On a recent outing, my wife and I attended a traveling exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution titled “Righting a Wrong.” Within the modest confines of a single room at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, the exhibition conveyed an epic tragedy: the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants as suspected traitors during World War II.
The test made it clear that none of those people proved to be disloyal. To the contrary, more than 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the United States. military during the war. those who remained imprisoned in our country’s de facto concentration camps formed communities with their own newspapers, sports teams, and arts programs.
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The national shame of Japanese incarceration has long been recognized through bipartisan consensus. In 1976 Republican President Ford revoked Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order that had authorized wartime incarceration. Twelve years later, an even more conservative Republican president, Ronald Reagan, signed into law a bill that would authorize the payment of reparations to the 60,000 people of Japanese descent who had been incarcerated and were still alive. one of the exhibits in the smithsonian exhibit quotes reagan at the signing ceremony:
“However, no payment can make up for those lost years. so the heart of this bill has less to do with property than with honor. because here we admit an error; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice before the law.”
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Given these formal acts of contrition, one could be forgiven for believing that the injustice of Japanese incarceration in the United States is established history. some of us, after all, are convinced that the immorality and treachery of the confederacy and its slave system are also beyond rational debate.
but earlier this month, a small school district in wisconsin delivered the latest example of two intertwined threats to history: the removal of books that dare to look critically at the american experience, and the mobilization of right-wing zealots on the streets. local school boards.
on june 13, a school board committee in the muskego-norway district in suburban milwaukee turned down a request from educators there to teach julie otsuka’s novel about japanese incarceration in a placement english class advanced for tenth graders. the reasons largely boiled down to complaints that the book, “when the emperor was divine”, is not impartial. That excuse brings to mind an observation by Holocaust survivor, novelist, and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, “Neutrality helps the oppressor. never the victim.”
I happen to be very familiar with otsuka’s book. I wrote about it in 2005, in a column about high school English teachers studying the book. what he knew then has become even truer since then. “When the Emperor Was Divine” is widely adopted in schools for the same reason that books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” are taught: it is a luminous literary work that forces readers to confront intolerance and injustice.
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Far from distorting or exaggerating the truth to make his points, Otsuka built the book on the experiences of his mother, uncle, and maternal grandparents who were incarcerated. Her research is so exemplary that I have assigned the novel several times to my graduate students at Columbia Journalism School.
Now, however, Otsuka’s book has become a captive of the Republican Party’s efforts to literally and figuratively whitewash American history and literature. The effort began to gather steam two years ago with the introduction and passage of state laws banning the use of “Project 1619,” an award-winning collection of articles and essays that reassesses American history, economics, public health, transportation, and other issues through the lens of black slavery and jim crow.
that certain legitimate historians intellectually discussed with the creator of the project fit well with the norms of academic discourse. state bans were something else entirely, an eradication effort. those laws anticipated more recent ones that ban instruction in critical race theory, by which right-wing activists essentially mean anything about racism that might cause a student to “feel discomfort, guilt, distress, or in any other way of psychological distress”. the legislation, often known as the stop wake law, puts it.
Censorship is coming so fast it’s almost impossible to keep track. Between July 21 and March 31, pen america counted 1,586 prohibited books in schools that serve some 2 million students. Overwhelmingly, the banned books featured nonwhite protagonists, dealt with racism, or addressed the lgbtq experience.
Back in the Muskego-Norway district, hundreds of residents have petitioned the school board to overturn the ban on Julie Otsuka’s book. You may want to quote the recent words of Levar Burton, beloved host of “Reading Rainbow”: “Read the books they’re banning. that’s where the good is. if they don’t want you to read it, there’s a reason why.”
samuel g. freedman is the author of nine books and is currently working on his tenth, on hubert humphrey and civil rights.
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