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Where are you really from? Asian Americans and the perpetual foreigner syndrome

Civil Rights Journal, Wntr, 2002 by Frank H. Wu

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Given a few days' notice, they were rounded up and sent to 10 hastily erected internment camps in deserts and swamps. With few exceptions, they were never charged with any crimes or convicted of any wrongdoing. They lost their liberty, their livelihoods, their communities, and their possessions.

The panic after Pearl Harbor was understandable. The disaster was unprecedented. Yet the decision to blame Japanese Americans should be neither condoned nor followed.

Lieutenant General John DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense, famously declared, "A Jap's a Jap ... The Japanese race is an enemy race ... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese." He added that German Americans and Italian Americans were only dangerous in some instances, "but we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map."

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Justice Hugo Black, renowned as a civil libertarian, wrote the majority opinion in the best known of the four Supreme Court cases lending judicial approval to the wholesale incarceration of a minority group. (3) Justice Black reasoned that Fred Korematsu, who had had crude plastic surgery in an attempt to pass as Hispanic and stay with his white girlfriend instead of reporting to an internment camp, "was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race." Instead, Black expounds, "He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire."

Justice Black notwithstanding, the crux of the matter must have been race. For aside from being of Japanese ancestry, Korematsu was simply another citizen. Apart from his ancestry, he had nothing to do with either the Japanese Empire or other Japanese Americans. The Korematsu case is the only example of the High Court using "strict scrutiny"--a form of judicial review that is said to be especially skeptical of racial references--but approving an invidious racial classification of a racial minority. Moreover, a case that was supposedly not about race at all has become the source of the controlling legal doctrine on race. (Although Korematsu had his conviction vacated on a rare writ of coram nobis decades later and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, his case has never been over-ruled and remains "good law.") (4)

Their patriotism may have been an unrequited love, but Japanese Americans displayed it poignantly. The Japanese Americans, still technically classified as "enemy aliens," who enlisted in the then-segregated Army proved themselves with the ultimate sacrifice. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Battalion became the most highly decorated units of their size and length of service in American history.

The law has changed, but the general culture has not. When 21-year-old Yale student Maya Lin won the competition for the Vietnam War Memorial commission, her profound design, with its black granite displaying a stark list of all the 58,000 Americans who died in the conflict and set into a gash in the earth, was controversial for more than its aesthetics. The selection process was anonymous, and the Ohio-born Lin was identified by only a number until her sketches were selected. Once her face was attached to her art, there were murmurings that she was the wrong choice because she was a "gook." Although her monument has become one of the top tourist attractions in the nation's capital, bringing together veterans, protesters, and families who make crayon rubbings of their love ones' names, the reticent sculptor still expresses shock at the attempts to discredit her because of race.

Where are you really from? Asian Americans and the perpetual foreigner syndrome

Civil Rights Journal, Wntr, 2002 by Frank H. Wu

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