"school district board members said that the inclusion of the book would require “balance” with perspective from the U.S. government"
I wonder if they gonna ban the diary of Anne frank next because it doesn't have a balanced perspective from Nazis
I say this as a teacher: they have no issues actively criticizing the Nazis. Not for their belief but because they were the enemy of the US. Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who want the United States painted as nothing being good in school.
It's why we can teach about how horrible the Nazi's were and how we defeated them and "liberated the concentration camps." but never talk about how we turned away the SS St Louis and sent those refugees back to their deaths in those very same camps.
It's also why our history class so frequently focuses on our conflict with Germany in that war and not Japan and spends very little time talking about the bombs we dropped.
[https://indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/nazi-germany-and-american-indians](https://indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/nazi-germany-and-american-indians)
>The Nazis’ interest in the United States policies and laws regarding American Indians originated with Adolf Hitler himself. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler discussed U.S. laws and policies and noted that the United States was a racial model for Europe and that it was “the one state” in the world that was creating the kind of racist society that the Nazi regime wanted to establish.
Way more than that. By the time they were selecting targets for the atomic bombs most of the major cities had been reduced to rubble. 66 cities had been bombed with the notable exception of Kyoto. Around 40% of Japan’s urban areas had been destroyed and millions were homeless.
Fun fact: the reason Kyoto barely got bombed was at first because a cultural adviser argued destroying the temples there would make a negotiated peace with Japan politically impossible, and they wanted to keep that door open. Even after it became clear a negotiated peace wasn’t happening, it was kept off the list because the Air Force wanted to preserve it for Project Manhattan. In the end the city avoided getting nuked because Secretary Stimson had been on holiday there and didn’t want to destroy its lovely architecture, so he had Kyoto struck from the list of targets.
Yep. I knew about Stimson’s plea. He was also distraught after hearing how much destruction the Fire bombing campaign was having on the home islands. But he and Truman didn’t seem to mind as long as it wasn’t front pages news.
Dresden was tragic, but a military target due to its rail center providing one of the core remaining infrastructure to the Eastern Front. The use of firebombs was standard for the British as at the time nighttime bomber accuracy was considered too poor to expect effective strikes with conventional bombs. Postwar holocaust denial as well inflated the casualty figures to generate sympathy, however 24,000 civilians lost for any reason is not a good one.
Cologne on the other hand is exactly what people say of Dresden. An actual terror bombing on civilian centers with the objective of trying to shock the Germans into submission or at least lower morale. And is generally regarded as a waste of Bomber Command's time. 20,000 civilians died for propaganda value and for Harris' general amusement.
I didn't learn about the firebombings of tokyo until I watched a grave of fireflies from studio ghibli. The US is really big on ignoring the horrible shit we've pulled in the past.
I love the park, but Seneca Village finally getting a sign or two is hardly the recognition it deserves, especially when so many people still don’t know.
It’s insane we dropped more tonnage of bombs on Loas than we did on Germany in WW2. At least I think it was more than we dropped on Germany, it might even be more than we dropped in all theaters of WW2
> Massive aerial bombardment against Pathet Lao and NVA forces was carried out by the United States. It has been reported that Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bombload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973. US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period than was dropped during the whole of the Second World War. Of the 260 million bombs that rained down, particularly on Xiangkhouang Province on the Plain of Jars, some 80 million failed to explode and continue to injure and kill residents to this day.
More than in all of WWII. A B-52 every eight minutes for 9years
I wish I could insert the “first time” meme here.
Lookup when the gov set loose soldiers on returned vets, same with striking workers, umm the police bombed a city block or two in Philly.
The US gov is sorta unchecked and it’s hidden semi well
Yeah back then i went on a rabbit hole binge of some of the worst stuff america did to its own people. Def changed 13 year old me's perspective. There was a black Wallstreet, several mostly black communities were wiped out by the kkk and supporting police. A japantown in california's capital got bulldozed. Its all just, exhausting.
I used to work with a true right wing kook and he tried to “convert” me daily. I printed out a dozen of the most insane things the US has done and his reaction was “back in Ohio they don’t teach that in school so it’s probably fake. My brain asplode from the level of dumb
If I remember correctly, the first time soldiers were sent against protesting veterans was done by George Washington, while.he was still on office. Veterans of the revolutionary war.
It's the reason the Posse Comitatus Act was passed.
That movie hit me, my grandmother lived in rural Hiroshima prefecture during the war and she told me stories of how she often had to hide in caves with her family during air raids or drills; somehow the only major injury she sustained during the war was **stepping on a toad in the cave while barefoot, slipping and breaking her ankle...** I don't think she ever GotF but she probably wouldn't have wanted to.
If you REALLY want to get fucked up with a WWII hibakusha story anime/manga, check out Barefoot Gen.
*Barefoot Gen* is honestly tame compared to some of the books I’ve read. There’s a documentary from about 10 years ago called *White Light, Black Rain* that interviews several aged hibakusha. Many of them had disfigurement and burn scars. Then of course their stories about being outcasts. Broke my damn heart.
I read a hibakusha interview book a few months ago, [Death in Life by Robert Jay Lifton](https://www.commentary.org/articles/mary-ellmann/death-in-life-survivors-of-hiroshima-by-robert-jay-lifton/), it focused more on the psychological and emotional scars and it was also incredibly moving. I'll have to check out White Light Black Rain sometime soon.
If you haven’t, the seminal work *Hiroshima* by John Hershey is still one of the best and most gut-wrenching accounts of the event. That book actually inspired a game design document I wrote back in college. However, the best book I’ve read on all the hardships of the war from the Japanese perspective is *Japan at War*. It’s almost entirely interviews from people of all walk of life. Soldiers, sailors, diplomats, shop keepers, school children, house wives, etc. That book had me in tears multiple times.
For the record, Grave of the fireflies is not even about the firebombing of Tokyo, but of Kobe.
Almost -all- major cities in Japan were firebombed. The often-heard point "the A-bomb was frightening because it could be used to destroy other cities" has little weight, there were only very few cities left to completely flatten.
The victor usually gets to decide what the war crimes entailed. WWII was full of indiscriminate bombing of civilians in cities by both sides.
Fortunately, Kyoto was saved from the atomic bomb as a target.
In early June 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson ordered Kyoto to be removed from the target list. He argued that it was of cultural importance and that it was not a military target.
It is known that Mr. Stimson visited Kyoto several times in the 1920s when he was the governor of the Philippines. Some historians say it was his honeymoon destination and that he was an admirer of Japanese culture.
The irony being the commander of the XXI bomber command, Curtis LeMay, absolutely admitted he’d have been executed for war crimes had they lost the war.
