just as anti-Asian hate persists today, the shackles of slavery, when looked at through the lens of critical race theory, were never really eradicated with the end of the Civil War or with the newly celebrated Juneteenth, but were reformed into laws and policies with the open intent of discriminating against Blacks up through their eradication in the 1960s.
Looking at our history through this lens also requires us to look at JACL’s own history. As we look at the story of the civil rights movement, how did JACL’s promotion of the successes of our own community feed into the development of the model minority myth?
How did our actions as an organization lead to the further segregation of nearly 19,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into the Tule Lake Segregation Center? Just as we decry the historic unjust mass incarceration of all Japanese Americans, under the false pretense of national security, there was no genuine assessment of loyalty in the segregation of Tule Lake prisoners that led to their further separation and intense terms of incarceration.
Today, we advocate for the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program as a means of supporting the interpretation of our incarceration story on our terms. We promote for the use of terms such as U.S. citizens rather than nonaliens to eliminate the euphemisms the government used to hide the racist intent of its policies.
We must continue to encourage the teaching of Japanese American history in schools so that children continue to learn about the imperfections of our American history but also the capacity of our country to approve redress and seek to correct past injustices.
This is what critical race theory is really about — seeing history through a different lens, which does not whitewash the harms that our government has inflicted upon groups of people.
If any of these topics sound familiar, it is because many of them are the subject of plenary and workshop sessions at the upcoming JACL National Convention, “Communities Forged Under Fire,” which will be held virtually July 15-18. We hope you will join us in extending this critical look at our own history for better and worse.
The JACL National Convention would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. Diamond level sponsors this year are AT&T and State Farm. Additional sponsors are Comcast, MGM Resorts International, Verizon, AARP, Google, the Motion Picture Association and the JACL Credit Union.
David Inoue is executive director of the JACL. He is based in the organization’s Washington, D.C., office.
