Teaching about the internment

[>:^|]

When I think about how I learned history, I often feel that I was taught to memorize names and dates and never really thought about the context. For example, I can tell you the date of the magna carta but I have no idea what it is. :tongue:

We were taught that Roosevelt was a great proponent of civil rights--not that he courted the Black vote for other reasons. I don't remember learning about the internment in high school. I do remember that somebody asked about it in AP history, and our teacher said that it "couldn't compare" to the holocaust. Then he changed the subject.

Teaching about the internment has become a controversy in Washington state:

http://www.thesunlink.com/redesign/2004-09-10/local/200409109084.shtml#

Jack Klamm, who told the audience he graduated from the radio operators school at the island's Fort Ward in July 1941, said Roosevelt let the world believe that the decision was racist to hide that the United States had become adept at intercepting Japanese communications to spies here.

"The very act of identifying and arresting the spies would tell the Japanese government we were reading their mail, and they would have drastically changed the codes and we would be many months or years breaking the new ones and many more soldiers, sailors and civilians would die," he said.

Jim Olsen, whose wife Mary Dombrowski addressed the issue at the board's Aug. 27 meeting, said the curriculum teaches students "to really hate and mistrust the government of FDR and to hate the current administration of President Bush, Ashcroft and the USA Patriot Act."

Additional articles here:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002027639_bainbridge06m.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/189244_internment03.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bainbridge12sep12,1,3947441.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

[AliBabaIncorporated]

and our teacher said that it "couldn't compare" to the holocaust.
As much as I get annoyed about the emphasis given to the European Jewish holocaust over other aspects of the war and of world history in general ... shit, the SS did kill millions of people systematically. Of course internment doesn't compare to that.

Anyway, I think most people are too stupid to think critically. So might as well have them memorizing as many useless facts as possible. If you feed people two sides of an argument, they'll probably just forget the one they don't like and retain the one they do like, and thus become even more biased.

[Yeahman]

How did you not learn about internment in school? And I was never taught that Roosevelt was a proponent of civil rights. This is the first time I'm hearing that.

[SunWuKong]

When I think about how I learned history, I often feel that I was taught to memorize names and dates and never really thought about the context. For example, I can tell you the date of the magna carta but I have no idea what it is. :tongue:

my world history teacher was like this, but my American history teacher was much different. we never had multiple choice tests. all we did was write papers and answer essay questions. he really emphasized on why things happened instead of what happened and how it happened. but the drawback to this was that we never even reached the 20th century in our lesson plan before the year was over.

[Banana]

Jack Klamm, who told the audience he graduated from the radio operators school at the island's Fort Ward in July 1941, said Roosevelt let the world believe that the decision was racist to hide that the United States had become adept at intercepting Japanese communications to spies here.

"The very act of identifying and arresting the spies would tell the Japanese government we were reading their mail, and they would have drastically changed the codes and we would be many months or years breaking the new ones and many more soldiers, sailors and civilians would die," he said.

is something I never heard of before.

However, no matter how "legit" their reasons were for locking them up, the principle idea remains the same. Japanese Americans being interned was a mistake and illegal. The sheer fact that Japanese Americans were treated like second class citizens which allowed them to be locked up in the first place means it's discriminatory. Discrimination falls under the umbrella of racism.

[nameless]

i read Journey to Topaz in 6th grade, but i dont remember much about that class or book. in world history (that is, the western world) sophomore year, internment wasn't even mentioned during ww2 and roosevelt was made out to be one of the greatest presidents ever. but whatevers, that class was racists as fuck.

the racist aspects of interment were only really touched upon in US history. it wasn't critically discussed, but then again, not much is in high school...

[kitty]

i was a terrible history student until university when i started learning it critically. i think that's the way history should be taught -- if the whole point is to never repeat history, students have to learn why things happened and not just that they did.

but learning that they did is a start. having internment part of all history curriculums nationwide might be nice, even if they're only memorizing dates and names.

[hooligan]

we have to keep the internment in the curriculum. if not one of the defining moments of apia history, it is a marker of how far apias have come and how far they have to go.

[sageb1]

i've done some thinking about internment.

it affected my parents, but overall it helps me look beyond prejudice and racism to see that no other people should have to go through the same treatment.

yet it's far better to go beyond the injustice, the unfairness, and the minimization of internment than to use the internment to pillory government.

it's helped me to mistrust the government, military industrial complex, and the intimate ties that places militarism in the service of profit.

[syc]

I dont really see much wrong with the internment. The US was at war with Japan so they kept Japanese people in camps... the same shit happened all around the world at that time, if your country was at war with another country then those nationals would have to flee the country or be locked up in camps so they couldnt contribute in the war.

The situation is completely different now, at least in the US and other countries with large immigrant populations, but at the time it just made sense. Would the Japanese govt. have let Americans or Chinese roam free around the country while they were at war with one another? Has anyone heard of the "death marches" that the Japanese put their prisoners through?

[>:^|]

my world history teacher was like this, but my American history teacher was much different. we never had multiple choice tests. all we did was write papers and answer essay questions. he really emphasized on why things happened instead of what happened and how it happened. but the drawback to this was that we never even reached the 20th century in our lesson plan before the year was over.

This is interesting. I think I might have enjoyed history if it had been taught in context. The downside, as SunWuKong mentions, is that it is more work and takes longer. However, I so often encounter people who have absolutely no idea about the internment--the general assumption is either that the people were suspect or that they were all aliens. Many people don't know that the majority of the people interned were citizens. The government called them "non-aliens" at the time. :tongue:

The woman who is protesting the Bainbridge curriculum is an ex-history teacher.

It is fascinating to me that people don't recognize that not all viewpoints have merit.