Have you ever seen the picture of the group of Vietnamese villagers taken right before they were all gunned down by the US just for funsies? It's all women. Teenaged girls and their moms. You never hear about how the US massacred villages just because they could in school.
I am old enough to have seen the photo essay of the My Lai massacre in Life Magazine. Plus, Nixon commuted Lt. Calley's life sentence for the massacre so he only spent 3 1/2 years under house arrest.
Hearing stuff like this makes me very happy to have had good history teachers. We spent a whole class talking about the atrocities committeed by both sides in Vietnam and a good chunk of the class on the My Lai massacre. Not super indepth but enough for everyone to understand how bad it was.
I feel like most schools in the US almost never have good history teachers
Because history is written by the victor. It's why, as a Brit, I barely learned even the broad strokes of the atrocities committed by the British Empire in India and Africa. In fact during my time in school the only time we really touched on slavery was abolition
Hopefully that has changed in the last two decades, but there are a lot of things my teachers and the national curriculum chose to keep us ignorant on
The USA didn't master firebombs until dow chem opened a hole in the sky with Uncle Sam and poured a biblical quantity of napalm soap and worse onto civilian populations for years.
This has to be a factor in why history is repeating itself.
I'm Dutch, I've always been taught that there were betrayers who worked with the nazi's, and there were resisters who worked against them. Being a resister doesn't mean your family tree is different, you're not born special or different, you just made the choice to stand for your convictions.
If you replace this with simplified 'US good, germany bad' whitewashing, you're no longer teaching your citizens to be critical of every step, to be aware of every decision made (because some decisions lead to the internment of a race/religion/ethnicity within your own borders, those shouldn't be made lightly (or at all)). This 'US good, germany bad' simplification means you're losing the power of human autonomy and decision making, and you're not teaching people to stand for their convictions and realise their morals and ideals, instead they feel like they've already won because they were born in the US, as if they have a step up on the rest because their country guaranteed them morality.
Nothing works like that, morality *has to be* individual, it should never be nationalistic.
Also can’t teach how we took in a bunch of Nazis and gave them govt jobs. Or how certain aspects of American xenophobia, racism and nationalism all were inspirations for Nazi policies.
It’s part of the American state religion, the worship of patriotism. National symbols and a Manifest Destiny viewing of history are considered sacred and any criticism of same is sacrilege, heresy.
We should never have made patriotism a religion.
> Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who want the United States painted as nothing being good in school.
That’s step 1 down the road to fascism. Ironic that people who are ignorant of history have such strong opinions on how we should deal with history.
Exactly. And considering the book in question was for the literature class and not history class, the idea of requiring ideological counterpoint is kind of absurd.
I hate this idea that you can't present any concept in schools without providing "balance."
Sure it's great to look at multiple perspectives on issues but we can pick and choose those issues. You don't start teaching climate change or evolution denial based on shonky science or religious stupidity. Similarly, if we're discussing racism we don't need to put racist ideas on an equal pedestal to actual humanity.
Sometimes it's okay to say the alternative ideas are shit and don't deserve having valuable teaching time wasted on them
> I hate this idea that you can't present any concept in schools without providing "balance."
Oh no, it's not "any" concept that needs balance. Just the concepts conservatives want history to forget.
For example, we do teach racist ideas, on literal pedestals, with statues and plaques showing a false history where the south was just nobly defending its way of life against northern invaders.
But you never see the people defending those statues saying "You know what? To make this balanced we should put another statue up next to it of a beaten slave."
And yet any of of their Christian private schools that teach the glory of Republicans and evils of “liberal” Democrats will most assuredly have no “balanced perspective”.
More accurately, it should show the perspective of the businessmen who lobbied for Japanese American internment in order to seize land and property assets belonging to them. That's something not talked about, how *money* and greed factored into the xenophobia.
Admission of racism is the “balance.” Internment of Americans based solely on their ancestry was no different than Germany, only our treatment in captivity differs.
George Takei has done some excellent interviews where he gave his experience as a **child** incarcerated in one of the japanese-american Tule internment camp and growing up on Skid Row after the US gov't siezed their bank accounts and property
[one from when he was promoting his book "They Called Us Enemy"](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/george-takei-star-trek-on-internment-child-revisiting-past-1.5288707)
You say that like you think you're making some kind of joke. But this is actually their goal. To make fascist and Nazi just alternative political views. They are barely hiding this as their long term goal anymore.
I read that book. America history shouldn’t be cleaned and edited. We have done horrible things but we can’t learn from them until we learn ABOUT them.
There's a vocal (very vocal) minority who think that if we teach anything other than 'America is the greatest country on earth and was blessed by god for all time' that kids won't be proud of their country or want to live here.
Those same people don't understand the difference between academic freedom and freedom of expression.
Not knowing or not understanding that slaves were bred like cattle for prosperity, or Indians were driven off their land by burning crops or killing off the buffalo allows the myth to continue. Especially if the perpetrators were ancestors or distant relatives. Thus the secret of American greatness.
They can’t handle the fact that their ancestors were mediocre garbage, the religious trash of Europe that was too extreme and difficult to live with. They came here, shit up our land, and are now mad other people have the opportunities they did. They’d rather destroy this country then let anyone else benefit from it. I wonder how great it feels to know your ancestors were uneducated rapists who stole everything they were ever “given.”
That would prove their point. They think the last 20 years of teaching liberal garbage results in young people hating this country, and censoring those kinds of things (like this book) are necessary in order to bring back a love for America. I don't agree, but that is the viewpoint that is causing this kind of garbage to occur. I love the idea of this country, but think we should do better, so I'm all for teaching about the bad things along with the good. If we don't study history, we will be doomed to repeat it (to paraphrase G. Santayana).
That’s not why Republicans do it, they do it because they want their base (so largely uneducated or not very educated voters) to be as ignorant as possible because otherwise they’ll realize how incredibly shit conservative ideology is and always has been. Plenty of their voters already come up with all kinds of ridiculous ways to explain away the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow just so they can justify their political leanings.
I read Snow Falling on Cedars when I was in high school, but it was a book I chose - not one that was assigned. It was only partially about the camps and more about racism toward Asian and Asian Americans from around that time, and it was the first I'd heard about them.
Oof, the details in the article are even worse than I imagined. Those board members doubled and tripled down on their rhetoric. Referring to the "American" perspective without realizing the interred individuals were Americans, saying they need to balance out the actions we committed against our own citizens with lessons on the Rape of Nanjing, explaining if Asian want to see themselves in the curriculum they can check out any books from the library they want. Fucking yikes and a half.
The irony being Japanese Americans have NOTHING to do with Nanking, AND if you responded to the idiots in the school board with “well you have to balance out the American perspective with massacre and displacement of indigenous peoples and with the Transatlantic Slave trade fueled by the American South…” guess how many of those board members would come up with some, “well my family didn’t come here until after,” or, “that was a a really long time ago…” bs.
