By Sabrina Singhapattanapong
Daily Bruin Contributor
On the 60th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Americans
in 1942, more than 100 students, former internees and community
members assembled Saturday to discuss similarities in
discrimination of Japanese Americans and Muslims today.
At the “Learning from the Internment in a Post 9-11
World” seminar, law professors and civil liberty activists
stressed the need to educate people about the internment of
Japanese Americans during World War II to keep history from
repeating itself.
“They were both born with appearances that sometimes are
not recognized by average-day Americans,” said Dale Minami,
the former chair of the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.
“They have ancestral ties to countries responsible for
destruction.”
“Let’s go back 10 years, to the Gulf War. There were
calls then for the internment of Arab Americans and widespread
discrimination against Arab Americans,” Minami added.
The panels also discussed racial profiling.
Minami described racial profiling as “good in theory but
very, very bad in practice.”
President Roosevelt’s executive order of February 19, 1942
led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans
This order was cited as the beginning of racial profiling with
Japanese Americans.
“Remember those Japanese Americans who were incarcerated,
who have passed on,” Minami said. “Those who never saw
the light of redress, those who never received payment and
compensation and went to the grave without knowing in their hearts
for sure that they did nothing wrong.”
Professor Don T. Nakanishi, the Director of UCLA’s Asian
American Studies Center, said 175 UCLA college students were
abruptly sent to internment camps.
Consequently, these students were unable to complete their
education.
UCLA alumnus George Wakiji, was interned in May of 1942.
His family was forced to move to the “Gila River
Relocation Center” in Arizona. They lived there for nearly
three years and were surrounded by barbed wire and watch
towers.
“It was extremely hot. Temperatures would reach 120
degrees,” Wakiji remembers.
“Classrooms were in barracks and supplies were almost
non-existent.”
Many speakers feel racial profiling still exists but has taken a
different form since the internment.
Minami’s client, an electrical engineer of Pakistani
descent, was trying to fly home to the States from Europe, but was
kicked off two different planes.
He was told the pilots felt uncomfortable with him on the
flight.
Leti Volpp, associate law professor at the American University,
said that with increasing acts of discrimination, Arabs and Muslims
have adorned their houses, taxis, mosques and temples with American
flags and signs of patriotism.
In response to Volpp’s statement, law student Christine
Trinh said that putting up American flags in defense is completely
contrary to patriotism.
“It’s as if they’re saying, “˜Oh,
I’m supportive of America. Don’t kill
me,'” she said.
The symposium was held by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center
and the UCLA School of Law’s Concentration in Critical Race
Studies.