Day of Remembrance

This weekend, the Bay Area Day of Remembrance takes place in San Francisco in remembrance of the internment of Japanese Americans. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The US government responded, in part, with Executive Order 9066. The order rounded up all Japanese living on the West Coast, citizen and non-citizen, from infant to elderly, and quarantined them in something the US government called "concentration camps" until the end of the war.

Much more has been written about the subject, but my highlighted source is No No Boy by John Okada. For those who haven't heard, its a novel centered on the experience of a Japanese American sent to jail because he refused to serve in the US army.

And what happened after that? The US government, apologized for their actions, and paid reparations to the remaining survivors 50 years later. But (this is important) the government still hasn't overturned the legal precedence of internment. That means that incarcerating American citizens who "pose a threat to national safety" can legally be locked away until the federal government deems that threat has passed.

And so the US government continues to lock away those human beings it considers undesirable or troublesome. One notable example is Guantanamo Bay. But before the "War on Terror", Gitmo had already been declared unconstitutional in 1993 for indefinitely detaining Haitian refugees who suffered from AIDS.