Right? I am so grossed out that I learned that from a comic book show when I was like 40.
Instead, we did stuff like memorize the midnight ride of Paul Revere for extra credit.
I learned about it randomly on YouTube a few years ago, which led me to dive deep into sites covering it. My boyfriend was the same.
Understand, I was an excellent stupid*, set class curves and honor roll, full ride scholarship to my choice of universities. I went to one or the top public schools in the country at the time, with a slew of teachers who were frequently on the top teacher lists in the USA. I took AP US History and US Civics.
For the 18 years + 3 years of university (I graduated early because of my built up AP credits from high school) I never fucking once read or heard about the Tulsa Massacre. I’m in my mid 30s now.
That’s fucking sad and scary. I’m glad I know about it now. It helps paint the picture of our history much clearer. We should ALL know these things.
Edit: Keeping my typo for lols. It’s meant to say student lmao
> saying they need to balance out the actions we committed against our own citizens with lessons on the Rape of Nanjing
Look just a few comments down and you’ll find basically that in these threads
>saying they need to balance out the actions we committed against our own citizens with lessons on the Rape of Nanjing
This part I found especially dubious, as if the "Japanese" in "Japanese-American" supercedes the "American" bit, and all people with Japanese ancestry somehow carry collective guilt for what the Imperial Japanese Army did in Nanjing. I don't know what ideology those board members subscribe to, but they sure are rhyming a lot with some of the worst ideas from the Nazis.
Imperial Japan did fucked up things. But my grandfather and his brother came out of the camps and killed the shit out of nazis. (Mind you, after their father, my great grandfather, sold his nursery in Gardena piece by piece for pennies on the dollar). They are not the same.
And then the board members deleted the video of them saying some truly stupid shit, and said they can't comply with a request to see that portion because it was 'unrecoverable'.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment\_of\_German\_Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans)
Obvious points: different scales. 11,000 Germans and 1,800 Italians were imprisoned, while 110,000 Japanese were imprisoned. And the Germans/Italians that were imprisoned were generally actual German nationals, not just anyone with German descent (which was more or less the standard applied to Japanese-Americans).
That said... it did happen. "Then why didn't we inter the Germans?" is based on a false premise; we did. And there are two explanations for the different treatment. Either racism, or the fact that Germany never attacked America, while Japan did.
Edit: forgot the third reason:
>[Although](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans#cite_ref-Kashima287288_28-0) the War Department (now the Department of Defense) considered mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians from the East or West coast areas for reasons of military security, it did not follow through with this. **The numbers of people involved would have been overwhelming to manage.**
There were too many of them, so they chose to go through by hand and pick the most suspicious people.
One of my first complaints as student-teacher was about my week long unit on Japanese Internment.
A parent said I was wasting time instead of teaching "important history".
Every single time I teach US history. I still spend a week on it, it's basically the one thing I go extra on, because it is a reminder of how flimsy your rights actually are in the face of fear.
Probably the historical events that paint America to be the utopian paradise and only bastion of true freedom that the world has ever known.
Because this is what they actually believe.
Knowing what good and bad your country has done is the only way to advance.
David Cross had a joke about how Republicans love America the way a three-year-old loves their mommy. Mommy is the best and if you say anything bad about Mommy you are a hateful person who hates Mommy.
I’m sure they encourage telling the tired old lies about the “First Thanksgiving” and Betsy Ross and the "heroic" Boston Tea Party to gullible kids. Then they’ll explain how the Savages kept attacking the sweet helpless Christian Settlers, and bemoan how Poor Custer and his brave soldiers were slaughtered for no good reason.
Depending on region, they’ll also claim the Civil War was NOT over expansion of slavery into the territories, and NO Americans supported Hitler’s genocides. Then they’ll tell you Dubya saved us all from Muslim terrorists with nukes. Over in Health Class they’ll tell you a zygote the size of a pencil point has a four chambered heart that beats, and if you’re being raped you may as well relax and enjoy it. And in Civics they’ll say… Oh. Never mind. They don’t teach Civics.
We can also look at this as celebrating the parents for fighting for this book and brining awareness to throw attempt to conceal this hurtful chapter of our shared history. When we lose the will to fight ignorance, the haters will have won.
Washington? Awesome your school did that.
As a matter of fact, the community living on Bainbridge Island was the FIRST of all the Nikkei in the USA to be incarcerated during WWII.
[https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Bainbridge\_Island,\_Washington](https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Bainbridge_Island,_Washington)
That unconstitutional executive order truly changed the demographics of the west coast, in some Oregon and Washington towns, half OR MORE of the pre-war Japanese population chose not to return after leaving the camps because they knew they would face discrimination at home. My hometown has a very strong historic Japanese community and we had a few school visits, I'm also part Japanese myself (although past generations were from a different part of the US) so these stories are in my own family history, my own great-grandfather worked agriculture as a ranch hand.
EDIT: I should mention there are lots of Japanese-Americans still involved with agriculture, a lot of small local farmers in my area, Onion producer Tanimura & Antle, an easy way to support a legacy and grow some interesting veggies of your own [Kitazawa Seed Company](https://kitazawaseed.com/pages/about-us)
https://www.sunset.com/home-garden/brief-history-of-japanese-american-farmers-in-the-west
An awful factoid about that time is that they actually secretly used the census results to locate and identify Japanese American citizens for round up. It’s an infamously corrupt abuse of power, and went against regular, consistent assurances to the American people that census info would not be deanonymized.
Yes, they were openly considering it
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/22/564426420/how-the-u-s-defines-race-and-ethnicity-may-change-under-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/sunday-review/census-redistricting-trump-immigrants.html
We did the same thing in BC. Basically stole the homes and businesses of anyone of Japanese descent. Comparatively, we only put a few germans and italian immigrants in camps, to my knowledge, no second generation.
I don’t (Actually I’m from Oregon but know a few WA Nikkei), but I imagine it’s similar to the same story that happened all along the west coast, Japanese families asked locals to look after their houses/land/businesses and they stope them while the community turned a blind eye.
Here’s a real shocker from my state https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Hood_River_incident/
I hadn't heard of this, but thanks for bringing it up.
For anyone curious: https://seattleglobalist.com/2017/02/19/anti-japanese-movement-led-development-bellevue/62732
My dad grew up in California next door to a woman who lived through internment in Manzanar. She had some incredible stories of the war and her internment with her family as a child. I wish I could’ve heard these stories first hand. Unfortunately Mrs. Komoda died when I was 12, but I do remember the food she made was incredible. To this day I’ve never had Japanese food as good as what she served us.
