On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Though no reference to Japanese Americans appears in the order, an estimated 120,000 of them and their families — most of whom were citizens — were, in effect, incarcerated in detention centers across the western United States. USC experts can discuss the mass incarceration with new insight into the factors that led to it, as well as examples of ongoing injustices that parallel the order.  
Contact: Ron Mackovich, ronald.mackovich@usc.edu
An unforgettable injustice with legal aspects unresolved
“While President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to Dec. 7, 1941 as a day of infamy, his issuance of Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, made that date a day of infamy, as well. What we should remember on Feb. 19, though, is not just the start date of this unconstitutional incarceration episode in our nation’s history; we should also call to remembrance the prejudicial environment that Asian immigrants have faced from the time they first arrived in this country, as well as the enduring inter-generational harm of the incarceration.
“Marking the 80th anniversary of the issuance of E.O. 9066 is our opportunity to better understand the dangers that result when impairing the civil liberties of marginalized populations is considered acceptable under the guise of public protection, and to stand against those threats today.”
Susan Kamei is the author of “When Can We Go Back to America?, Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during WWII.” She is the managing director of the Spatial Sciences Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Kamei also is an expert on the legal challenges that unfolded after the detention order. She explained three court cases, including the landmark Korematsu v. United States that went to the U.S. Supreme Court:
“In the wartime decisions of the court cases Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu (v. United States), the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion of Japanese Americans from West Coast areas designated as military zones under the premise of ‘military necessity.’ In 1982, the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a bipartisan federal commission directed by Congress, found that the government did not have a basis for asserting military necessity for the exclusion, forced removal and detention, and that the incarceration instead resulted from ‘race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.’ The commission’s recommendations led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an apology and $20,000 redress payments to surviving incarcerates as token acknowledgement of their wartime losses.
“In addition, Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu were able to prove in the 1980s that they suffered a ‘manifest injustice’ in the appellate considerations of their criminal convictions in coram nobis proceedings. Although they were successful in having their criminal convictions vacated, the wartime Supreme Court decisions which bear their names, while discredited, have not been expressly overturned.
“Eighty years after the issuance of Executive Order 9066, the infamous legacy of the incarceration continues to be that our country presumed innocent persons, including American citizens, to be guilty of disloyalty to justify their long-term imprisonment simply because of their race, and serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of infringing upon the civil liberties of marginalized communities under the guise of protecting national security.”
Contact: kamei@dornsife.usc.edu
An enduring disregard for human rights
“9066 as a presidential order did not specify who the target was, it simply gave the U.S. Army latitude to round up any they deemed was a national security threat. And if you had a drop a Japanese blood in you, that made you un-American and even anti-American, even if you were a citizen.
“They took everybody from the West Coast — babies, grandmothers, even people of partial Japanese heritage, and put them into these camps. We were also at war with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but there was no mass roundup of all German Americans and Italian Americans. It was much more selective. There was no due process as the Constitution allows. You’re normally afforded some judicial process before you’re put in a high barbed wire camp with armed guards, but this community was not afforded protection. They weren’t told what crime they were supposed to have committed. They weren’t treated as individuals, but rather as a mass of unidentified people.
“For me that’s the legacy of 9066. Today, we have children being separated from their parents on the southern border, Muslims being banned from travel. and the repetition of history as other groups are treated as undifferentiated enemies.”
Duncan Williams is professor of religion, American Studies and Ethnicity and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He is the author of “American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War.”
Contact: duncanwi@usc.edu
The intergenerational trauma of an injustice
“Executive Order 9066 and its breach of principles of justice produced historically devastating effects. We commemorate this event, but legally we can still incarcerate ‘undesirable’ others. My work as scholar-artist includes a play based on interviews with my parents, who were carted off to stockyards, then confined in camps in Tule Lake, California, and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. As a third-generation Japanese American who was born after the camps, I urge us to take seriously the affective consequences of such injustice. What are the reverberations of historical trauma across generations?
“We need to understand these effects, and we must seek redress—through our scholarly, creative, political work, and through alliance with BIPOC peoples who have experienced dispossessions and enclosures, including Indigenous peoples, Arabs and Muslims, border detainees, refugees. Psychically, politically, the past is not even past. ‘Internment’ is not over.”
Dorinne Kondo is professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Contact: kondo@usc.edu
A travesty at times ignored
“The internment of Japanese and Japanese American people, forcibly evicted from the West Coast, is a stain, a wrong, and a heartbreak. It is made all the worse by the stubbornness of our blind spots.
‘It was a long time ago,’ some claim. It was not.  It was a single lifetime ago.
‘It was an aberration,’ some say. It was not. Rather, internment is a link in a chain made of anti-Asian thought and behavior running back and forth in time and place from 1942.
‘I’d never heard of it,’ some say. Yes, you did. It is in the books, it is in the history classes. It is in the yearbooks of a school like USC: here are the Japanese students in 1940 and 1941. Now it is 1942, where have they gone? You knew, you know, we all knew, we all know.
“The shame of it is that we forget over and over again. Memory and history are perhaps the only barrier we can construct to make sure it does not ever happen again.”
William Deverell is Professor of History at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He is also the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
Contact: deverell@usc.edu
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Photo courtesy of US Government Archive
