How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

by Crystal Marie Fleming

Just three years after rejecting Holocaust refugees, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, thereby initiating the racist policy euphemistically known as the “internment” of Japanese Americans.20 As a result of white supremacist hysteria, more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans, children included, were rounded up without legal hearings or trials, forcibly removed from their homes, and relocated to ten different concentration camps scattered throughout California, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas.21 More than 60 percent of those incarcerated were born in the United States. Historian Roger Daniels has described the racially motivated incarceration as an “attempt at ethnic cleansing.”22 Officially, Roosevelt and military officials rationalized their racist policy with the now familiar excuse of national security.23 Japanese Americans were described as an enemy race and an existential threat to the nation’s wartime effort—despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever of disloyalty or espionage among Japanese Americans. Of course, German Americans and Italian Americans were not treated similarly or sequestered in concentration camps. Gee, I wonder why.