Race, Nation, War

Japanese American Forced Removal, Public Policy and National Security

Ayanna Yonemura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367727697
• eBook ISBN: 9780429885396
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines international post-9/11 policies by connecting them to the US violations of Japanese Americans' human rights during World War II. Analysing the policies of the United States, Race, Nation, War illustrates how ideas of race and masculinity shaped the indefinite leave policy which the government used to move Japanese Americans out of camps during the war. With attention to recent American and European policies, the author demonstrates that race, gender, and nation also converge in President Trump's policies on refugees and human rights, the German and European migrant crises, and related German policies and politics. Assayed from a unique city and regional planning perspective, Race, Nation, War will appeal not only to scholars of planning, but also to those with interests in American Studies, gender studies, race and ethnicity, sociology, history, and public policy.

1 Introduction

As a presidential candidate and as U.S. President, Donald Trump has routinely performed a type of masculinity which includes boasting about the size of his body parts and employing, what some commentators have called, “the language of domestic violence.”¹ “Doing gender,” to use the term which West and Zimmerman coined, Trump has enacted a plethora of “ideas of masculinity. . . so pervasive that they [have] become a natural way. . . to make policy.”² The president also regularly articulates the hegemonic idea that European and European-derived cultures are, as Edward Said explains, “superior in comparison with all non-European peoples and cultures.”³ American notions of race and gender are “shaped by a uniquely American experience” as well as “[s]hared with other societies” and particularly with European societies and others founded by European settler colonists. Ronald Takaki’s description of World War II policymakers applies to presidents and their advisors since World War II as well, “. . .they had grown up and were living in a culture that defined how men and women should behave.”⁴

This book presents three moments in which ideologies of cultural superiority and gender manifested in national policies during times of war. They are the United States’ World War II forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans; U.S. President Donald Trump’s refugee policies during the so-called war on terror; and contemporary and parallel refugee policies in Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel. I explore these moments through the lenses of cultural domination, gender ideology, and policymakers’ intersecting cultural contexts especially those pertaining to race, class, and nationality.⁵ Legal scholar Jerry Kang speaks to the significance of Japanese American history to national security policies in the post-9/11 era,

We are fighting an indefinite war on terror. In considering the policy and practice of this war, the history of Japanese American internment looms large. . . It is only through constant vigilance that the internment can remain a lighthouse that helps us navigate the rocky shores triangulated by freedom, equality, and security. We can never presume ‘never again.’⁶

Far from being an aberration, Mr. Trump’s ideologies are ubiquitous in European and Euro-American politics historically as well as in the twenty-first century.⁷ This book responds to the ways in which ideas of race, gender, and nation converge during the so-called war on terror by connecting them to the United States’ World War II policies on Japanese Americans.⁸ By relating the World War II-era policies to U.S. and international post–September 11, 2001 policies, my aim is to shed light on the tenacious myth of white cultural superiority, its significance in the twenty-first century, and its entanglements with gender ideologies and national identities.

An interdisciplinary inquiry, this book relies on theories and methods from gender studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and history to analyze public policy, public administration, and politics. As it originated with a dissertation on the hidden history of urban and regional planning’s influence on cultural domination in War Relocation Authority’s (WRA) policy, this book is, partly, a history of urban and regional planning and the related disciplines of applied sociology and anthropology. While Race, Nation, War mostly concentrates on the U.S. and Japanese Americans, comparisons within and between the United States, global, and historical contexts are an indispensable strategy for demonstrating the continuity of the idea of white cultural superiority.

As Robert Dean describes in Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy, this book “assumes that [policymakers] . . . are complex, socially constructed beings, who act from a repertoire of possibilities that are a product of their experience. . . [and that] policy reason, too, is thus culturally constructed and reproduced.”⁹ Analyzing policy includes understanding “the formative patterns of class and gender among the policymakers.”¹⁰ I incorporate intersectional analyses of class and gender along with race and nation to unravel policy epistemology and why particular policymakers considered certain policies possible and desirable.¹¹

Like other cultural constructs, masculinity and femininity ideologies vary as do gender performances and ways of doing gender. West and Zimmerman point out that “The meanings people attach to particular gender-, race-, or class-appropriate conduct come from historically specific institutional and collective practices in the . . . allocation of material and symbolic resources.”¹² Public policy allocates “material and symbolic resources” on the basis of “institutional and collective practices” and is often a way of doing gender.¹³

This book utilizes primary sources including public documents, correspondence, policy statements, Congressional testimonies, and speeches accessed via the U.S. National Archives, the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and Special Collections at the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Arizona in Tucson. It also incorporates reinterpretations of secondary studies and interpretations of biographies and autobiographies. Reports from organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the United Nations provide information on recent events including German and U.S. elections, migration data, and policy debates.