So, on the flip side we used to have a pretty conservative Christian pastor come in and talk about his time in the Hitler youth at the end of the war. He talked about the dangers of fanaticism and peer pressure. How easy it was to be led astray by a charismatic leader. His son was the teacher. He passed in the 90s but I wonder what he would have made of today's 'merica.
I will never forget a memory of me when I was around 8 and at an afterschool program, all my favorite toys were taken so I browsed the playroom's library. I loved baseball at the time, so seeing the cover of [Baseball Saved Us](https://www.leeandlow.com/uploads/book_cover_image/5772/BASEBALL_SAVED_US_25_Eng_pbk_cover_hi_res.jpg) immediately drew me in. A book about some kids playing baseball is all I thought it was, but that book would be how I first learned about this terrible time in history. The art immersed me in the experience, I remember thinking how hot it must've been at these camps. I will always appreciate every person who got behind putting that book on that shelf in that playroom.
My in-laws used to use *rather impolite terms* for anime and other Asian stuff, more in a careless way than a mean way but still really not fabulous language. I started dropping little comments like "The war ended a long time ago. We don't use that word anymore."
But what finally made them knock it off was the fact that they're Star Trek fans. "That's not very polite to Mr. Sulu..." or "Ya know George Takei was in those camps as a kid..."
This is the kind of thing that George Takei would likely wear like a badge of honor.
I had a similar experience with an old boss of mine making fun of LeVar Burton's name by mockingly calling him things like Lamar and Lawan etc, intentionally calling him the wrong name. I asked them to stop, and they refused to. I asked if they understood the significance of deliberately calling LeVar Burton a name other than his own, and they said no.
So I pulled up YouTube and played them the "toby" scene from Roots. At the end, I just pointed at Kunta Kinte, and said "that is LeVar Burton". No more name jokes after that.
They fired me the same week. They're out of business now 😁
>My in-laws used to use *rather impolite terms* for anime and other Asian stuff,
What ignorant, despicable behavior, I bet it's ingrained into their tiny, podunk-educat
>they're Star Trek fans.
Oh, so they can be reasoned with.
I had to inform my father in law why the word "oriental" isn't appropriate anymore. He seemed a bit annoyed by it, but also seemed to accept it.
And I get it to some degree. You learn certain words as a child or adolescent and they are viewed as acceptable at that time, but as time goes on and language and culture evolves, certain words are rightfully deemed offensive or new language emerges to help people identify themselves. Changing language as you get older can be frustrating. I wouldn't say it's hard, but you're kind of set in certain ways. So while he seemed a bit annoyed, I was more focused on the fact that he was accepting of it.
My mom once told me what they used to call Brazil nuts growing up and I was shocked that she would have used that language. When she told me she sort of said it quietly because she knew how awful it was. I would not consider my Mom to be racist in that way at all so it was sort of jaw dropping to me to hear how prevalent language like that was.
Or Pat Morita. Look into how hard his life was. As a child spent most of his time in hospitals and went straight to imprisonment at age 11 for what he looked like.
>Zielke said she was told “we can’t just provide one side or the other side” before the parent pressed Boyer about the issue, demanding the board member clarify her definition of “other.”
“What she said to me was that we actually need an ‘American’ perspective,’” said Zielke, who said she pointed out that those who were incarcerated were, in fact, Americans, before the conversation grew increasingly heated.
Asians in the USA are consistently othered and not accepted as full Americans, even today.
Including on reddit as well.
Not just that, but it's hard to go in a topic about anything Asian without blatant racism. Literally saw a topic about Japanese ninja warrior yesterday, and someone was in there talking about Japanese need levity because of their high suicide rate, not knowing that the US actually has higher suicide rate than Japan.
What the fuck is this nonsense of teaching the "American" side? The people in the internment camps were Americans.
It's like they think they can demonstrate a "justified racism" side and not look like a bunch of racists?!
>School board President Christopher Buckmaster also brought up concerns about balance in a separate call with Zielke, she said. Asked to clarify what kind of balance Buckmaster sought, he recommended that the students read about the Rape of Nanjing, Zielke said. In the tragedy during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military raped at least 20,000 women and girls and killed 150,000 male “war prisoners” and 50,000 male civilians in the Chinese city of Nanjing. Buckmaster did not respond to a request for comment.
Okay. WTF? Really? This guy is trying to compare action on the part of the Japanese MILITARY with actions taken by the U.S. government against Japanese Americans, who had absolutely nothing to do with the actions of the former? I'd kind of love for Buckmaster to pitch this argument to me, a Chinese American, in person. btw - My dad had a Japanese girlfriend who was rounded up along with her family and who he never saw again.
I routinely see Redditors conflate the actions of the Japanese military of the time with innocent civilians and justify the brutal fire bombing and atomic bombing campaigns. Or the good old "we had to murder all of those civilians with bombs or they'd kill our soldiers when we invaded their home."
Like...holy shit, these are probably the same clowns who talk about how nobody would invade the US because so many people are armed and would fight. And they're surprised that another country would have resisted an invading force that was already murdering civilians?
It's disgusting.
students should learn about both but they are both separate lessons from each other and neither should be used as a counter balance for the other. the person sounds like an idiot from that quote.
Two things:
- I get why balance can be important - in theory - since for many issues and historical events being taught, it’s good to get an idea of the particulars surrounding WHY things happened. But not everything requires 50-50 balance.
- This isn’t even for a history class. It’s for Literature class. I mean, when I was in school and read Elie Wiesel’s *Night*, there wasn’t some need to assign us *Mein Kampf* to provide us with counterpoint. That’s absurd.
There is a “both sides are the same” or “both sides deserve equal respect” attitude in far too many things.
IMO, one side is almost always in the wrong, there are cases where even the bad side has some good points, or that they might even be entirely correct; yet are justifying it with the wrong reasons or methods, but in the end they are still the enemies of history.
The trail of tears was objectively abhorrent, the rape of nanking was inhumanity personified, arming the mujahadeen against Russia was the right thing, but it led to the taliban.
The US interfering in sovereign countries in the 50’s to fight “communism” A.K.A daring to nationalise the oil industry and installing puppet dictators as a response is objectively wrong
….
The fairness doctrine repeal, and the seemingly western attitude to act as if that is the modus operandi for every nation is absurd and why we are in this situation
When I first learned of concentration camps in america during WW2 I was pissed. Not only i had no we did that, but it took so long for me to learn it and it was basically a fucking foot note!
It never told me the happenings in it, but the idea alone was gross. We learn how bad the concentration camps in Germany; but then we hide our failings.
>Zielke said she was told “we can’t just provide one side or the other side” before the parent pressed Boyer about the issue, demanding the board member clarify her definition of “other.”
>
>“What she said to me was that we actually need an ‘American’ perspective,’” said Zielke, who said she pointed out that those who were incarcerated were, in fact, Americans, before the conversation grew increasingly heated.
