It was seventy years ago today that America sent Japanese Americans to our own concentration camps.

[dynasaw]

31. Let's Get This Straight

those interned were Americans. They happened to have yellow skins.

The redress movement was part of the civil rights movement that began in the 60's- 70's and it involved a generation of Asian Americans who recognized the acts of racism against people of Asian descent which paralleled the injustices against African American, Latinos and Native Americans. This happened in an environment fired by racist hysteria against a longtime historical backdrop of anti-Asian sentiments--yellow perilism was very much the order of the day. People of Chinese or other Asian descent went about in fear of being mistaken for being of Japanese descent.

These were concentration camps period. They were located in the most in the most inhospitable areas of the nation, enclosed with barb wire with watch towers, search lights, guard dogs and armed guards with orders to shoot to kill anyone attempting to escape. In some camps, the guards were themselves prisoners (white) suspected of being Nazis. Some camps like those in Idaho used the internees as farm labor. Groups of them were taken, under armed guard to work the beet fields.

Americans tend to think of concentration camps only in regard to the Nazis, because with their pitiful ignorance of world history, those are the only ones they know about. Most don't even realize that there were concentration camps all over Asia and Manchuria during World War II where those interned suffered the horrors that equaled the situation in Europe.

For many Japanese Americans, the Bush-fanned hysteria after 9/11 and the suspicions cast on any one who looked middle eastern evoked memories of what took place during World War II.

Neither FDR nor the ACLU come out looking very good where this page in history is concerned.