They did me a great wrong: History and meanings of the Japanese American exclusion and incarceration.

Abstract

This study argues that systematic and deliberate efforts were made to discursively erase the contradictions inherent in the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Contradictions were rendered unspeakable by acknowledging their existence, but denying their status as contradictions, instead being forcefully stated to be consistent with public statements of rights and freedoms. They were also rendered invisible through thoroughgoing and categorical refusals to acknowledge their existence or importance. These techniques allowed the raw facts to be acknowledged, while largely eliminating the grounds for analysis that would reveal the basic contradictions between government deeds and professions of inalienable rights and freedoms. Thus, rather than being concealed, the exercise of power was openly acknowledged, but discursively defined as necessary, for the good of the whole, lawful, and as actually benefiting those it harmed the most. The exclusion and incarceration occurred because those in power had the means and desire to carry it out. Political leaders deliberately engaged in actions they knew to be in violation of constitutional strictures. They possessed this capacity to act because of the technical, material and ideological resources they commanded as top government officials of a large, industrial nation, and not because of their status as public servants in a constitutional democracy. Their arbitrary exercise of power was no more constrained by the Constitution than was the ability of a patron to yell fire in a crowded theater. Some of those who were the most intensely targeted for this obfuscation of material reality, the Japanese Americans in the camps, penetrated the fog and saw for truth. Armed with this penetrating vision, disbelieving Japanese Americans were able to gain concessions despite the massive disparity in power between the oppressors and the oppressed. In later years, Japanese Americans and others continued to reject the meanings imposed during wartime, and were, over time, able to substantially shift the meanings assigned to this history.