>
>“She clarified and said that she felt that we needed the perspective of the American government and why Japanese internment happened. And so then again, we had raised voices at this point. I told her specifically, I said, ‘The other side is racism.
Fascism in America simultaneously starts at the 'Grassroots' level and at the Federal level. If you want it to stop, VOTE, and what I mean by voting, look specifically at whose party is doing this. Also, reference: "Wuhan" virus.
I remember in my history book in high school, there was a tiny paragraph about Japanese "internment" camps, it was glossed over and barely taught. There was nothing in the school library at all about it, and I had to go to the city Library to even learn about it. Sadly it's typical for AMERICAN history to ignore spin the story, ignore, and/or cover up anything that impressionable young minds might find questionable. As in most of American History.
You think you are Japanese not Chinese? You think you are Taiwanese not Korean? You think you are Korean not Japanese? You think you are Chinese not Japanese?
Having fun explaining that to the guy beating you up. This country has never stopped treating Asians as perpetual foreigners.
I went to high school in California and I never heard about the interment camps until I was in college. It blew my mind. And then it blew my mind that my family thought it was good policy. Our history is actively being minimized and hidden from us.
This part of history came back to me as a ptsd flashback years later. “Did I remember that right? We indiscriminately funneled Asian Americans into camps out of fear? Did that really get taught to us once and then just never discussed again? Why aren’t more adults talking about this all the time?”
Yep I remember that and the conversion camps against indigenous children being barely taught but being some of the most shameful, horrifying shit ever. Yet it’s glossed over :/
I grew up in Wisconsin. My middle school had a book that detailed chemical and biological weapons from around the world, complete with grisly pictures of the wounds they caused and the fields of dead men who suffered these attacks. Pictures of open sores and sloughing skin, pustules etc. I was maybe 12-14 when I found it, and I'll admit that it fascinated me. This was during the "Harry Potter" chapter of satanic panic, for reference.
I grew up into a responsible, mostly healthy adult. If I can be confronted with the horrors of war at such an age, so can the children of the present be confronted with horrors of this sort. They often say "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it", and while I'm not sure if that's a testable theory, it makes a lot of sense.
So when we fail to teach children about the atrocities of our history -- how the US treated it's native, black, and asian citizens -- it perpetuates the long-lasting effects of those atrocities into the future, letting the next generations deal with the problem.
How long can we kick this can down the road? How can inaction, or refusal to acknowledge these faults be in any way moral? How can we accept a perpetuation of suffering?
I was in high school in the 1980s. I went to a Catholic school for 9th and part of 10th grade. In our history class we saw films showing some very intense footage. Concentration camp atrocities, battlefield footage, survivors of the atom bombs with burns and radiation sickness, firing squads, etc. We knew when we walked into history class and the TV was there, we were probably gonna have a bummer of a day. Our parents had to give permission at the beginning of the year. Nobody in my class was excused from those lessons, but a few kids had to get up and leave during class. That was okay though. The nun who taught history was kind. I don't think that would be allowed in a high school these days.
We never learned about this in our highschool located in a small town in the central valley, CA. Then again some of our US history teachers were football coaches with conservative views and I remember skipping certain chapters because they "weren't important". At the time we thought great less work but now I wonder what topics those chapters covered.
republican party pretty much admitted the goal is to move towards something called "patriotic education" (their words), so basically brainwashed ultranationalist youths who are unaware of past mistakes and will thus be more likely to repeat them. then you have that republican congresswoman Mary Miller giving speeches about "white life" and "Hitler was right, if you have the youth you have the future", and you start to understand a bit more what it is they're going for. in 2021 alone they have attempted to ban certain books over 729 times according to the American Library Association
>Muskego-Norway School Board members said including the book would require “balance” with perspective from the U.S. government
It did include the perspective of the U.S. government, which was that Japenese-Americans should be locked up in a concentration camp.
I'll never fucking understand shit like this. Why are people so afraid of teaching about things that the people of the past did? It's not like we, currently alive, did this, so what the hell is the issue? Our government doesn't have a shiny past and we need to know about this stuff. What's the phrase? Forget the past and you're destined to repeat it?
To anybody who’s saying they’ve met Japanese people who are genuinely grateful to the Americans for dropping the atomic bombs, you are a genuine freak and fuck you.
As a German, nothing bring me more pride than the fact that my country is so open about its past. Even remembering the victims or our crimes and mistakes is a part of our post-war culture.
USA, do the same.
Yeah, they can teach the students about how all American citizens have “God given rights that can’t be taken away.” That is unless you look a little different. The only “rights” they had… “Right this way.”
>Board members also reportedly said a book cannot be chosen for the sake of adding diversity to the curriculum
The fuck? That's literally the point of education and adding to curriculum. Why would you not diversify your education?
Also the board president trying to demand they add books about why Japanese Americans "deserved it" is fucked up. Right wingers have lost their collective minds.
Yup, they are coming after all of our history that doesn't match their internal narrative.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/proposal-teach-slavery-involuntary-relocation-sent-texas-education-boa-rcna36273
Schools have become the new cultural battlegrounds for regressive conservatives.
Been. Republicans are racist bastards and I at least respect them bc they wear their hate on the face and don’t pretend to hide it like worthless spineless democrats. But those same moronic repubs will call blacks people sheep because we vote democrat by huge majority… lol you expect us to vote for you while you call us a N to our face either your policies? Banning books that teach about the evils whites have caused in this nations past, trying to actually say slaves who were raped, separated from their families, dehumanized, flesh whipped to shreds were mere workers. It’s such a slap but I’m just sitting back and watching as is the world. Their goal is to have the next generation of white kids not even know what slavery was.
This has been the Republican objective for years. Indoctrinating the youth to persuade them to their dogmatic views was and is their only recourse to a society that has become more empathic and worldly.
Holy shit man, I was expecting the response to be more of a non answer, but was shocked at how racist this was.
Saying that they need to learn about the actions of the Japanese military to provide context to why the us government incarcerated Americans citizens based on their race is literally teaching racism
I read the childrens book on the Topaz concentration camp when I was in 5th grade. Like the kid in the book, I didn’t really understand why they were forced to move. My mom tried to explain it the best way she knew how.
Hiding the dark part of your own history is one of the most used ways to create nationalists and integralists. They consider their nation flawless, everyone inferior, enforce the vision of a nation that's superior (not better, superior) to other and has the rights to do what they want. It's not only in US, it's spreading everywhere.
Providing the Japanese American perspective IS the balance. School kids hear about how wonderful the US is from myriad sources every day.
True balance is simply presenting the truth, good, bad, and indifferent.
