September 11 and Arab Profiling On September 11, this nation suffered a vicious surprise attack on its own soil, by people of a different race and culture. We suffered a similar surprise attack sixty years ago, and so the comparisons to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came immediately. We would do well to pursue the analogy, because the Pearl Harbor attack led to the most massive government-sponsored human rights violation in the United States since the end of slavery. Within a few months of Pearl Harbor, the federal government uprooted all 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, aliens and U.S. citizens alike, and jailed them in desolate camps in the U.S. interior. With upwards of three million people of Arab descent living in America, we must now ask ourselves: Could it happen again? The early indications are worrisome. Mosques have been defaced. Arab-owned businesses have been shot at. Arab Americans have faced verbal and physical abuse in the streets. Internet message boards burst with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim slogans and threats. To his credit, Attorney General John Ashcroft has clearly condemned this wave of violence and harassment. "Such reports of violence and threats," he said on September 13th, "are in direct opposition to the very principles and laws of the United States and will not be tolerated." These are welcome words, but they cannot assure us that we are not lurching toward an Arab American internment. After all, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Attorney General Francis Biddle came to the defense of Japanese America, arguing courageously that "the Bill of Rights protects not only American citizens but all human beings who live on our American soil." His words did not prevent the incarceration of Japanese Americans just a few months later. The risk of a replay of 1942 is clear. In the public's mind, today's enemy is not so different from the enemy of sixty years ago. His religion is foreign, we tell ourselves. His devotion to it is suicidal. He is secretive. He is barbaric. His skin is of a different color. And so on. Yet the situations of Japanese Americans in 1941 and Arab Americans in 2001 are different in hopeful ways. The oppression of Japanese Americans came from more than just military fears and racial hatred. Its main engine was economic. The historical record is clear that the most effective advocates for evicting the West Coast's Japanese Americans were their white business competitors, especially in agriculture. The attack on Pearl Harbor presented white farmers with a chance to cap off a program of economic nativism that had been in place for years. Arab Americans, while above the national median in income and education, do not stand as a unified economic target. Unlike Japanese Americans in 1941, who were concentrated in agriculture and in certain retail and service industries, Arab Americans today spread themselves across a broad range of the labor force. Arab America is also more broadly dispersed across the country than was Japanese America in 1941. At that time, nearly ninety percent of all people of Japanese ancestry lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where they made an easy target. Today, Arab Americans live all over the country, with especially large populations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Washington, DC. Unlike Japanese Americans in 1941, Arab Americans walk the corridors of political power. Two cabinet secretaries are of Arab descent-Spencer Abraham, the Secretary of Energy, and Mitchell E. Daniels, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Donna Shalala, President Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services, is also of Arab ancestry. John Sununu, an Arab American, was governor of New Hampshire and the first President Bush's chief of staff. Several Arab Americans serve in the House of Representatives. Perhaps most importantly, the law protects Arab Americans today in a way that it did not protect Japanese Americans in 1941. What we today take as a commonplace-namely, that the government may not take race or ethnic origin into account in its dealings with individuals-had not yet been established in 1941. To be sure, our government often strays from this principle, as our experience with racial profiling shows us. But today's courts have nearly sixty years of precedent to rely upon in condemning race-based government action. And what's more, nearly all of our current Supreme Court justices have condemned the Japanese American internment as unconstitutional, and the 1944 Supreme Court's opinion to the contrary as a colossal mistake. Sadly, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents of the last few months have shown that Americans are no less susceptible to racist fear than we were after the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. The situation of Arab Americans is, however, different from that of the Japanese Americans during World War II, and we live in a different legal world as well. Let us hope that we are in a better position to hear, and to heed, our Attorney General's sensible words of restraint today than we were in 1941.
The Bill would prevent many injustice incidents such as the case with the Japanese citizens in 1942. During WWII, the government gov’t declared that all people of ...