"The very act of identifying and arresting the spies would tell the Japanese government we were reading their mail, and they would have drastically changed the codes and we would be many months or years breaking the new ones and many more soldiers, sailors and civilians would die," he said.

Uh ... yeah. They didn't arrest the spies so that they could continue to intercept messages. Instead, they locked up all the innocent people to throw the Japanese off the trail. How exactly did the spies wander around in the exclusion areas?

[SunWuKong]

I dont really see much wrong with the internment. The US was at war with Japan so they kept Japanese people in camps... the same shit happened all around the world at that time, if your country was at war with another country then those nationals would have to flee the country or be locked up in camps so they couldnt contribute in the war.

actually most of the internees were not foreign nationals. they were American nationals, and it has been proven that none of the Japanese Americans interned actually contributed to helping Japan win the war.

The situation is completely different now, at least in the US and other countries with large immigrant populations, but at the time it just made sense.

how so? can you elaborate?

Would the Japanese govt. have let Americans or Chinese roam free around the country while they were at war with one another? Has anyone heard of the "death marches" that the Japanese put their prisoners through?

why does that make it ethical to intern Japanese Americans? is it ethical, therefore, for Native Americans to commit genocide on white people? or for black people to enslave white people?

[yoMAMA]

I dont really see much wrong with the internment. The US was at war with Japan so they kept Japanese people in camps... the same shit happened all around the world at that time, if your country was at war with another country then those nationals would have to flee the country or be locked up in camps so they couldnt contribute in the war.

The situation is completely different now, at least in the US and other countries with large immigrant populations, but at the time it just made sense. Would the Japanese govt. have let Americans or Chinese roam free around the country while they were at war with one another? Has anyone heard of the "death marches" that the Japanese put their prisoners through?

I think most Japanese Americans that were sent to the internment camp were nisei, or second generation born in the U.S.

They are not "foreign nationals".

[hooligan]

I dont really see much wrong with the internment. The US was at war with Japan so they kept Japanese people in camps... the same shit happened all around the world at that time, if your country was at war with another country then those nationals would have to flee the country or be locked up in camps so they couldnt contribute in the war.

The situation is completely different now, at least in the US and other countries with large immigrant populations, but at the time it just made sense. Would the Japanese govt. have let Americans or Chinese roam free around the country while they were at war with one another? Has anyone heard of the "death marches" that the Japanese put their prisoners through?


one can also argue that little italians or germans were placed in the same concentration camps that many Japanese Americans were put in. i mean, by your definition, the US is on equal footing with the Japan militaristic government during WW2. oh wait, we are.

[SunWuKong]

one can also argue that little italians or germans were placed in the same concentration camps that many Japanese Americans were put in. i mean, by your definition, the US is on equal footing with the Japan militaristic government during WW2. oh wait, we are.

does anybody have any stats on the number of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans that were interned? and how did they determine that someone is of German and Italian ancestry anyway? they could have easily changed their surnames a generation or two ago, couldn't they? Anglising the surname was the popular thing to do for European immigrants.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

I think most Japanese Americans that were sent to the internment camp were nisei, or second generation born in the U.S.

They are not "foreign nationals".
More properly, most of them were dual citizens.

[hooligan]

More properly, most of them were dual citizens.
not out of choice.

[syc]

QUOTE:
Originally Posted by syc
I dont really see much wrong with the internment. The US was at war with Japan so they kept Japanese people in camps... the same shit happened all around the world at that time, if your country was at war with another country then those nationals would have to flee the country or be locked up in camps so they couldnt contribute in the war.


actually most of the internees were not foreign nationals. they were American nationals, and it has been proven that none of the Japanese Americans interned actually contributed to helping Japan win the war.

QUOTE:
Originally Posted by syc
The situation is completely different now, at least in the US and other countries with large immigrant populations, but at the time it just made sense.


how so? can you elaborate?

QUOTE:
Originally Posted by syc
Would the Japanese govt. have let Americans or Chinese roam free around the country while they were at war with one another? Has anyone heard of the "death marches" that the Japanese put their prisoners through?


why does that make it ethical to intern Japanese Americans? is it ethical, therefore, for Native Americans to commit genocide on white people? or for black people to enslave white people?



Whether or not they were foreign nationals obviously didnt matter. What mattered was that Japanese, or "Japanese-American" people, look completely different from the average American (white, of course). For that reason they, like other any other ethnicity that was not white, were seen as foreigners. When the government was putting these people in internment camps they did not see it as Americans being locked away, it was an inferior race who were only there to provide cheap labor anyways.

Thats one of the reasons why i'm not very shocked or outraged about the internment, i mean, black people getting lynched was a daily routine, Chinese people had only been brought into the states to build railroads as virtual slaves, Indians as a race were all but completely wiped off of the face of the earth by this time. I definitely dont agree with all of that but knowing what the US government did prior to WW2, and even up to this day, it would have surprised me more if they didnt imprison Japanese people. If Italians and Germans werent white then they too would have been locked up.

All this doesnt mean i think the internment was ethical but it was definitely consistent with the times and what was going on in the world.

[nonamerasian]

If Italians and Germans werent white then they too would have been locked up.

Some of both groups had their families interned, too. Like the Japanese/Japanese-Americans, some were told that their families weren't held because of what they had done, but because of what they might have done being that they were of Italian or German descent.

I don't know about the camps for those of Italian descent, but I believe about 10,000 people of German descent were held during WWII and a lesser number were detained during WWI.

I don't think they received compensation. In a German-American history documentary, one woman said her family received train tickets up North (from Texas) and $50 dollars to tie them over. That might have been typical.

It's obviously to a different degree than the Japanese internment, but the internment of members of these two groups did occur.