General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums5 Japanese-American Women Activists Left Out of U.S. History Books
http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/5-japanese-american-women-activists-left-out-of-us-history-books-20160327by Nina Wallace
From African American activists critical to the 1963 March on Washington to the Japanese American women among the 120,000 wrongly imprisoned by a panic-stricken and—let’s be honest—racist United State government after Pearl Harbor, history has a nasty tendency of suppressing the role women played in major social movements throughout the 20th century.
As an antidote to this historical stifling of strong female voices, here’s a little herstory lesson about five women whose World War II incarceration inspired them to fight back. And no, they don’t care if they’re hurting your stereotypes about quiet, submissive Asian women.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Some people are just amazing. Kind of gives me hope.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/5-japanese-american-women-activists-left-out-of-us-history-books-20160327
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)knr
JEB
(4,748 posts)Lifting our country up from its own dirt. The media and official sanctioned "history" seems to prefer to honor the ones making the dirt. I bet more people know about Ollie North than these beautiful strong women.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)Racist? Sure, but that was en vogue at the time. Both parties had anti-Asian planks in their platforms.
The internment was no more a military necessity than the threat of Saddam's WMD. What was a threat was the Japanese's skill in farming; wages for Japanese workers were creeping up on the wages for Caucasian workers.
Once the Japanese were interned, farm corporations struck a deal with the government to harvest the crops in the field; dummy corporations would be subsidized by the government to spare the farm corps from any risk. These dummy corporations would then sell back to the farm corporations at a very low price. Any other expenses encountered would be billed to the Japanese. (Farm corporations had liens against the crops, a consequence of the Japanese suffering decades of legislative hurdles to make their living expenses very costly.)
The congressional report, Personal Justice Denied, explained the internment as war-mongering racists gone wild, with a failure of everyone to stop them.
Oops! Our bad. These things happen.
No mention of the objective monetary incentives received by farm corporations (Financial loss to the Japanese was estimated to be between $800 million and $2 billion in 1983 dollars.)
There's a lot about the Japanese that's been left out of history books. (No surprise that history books leave out strong Japanese women, as immigration policies were in put in place to prevent them from entry, unless they were willing to become "mail-order brides."
JEB
(4,748 posts)