This book’s focus on the United States and Germany reflects those nations’ relevance to the topic of nationalism and war as well as my personal and scholarly relationships with the United States and Germany. One could conduct parallel analyses of other European and European-derived nations. France and Australia come to mind. This book, though, is about the two countries with which I am most familiar.

As a world power since 1898 and a twenty-first-century global super power, the United States is a singularly influential nation. It also purports to be the world’s largest democracy yet suffers from a racist present and past. A nation built with enslaved labor on colonized land, the United States has the world’s largest economy and third largest population with growth primarily fueled by immigration from Latin America and Asia. Demographers predict that by 2050, whites will no longer be a majority, but if inequalities persist, the United States will resemble Brazil or South Africa where wealth and resources are concentrated in a white minority.¹⁴

Germany is the European Union’s most populous and economically powerful member. According to global studies professor Joyce Marie Mushaben, the recruitment of skilled workers, the need for a tax base to support the aging population, postunification cultural changes, and a “new human rights” culture has led to a German “paradigm shift in citizenship and migration policies.”¹⁵ Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germany has gone from a country that rejected immigration to one with a “welcoming culture.” Before that change, though, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government tightened migration and refugee policies. During his chancellorship and shortly after unification, the nation experienced the racist violence of 1991–1993 which included multiple fire-bombings of housing for people seeking asylum. My earliest reflections about racism, nationalism, and policy were during the time of this historic violence when I researched and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Germany’s political asylum policy. The racist nationalism of those years complicated the plights of people seeking refuge in a country where neither the policies nor much of the population were welcoming.¹⁶

With the 1999 Citizenship and Naturalization Law, Germany broke with laws which dated back to 1913 and defined citizenship by jus sanguinis (“law of blood”). Mushaben writes that Chancellor Merkel has accomplished “more to advance the legal rights and day-to-day opportunities of foreigners and their offspring than all of her predecessors’ reforms dating back to 1949.”¹⁷

Cultural domination

At the time of writing, nationalist narratives that portray refugees as threatening, inferior people are increasingly manifesting in German and U.S. policies. As George Lipsitz writes, “The possessive investment in whiteness fuels depictions of aggrieved racialized populations as innately risky, as unworthy of protection or support. . .”¹⁸ Regardless of national and international laws designed to protect them, depictions of the type which Lipsitz describes contribute to the criminalization of refugees. Ideals pertaining to “rights,” whether described as “human,” “civil” or both, are fundamental to U.S. and European identities and narratives which position these nations as superior to non-Euro-American nations. Paradoxically, the crises of refugee politics have exposed the racism and ideas of cultural domination which are integral to these North American and European countries.¹⁹

In Orientalism, Edward Said argues that the ideology of white cultural superiority is fundamental to maintaining Europe and the United States’ power on the global stage. Said points out that “. . . the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”²⁰ This idea connects racism against refugees with that perpetrated against nonwhites within their own countries. The influence of Western cultural domination is not limited to Europe, the United States, and “the Orient.” Globally, it is part and parcel to the ongoing hierarchical relationships between and within regions, nations, and peoples.²¹

It is necessary to understand cultural domination in order to fully understand Europe and the United States’ economic and political power as well as the disproportionate power of whiteness and white people. This domination accounts for the ability to subject people to hate crimes and homelessness as well as to reject people even when that means exposing them to the horrors of human trafficking, sexual assault, and death by drowning in the Mediterranean or of thirst in North American deserts. Following Said’s lead, this book is concerned with, “. . . Western conceptions and treatments of the Other but also with the singularly important role played by Western culture in . . . the world of nations.”²² Ronald Takaki and Alexander Saxton, who have dissected the idea of white cultural superiority’s “cultural leadership,” are significant inspirations.²³

Said, Takaki, and Saxton are part of a post-Gramscian approach. Said summarizes Antonio Gramsci’s use of hegemony: “In any society . . . certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony. . .”²⁴ Human rights-related policies, whether part of discourse on “refugee policy,” “racism,” “civil rights,” or “civil liberties,” go to the heart of the cultural leadership of the idea of white cultural superiority. In international relations, European and U.S. discourses on “democracy,” “freedom,” and “equality” often serve as proxies for claims which contrast “Western civilization” with nonwhites supposedly savage, heathen, or backward ways.²⁵

Paradoxically, in juxtaposition to these claims, Western global dominance of the last several centuries has been based on the exploitation of nonwhite peoples and non-European places. The ongoing cultural hegemony and political, economic, and military dominance res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Overview of World War II policies targeting Japanese Americans
• 3 Dillon Myer goes to war: masculinity and the War Relocation Authority
• 4 Forced migration “the American Way”: race and the War Relocation Authority
• 5 Epilogue: racism and nationalism in the twenty-first century
• References
• Index