Subject: JAs and Arab Americans
I don't know whether you caught news of this incident?
Apparently two young Saudi Arabian men on an airliner were detained
for six hours, grilled by police and the FBI, and a runway was cleared
for two hours, all because the men asked strange questions about the
flight. While I'll admit the questions were unusual, it is obvious,
given the recent EgyptAir disaster, that these men wouldn't have been
regarded as "suspicious" if they didn't look so conspicuously "Arab."
They were understandably upset,
and now various civil rights organizations are getting involved.
An organization of Arab Americans is urging their community to boycott
that airline.
I mention this at all on this list only because, in 1991, when a
"Desert Storm" war was imminent, then-President George Bush and the
feds purchased barracks somewhere in Louisiana, anticipating the
possible "need" to intern Arabs and Arab Americans. The Arab American
community has become the convenient target of much racist hostility today.
Several historians are now publishing articles on the extent and depth
of protest and support for JAs voiced in WW II by non-Japanese groups
-- in September 1999, Robert Shaffer won a major award for an article
that makes a "compelling" claim that non-J groups strongly protested
internment and strongly supported JAs. Of course this doesn't seem too
compelling and persuasive to us. But let's hope that, if an accumulation of
international incidents leads to internment of Arab Americans, our
community will be in the front ranks of protesters.
Subject: JAs and Arab Americans
> But let's hope that, if an accumulation of international incidents
> leads to internment of Arab Americans, our community will be in
> the front ranks of protesters.
Amen. The Nikkei had lots of wartime and postwar EuroAmerican allies
among the Quakers and other religious groups. The passion of their
commitment running resettlement hostels, etc. is moving. Some very
decidated people really put their lives on the line. Others were
questionable, like the bi-lingual Protestant missionaries who visited
the camps and also did propangda broadcasts aimed at Japan audiences,
"Tojo, your name will live in infamy..."
Their efforts were too little and too late to save the Nikkei from
incarceration, and were hampered by trying to deal with McCloy's
bureacracy. However, I fear that many Nikkei have let their unhealed
wounds and fear engrave upon their hearts the feeling that you "can't
trust anybody but Nikkei". It may be one of the things stops many
people from seeing how important it is for Nikkei to be good allies
to Arab Americans and other potential targets.
It may also somewhat explain why we have not been leaders in helping the
Vietnamese American story become mre visible. Many parallels. I'm sure most
Southeast Asian kids have been attacked in school for being "gooks" just as
many of us were for being "Japs". They are living in the same kind of
skid-row ghettso as post-war JAs. Many of the men, like the MIS, had the
experience of doing military service on the proUS side while looking like
the enemy.
But there is this silence from most JAs, it almost as if to say,
"They weren't there for us, so why should we stick or necks out for anybody else?"
But some people were there for us. And they helped get us out of camp faster, got us
into colleges, etc, etc. Let's not discount that. It could have been much
worse, as the Jews can attest.
Subject: JAs and Arab Americans
> The Nikkei had lots of wartime and postwar EuroAmerican allies
> among the Quakers and other religious groups.
Thanks for mentioning the Quakers and other religious groups. I had
forgotten them entirely (even though I dug up, in the Balch Institute archive in
Philadelphia last spring, quite a bit of material on the help they gave JAs).
And I also mis-characterized Robert Shaffer's article.
He oversells some groups' tepid support and underplays
the fact that much of this support came in 1943 and 1944, much too late
to undermine (much less prevent) the evacuation, still the groups are
impressive.
Gary Okihiro's recent book "Storied Lives" examines
the help extended to JA students "resettling" into colleges.
In his useful Introduction, Okihiro warns us to beware the help
extended by those who would exoticize us for their own Orientalist
agenda. Okihiro even uses Frank Chin's old label in calling such
exoticized support "white racist love."
I realize that other non-white communities, lacking power themselves,
couldn't help as much as, say, the Quakers; but still I am impressed
by the few and brief expressions of solidarity by Langston Hughes and
a few other African American leaders.
Finally, reading some of the oral testimony of people who worked in
the camps not as administrators but as teachers or laborers,
I am struck by a wide range of feelings about JAs.
Some were knowledgeable and supportive. Others started ignorant and
evolved a sympathy. And still others were hostile at first and
remained hostile. Has anyone here read Georgia Robertson's
novel "The Harvest of Hate"? I've just picked up my copy and plan to read it
soon, and I'd appreciate any impressions from anyone here.
As a teacher of Ethnic Studies, I notice that most students define
racism as a hatred borne of ignorance. I must have heard a billion
times someone start a sentence with, "I'm not a racist, but..."
They finish the sentence with some (usually racist) assertion based
on some presumed knowledge. Usually this knowledge turns out to be
badly mistaken. But I think most people would rather confess their
hate than their ignorance.
We live in a society that has become so concerned for "victims' rights"
and so tired of "rights of the accused" that we feel no guilt about
hating "bad guys." This is why hate groups, having acquired the
trendiness of righteous rage, may recruit more openly now. And so
Jews in America have less to fear from Arab terrorists than from
the Ku Klux Klan, and Arabs in America have less to fear from Jewish
reactionaries than from anti-Arab stereotypes of the sort that
resulted in the detention of the two young Saudi men on the airliner.
Last updated 28 November 1999