The bombing on Pearl Harbor impaired America, which brought an increase to racial tension. However, this impairment brought all nationalities together. “Thirty-three thousand Japanese Americans enlisted in the United States Armed Forces. They believed participation in the defense of their country was the best way to express their loyalty and fulfill their obligation as citizens” (Takaki 348). Takaki proves to us that the battle for independence was grappled on the ends of enslaved races. The deception of discrimination within the military force didn’t only bewilder Americans that sensed the agony of segregation, but also to the rest of world who honored and idolized America as a beam of freedom for
On December 7,1941 Japan raided the airbases across the islands of Pearl Harbour. The “sneak attack” targeted the United States Navy. It left 2400 army personnel dead and over a thousand Americans wounded. U.S. Navy termed it as “one of the great defining moments in history”1 President Roosevelt called it as “A Day of Infamy”. 2 As this attack shook the nation and the Japanese Americans became the immediate ‘focal point’. At that moment approximately 112,000 Persons of Japanese descent resided in coastal areas of Oregon, Washington and also in California and Arizona.3
In this essay I will discuss to what extent is act 3 scenes 2 pivotal
American society, like that of Germany, was tainted with racial bigotry and prejudice. The Japanese were thought of as especially treacherous people for the attack on Pearl Harbor. The treachery was obviously thought to reside in ...
Sekhon,Vijay. �The Civil Rights of �Others�: Antiterrorism, The Patriot Act, and Arab and South Asian American Rights in Post-9/11 American Society.� Texas Forum on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights 8.1 (2003): 117-148.
other wise she is in good health. Rita works long hours and she is in
reflects the real world. The entire play is set in one study room in a
No Japanese American attack on U.S soil. All in all, their pre-measures for “national security” was a waste. About $9.5 million was spent to build internment camps and nurture the prisoners. This is somewhat a similar situation to today. After the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, many people, specifically, Americans, became very xenophobic and racist against Muslims and Arabs. The most obvious reason is that al-Qaeda, a middle eastern terrorist group, ended up being the people who hijacked the planes and crashed them. Soon after the event, most Americans begin to have this evil vein in them. Arabs and Muslims were being discriminated wherever they go. Airports began to have extra security and, although they won’t admit it, they specifically target people who aren’t white. It may seem to be extra security, but it’s straight up discrimination. This process can be extremely humiliating and terrifying. They usually don’t find anything but yet they check everything they have. America should remind themselves of the internment of Japanese Americans. Of how none of them actually committed a crime and imagine that for Arabs and Muslims. So they should stop treating any Middle Easterners as if they were criminals. Stereotypes shouldn’t define a person and prevent them from receiving the same rights a “True
In 2011, on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, a half-Jewish and half-Arab woman was yanked off her flight, in handcuffs. She was then strip-searched and put in jail for more than 4 hours. Due to Hebshi’s and the two Indian-American men sitting next to hers’ ethnicity, they were targeted and then were ordered off the plane. Not one of
Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. Choices made, whether good or bad, follow you forever and affect everyone in their path one way or another. As you venture into new phases of life or worlds or ‘grow up’, you are commonly faced with having to make difficult choices and decisions, which may change your life forever. Each choice throughout this transition can be either rewarding or challenging, depending on the individual and the obstacles that they must overcome. However, through successfully moving into the world, it can consequently bring new experiences and opportunities, growth, change, self-fulfilment, greater freedom and choice, and other consequences, may they be positive or negative. The play, ‘Educating Rita’ by Willy Russell, and the music video ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman both explore this concept of ‘Into the World’ through the use of language, visual and dramatic techniques, as they portray the beneficial and negative relatable outcomes of personal choices and transitions into a new phase of life or world.
Civilization has a tendency to attempt to divide people into different groups. Our environment weighs and measures us; then places us into a certain company.
In act 1 scene 1 the stage directions are about 1 and a half pages
The content of Act 2, scene 1 and 2 are of critical importance to the