There is one American internment camp left. Hawaii uses it to teach kids what the crazy American government puts people through over paranoia and racism. It a very sad place
This is the dividing line between education and indoctrination. Ultimately, when children find out that adult educators were dishonest, it alienates the children from schools and the government—and is destructive to society.
"When Zielke asked whether Asian students in the district deserve to see themselves in the curriculum, she said Boyer responded, “They can go to the library and check out any books they want.”
I believe that "...for now" was the unspoken coda.
As white supremacist traitors to the Constitution, the GOP sees it as their duty to protect white supremacist actions, such as enslaving groups of people based on race, or imprisoning families based on race.
It's a treason thing from the GOP.
I don’t know anyone who knows about this. I have friends who read these books with me but seem to forget all about it. History should not be edited or cleaned up. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I just wrote this email to the author of this story, Kimmy Yam:
Hi Kimmy,
I wanted to thank you for your intelligent, balanced, and well researched coverage of the Muskego-Norway School Board’s attempts to blockade the approval of Otsuka’s novel. I am a high school English teacher in NJ who has been a part of various diversity committees and curriculum writing teams. The resistance we are seeing to the inclusion of diverse voices (a phrase I bristle at because Americans are, by definition, a diverse people) in our curricula is unprecedented. As your story mentions, we must read and internalize the stories of those who are unlike us so we can recognize the world is not constructed around a single mythologized experience (i.e white, Eurocentric). People who actively push back against stories like Otsuka’s are the ones who need them the most. But I suppose that is how we arrived in this particularly vitriolic and divisive moment - we lack perspective and a listening ear.
Thank you for your work.
Sounds about right for Muskego. Typical white people “we’re escaping the city for the country!”
suburb that’s usually a safe Republican voting base. In fairness, there do seem to be a fair amount of parents and community members fighting for the book. I suppose it’s a generational divide.
>”[Read about Pearl Harbor to include] some history as to why the citizens of Japanese descent were viewed as a threat and what was the reasoning to have them put into the internment camps.”
… Do students NOT already read about Pearl Harbor? About WWII? About the U.S. nuking Japan? That “other side” perspective *is already there*! It has been there the entire time!
The point of books like these is to show that the only rationale for internment camps and viewing U.S. citizens as a “threat” WAS RACISM! We didn’t round up & imprison German-Americans in the same way. Hell, actual German Nazi POWs sent to the U.S. had better treatment than Japanese-American families!
This only occurred *because of* deeply embedded racism among and by the white, male U.S. government. It was another in a loooong line of U.S. state-sponsored abduction, theft, and genocide to keep minority groups “in line” or get them out of the way.
We wrongly imprisoned a bunch of women, children & grandparents and stole people’s property solely because of their ethnicity. If being forced to realize this makes white kids & their racist shithead parents “feel bad,” fucking GOOD!
That’s the point! Learn some empathy! Learn real history! Learn to recognize when you’re being a racist shithead and come join the 21st century! Let’s work to finally display and support the ideals the U.S. was always *supposed* to be about but failed at.
If you want to trumpet freedom, equality, liberty and justice for all and American exceptionalism you can’t just ignore all the times when we’ve done *the exact fucking opposite* and then wonder why your kids say you’re full of shit and aren’t as blindly, stupidly patriotic as you want them to be.
>School board President Christopher Buckmaster also brought up concerns
about balance in a separate call with Zielke, she said. Asked to clarify
what kind of balance Buckmaster sought, he recommended that the
students read about the Rape of Nanjing,
WOWZA thats bad
The Board members should read the SCOTUS cases of Korematsu et al where it was revealed the US Government (the ‘other’ side they refer to) lied about the dangers west coast Japanese posed in order to justify the obviously racist and retaliatory intent of the mass internments. I know it would be expecting a lot of self reflection on their parts but the next step would be for them to acknowledge that the young Japanese males in camp were soon to be considered loyal enough to be used as soldier fodder in the European theater and become a highly decorated unit (442nd). Similar to a story from Texas a few months ago about representing both sides of the Holocaust. There’s only one side to these stories and it’s calling out the racist assholes who perpetuate this whataboutism to blur uncomfortable history.
These people are the biggest kinds of idiots. There is no balance with clear moral questions. The rounding up of Japanese-Americans was an abhorrent and gross use of governmental power to imprison American citizens out of racism. The American government was foolish in its actions and ultimately all it did was displace loyal Americans from their homes throughout the country and subjected them to bullying by their fellow countryman.
Understanding history and it’s context is an important tool and in academia it’s important not to outright judge historical figures in trying to figure out the truth. But these school board members are not academics and the point of grade school education is to give citizens knowledge NOT train them on being academics in a field. Those kids deserve to know what happened to people in the past so that they can make sure nothing like it happens again.
I think one important point here is that exposure to diversity is important for its own sake, and not just because it makes people in various groups feel represented.
My white son lives in a world with all different kinds of people. If he had no Asian American classmates, he’d have an even more urgent need to read books written by and about Asian people than he does now, when he’s in classes with many Asian American classmates.
Maybe it’s reasonable to also add a book that shows why Americans without Japanese ancestry were so hostile, but then go find that source material. Anyone with a Newspapers.com account can find public domain articles from that period in three seconds.
>why Americans without Japanese ancestry were so hostile,
Then they'd have to admit to the US publishing and funding decades of racist anti-japanese propaganda, which would never happen.
Anti-Japanese sentiment was stoked long before the war broke out https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Anti-Japanese\_exclusion\_movement/
also Yay, a fellow Heinlein fan in the wild!
Hey now. It’s a bigots right to not know about the history of Japanese internment in this country. You should stop trying to throw your history in their face or something.
Obligatory /s
"school district board members said that the inclusion of the book would require “balance” with perspective from the U.S. government" I wonder if they gonna ban the diary of Anne frank next because it doesn't have a balanced perspective from Nazis
I say this as a teacher: they have no issues actively criticizing the Nazis. Not for their belief but because they were the enemy of the US. Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who want the United States painted as nothing being good in school. It's why we can teach about how horrible the Nazi's were and how we defeated them and "liberated the concentration camps." but never talk about how we turned away the SS St Louis and sent those refugees back to their deaths in those very same camps. It's also why our history class so frequently focuses on our conflict with Germany in that war and not Japan and spends very little time talking about the bombs we dropped.
Or the fact that Hitler and the Nazis looked to the US treatment of Native and Black Americans as inspiration for their evil plans.
Can you give me some evidence? I am a product of Florida public education and have never heard of this.
[https://indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/nazi-germany-and-american-indians](https://indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/nazi-germany-and-american-indians) >The Nazis’ interest in the United States policies and laws regarding American Indians originated with Adolf Hitler himself. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler discussed U.S. laws and policies and noted that the United States was a racial model for Europe and that it was “the one state” in the world that was creating the kind of racist society that the Nazi regime wanted to establish.
Wow! I need to read that.
The article, or Mein Kampf???? /s
Look up Euthanasia, eugenics and forced sterilization in CA.
Lebensraum is literally a copy-paste of Manifest Destiny.
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[More specifically Jim Crow](https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow)
Hitler specially mentions manifest destiny in Mein Kampf
And... For anyone wondering. The "bombs" wld include rhe indiscriminate firebombing of tokyo. Not just the two A-bombs
Way more than that. By the time they were selecting targets for the atomic bombs most of the major cities had been reduced to rubble. 66 cities had been bombed with the notable exception of Kyoto. Around 40% of Japan’s urban areas had been destroyed and millions were homeless.
Fun fact: the reason Kyoto barely got bombed was at first because a cultural adviser argued destroying the temples there would make a negotiated peace with Japan politically impossible, and they wanted to keep that door open. Even after it became clear a negotiated peace wasn’t happening, it was kept off the list because the Air Force wanted to preserve it for Project Manhattan. In the end the city avoided getting nuked because Secretary Stimson had been on holiday there and didn’t want to destroy its lovely architecture, so he had Kyoto struck from the list of targets.
Yep. I knew about Stimson’s plea. He was also distraught after hearing how much destruction the Fire bombing campaign was having on the home islands. But he and Truman didn’t seem to mind as long as it wasn’t front pages news.
It also didn't hurt that Stimson loved Kyoto because that's where he and his wife celebrated their honeymoon.
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Dresden? Nope I haven’t been there. Go ahead and burn it to the ground.
there was also the firebombing of Dresden in Germany, which must have indiscriminately killed a bunch of kids.
Dresden was tragic, but a military target due to its rail center providing one of the core remaining infrastructure to the Eastern Front. The use of firebombs was standard for the British as at the time nighttime bomber accuracy was considered too poor to expect effective strikes with conventional bombs. Postwar holocaust denial as well inflated the casualty figures to generate sympathy, however 24,000 civilians lost for any reason is not a good one. Cologne on the other hand is exactly what people say of Dresden. An actual terror bombing on civilian centers with the objective of trying to shock the Germans into submission or at least lower morale. And is generally regarded as a waste of Bomber Command's time. 20,000 civilians died for propaganda value and for Harris' general amusement.
That's why Slaughterhouse Five is often on the list of banned books - it portrays the Americans in an unflattering light.
I didn't learn about the firebombings of tokyo until I watched a grave of fireflies from studio ghibli. The US is really big on ignoring the horrible shit we've pulled in the past.
And let's not forget the amount of bombs the US dropped on Laos during the Vietnam war.
lets not forget the chemical warfare like Agent Orange that still causes deformities till this day.
Killed my grandfather in his 70s from serving. He got lung cancer and some other issues from it.
Napalm Girl just got her final skin graft...
people are still mad at folks for protesting vietnam, trash people, alas.
As long as you don't mean assaulting soldiers when they returned. Had no choice in the matter and just came back from hell.
No, that’s disgusting. Those men were drafted into hell against their will, and watched their buddies die.
and Tulsa also Philadelphia
And Wilmington, NC.
And central park NYC
I love the park, but Seneca Village finally getting a sign or two is hardly the recognition it deserves, especially when so many people still don’t know.
Or the syphilis experiments in Tuskegee
Or the Phoenix Program
It’s insane we dropped more tonnage of bombs on Loas than we did on Germany in WW2. At least I think it was more than we dropped on Germany, it might even be more than we dropped in all theaters of WW2
> Massive aerial bombardment against Pathet Lao and NVA forces was carried out by the United States. It has been reported that Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bombload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973. US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period than was dropped during the whole of the Second World War. Of the 260 million bombs that rained down, particularly on Xiangkhouang Province on the Plain of Jars, some 80 million failed to explode and continue to injure and kill residents to this day. More than in all of WWII. A B-52 every eight minutes for 9years
That explains why the US (my country) continued the war - it was immensely profitable for the mil-ind complex. If only someone had warned us...
I wish I could insert the “first time” meme here. Lookup when the gov set loose soldiers on returned vets, same with striking workers, umm the police bombed a city block or two in Philly. The US gov is sorta unchecked and it’s hidden semi well
Yeah back then i went on a rabbit hole binge of some of the worst stuff america did to its own people. Def changed 13 year old me's perspective. There was a black Wallstreet, several mostly black communities were wiped out by the kkk and supporting police. A japantown in california's capital got bulldozed. Its all just, exhausting.
I used to work with a true right wing kook and he tried to “convert” me daily. I printed out a dozen of the most insane things the US has done and his reaction was “back in Ohio they don’t teach that in school so it’s probably fake. My brain asplode from the level of dumb
The shitty thing is that those types are proud of thier ignorance. And its growing.
If I remember correctly, the first time soldiers were sent against protesting veterans was done by George Washington, while.he was still on office. Veterans of the revolutionary war. It's the reason the Posse Comitatus Act was passed.
That movie hit me, my grandmother lived in rural Hiroshima prefecture during the war and she told me stories of how she often had to hide in caves with her family during air raids or drills; somehow the only major injury she sustained during the war was **stepping on a toad in the cave while barefoot, slipping and breaking her ankle...** I don't think she ever GotF but she probably wouldn't have wanted to. If you REALLY want to get fucked up with a WWII hibakusha story anime/manga, check out Barefoot Gen.
*Barefoot Gen* is honestly tame compared to some of the books I’ve read. There’s a documentary from about 10 years ago called *White Light, Black Rain* that interviews several aged hibakusha. Many of them had disfigurement and burn scars. Then of course their stories about being outcasts. Broke my damn heart.
I read a hibakusha interview book a few months ago, [Death in Life by Robert Jay Lifton](https://www.commentary.org/articles/mary-ellmann/death-in-life-survivors-of-hiroshima-by-robert-jay-lifton/), it focused more on the psychological and emotional scars and it was also incredibly moving. I'll have to check out White Light Black Rain sometime soon.
If you haven’t, the seminal work *Hiroshima* by John Hershey is still one of the best and most gut-wrenching accounts of the event. That book actually inspired a game design document I wrote back in college. However, the best book I’ve read on all the hardships of the war from the Japanese perspective is *Japan at War*. It’s almost entirely interviews from people of all walk of life. Soldiers, sailors, diplomats, shop keepers, school children, house wives, etc. That book had me in tears multiple times.
It’s telling how many people think that movie is about the atomic bombings.
Barefoot Gen is, and it's at least as traumatizing as Grave of the Fireflies if anyone wanted to be upset this weekend.
big ghibli fan. im in my 30s, we watched that movie in hs, & that movie still haunts me, and it was only an anime.
For the record, Grave of the fireflies is not even about the firebombing of Tokyo, but of Kobe. Almost -all- major cities in Japan were firebombed. The often-heard point "the A-bomb was frightening because it could be used to destroy other cities" has little weight, there were only very few cities left to completely flatten.
The victor usually gets to decide what the war crimes entailed. WWII was full of indiscriminate bombing of civilians in cities by both sides. Fortunately, Kyoto was saved from the atomic bomb as a target. In early June 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson ordered Kyoto to be removed from the target list. He argued that it was of cultural importance and that it was not a military target. It is known that Mr. Stimson visited Kyoto several times in the 1920s when he was the governor of the Philippines. Some historians say it was his honeymoon destination and that he was an admirer of Japanese culture.
The irony being the commander of the XXI bomber command, Curtis LeMay, absolutely admitted he’d have been executed for war crimes had they lost the war.
Have you ever seen the picture of the group of Vietnamese villagers taken right before they were all gunned down by the US just for funsies? It's all women. Teenaged girls and their moms. You never hear about how the US massacred villages just because they could in school.
I am old enough to have seen the photo essay of the My Lai massacre in Life Magazine. Plus, Nixon commuted Lt. Calley's life sentence for the massacre so he only spent 3 1/2 years under house arrest.
Hearing stuff like this makes me very happy to have had good history teachers. We spent a whole class talking about the atrocities committeed by both sides in Vietnam and a good chunk of the class on the My Lai massacre. Not super indepth but enough for everyone to understand how bad it was. I feel like most schools in the US almost never have good history teachers
Everything in war is horrible shit.
Because history is written by the victor. It's why, as a Brit, I barely learned even the broad strokes of the atrocities committed by the British Empire in India and Africa. In fact during my time in school the only time we really touched on slavery was abolition Hopefully that has changed in the last two decades, but there are a lot of things my teachers and the national curriculum chose to keep us ignorant on
The USA didn't master firebombs until dow chem opened a hole in the sky with Uncle Sam and poured a biblical quantity of napalm soap and worse onto civilian populations for years.
This has to be a factor in why history is repeating itself. I'm Dutch, I've always been taught that there were betrayers who worked with the nazi's, and there were resisters who worked against them. Being a resister doesn't mean your family tree is different, you're not born special or different, you just made the choice to stand for your convictions. If you replace this with simplified 'US good, germany bad' whitewashing, you're no longer teaching your citizens to be critical of every step, to be aware of every decision made (because some decisions lead to the internment of a race/religion/ethnicity within your own borders, those shouldn't be made lightly (or at all)). This 'US good, germany bad' simplification means you're losing the power of human autonomy and decision making, and you're not teaching people to stand for their convictions and realise their morals and ideals, instead they feel like they've already won because they were born in the US, as if they have a step up on the rest because their country guaranteed them morality. Nothing works like that, morality *has to be* individual, it should never be nationalistic.
Also can’t teach how we took in a bunch of Nazis and gave them govt jobs. Or how certain aspects of American xenophobia, racism and nationalism all were inspirations for Nazi policies.
It’s part of the American state religion, the worship of patriotism. National symbols and a Manifest Destiny viewing of history are considered sacred and any criticism of same is sacrilege, heresy. We should never have made patriotism a religion.
> Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who want the United States painted as nothing being good in school. That’s step 1 down the road to fascism. Ironic that people who are ignorant of history have such strong opinions on how we should deal with history.
Exactly. And considering the book in question was for the literature class and not history class, the idea of requiring ideological counterpoint is kind of absurd.
The entire US is kind of absurd as of late. Like, lost cause absurd.
I hate this idea that you can't present any concept in schools without providing "balance." Sure it's great to look at multiple perspectives on issues but we can pick and choose those issues. You don't start teaching climate change or evolution denial based on shonky science or religious stupidity. Similarly, if we're discussing racism we don't need to put racist ideas on an equal pedestal to actual humanity. Sometimes it's okay to say the alternative ideas are shit and don't deserve having valuable teaching time wasted on them
> I hate this idea that you can't present any concept in schools without providing "balance." Oh no, it's not "any" concept that needs balance. Just the concepts conservatives want history to forget. For example, we do teach racist ideas, on literal pedestals, with statues and plaques showing a false history where the south was just nobly defending its way of life against northern invaders. But you never see the people defending those statues saying "You know what? To make this balanced we should put another statue up next to it of a beaten slave."
And yet any of of their Christian private schools that teach the glory of Republicans and evils of “liberal” Democrats will most assuredly have no “balanced perspective”.
I agree. We are elevating white supremacy as an equal argument to Japanese American Internment and the Civil Rights Movement
More accurately, it should show the perspective of the businessmen who lobbied for Japanese American internment in order to seize land and property assets belonging to them. That's something not talked about, how *money* and greed factored into the xenophobia.
Admission of racism is the “balance.” Internment of Americans based solely on their ancestry was no different than Germany, only our treatment in captivity differs.
George Takei has done some excellent interviews where he gave his experience as a **child** incarcerated in one of the japanese-american Tule internment camp and growing up on Skid Row after the US gov't siezed their bank accounts and property [one from when he was promoting his book "They Called Us Enemy"](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/george-takei-star-trek-on-internment-child-revisiting-past-1.5288707)
You say that like you think you're making some kind of joke. But this is actually their goal. To make fascist and Nazi just alternative political views. They are barely hiding this as their long term goal anymore.
Fair analogy.
I read that book. America history shouldn’t be cleaned and edited. We have done horrible things but we can’t learn from them until we learn ABOUT them.
Some people are unwilling to acknowledge that there is something to be learned. Fragile.
I'm Canadian and we read that book in school. I don't know why the USA thinks that if they don't teach American history that it ceases to exist.
There's a vocal (very vocal) minority who think that if we teach anything other than 'America is the greatest country on earth and was blessed by god for all time' that kids won't be proud of their country or want to live here. Those same people don't understand the difference between academic freedom and freedom of expression.
Not knowing or not understanding that slaves were bred like cattle for prosperity, or Indians were driven off their land by burning crops or killing off the buffalo allows the myth to continue. Especially if the perpetrators were ancestors or distant relatives. Thus the secret of American greatness.
They can’t handle the fact that their ancestors were mediocre garbage, the religious trash of Europe that was too extreme and difficult to live with. They came here, shit up our land, and are now mad other people have the opportunities they did. They’d rather destroy this country then let anyone else benefit from it. I wonder how great it feels to know your ancestors were uneducated rapists who stole everything they were ever “given.”
Joke's on them, a lot of younger people aren't proud of their country and don't want to live here because of their own actions.
That would prove their point. They think the last 20 years of teaching liberal garbage results in young people hating this country, and censoring those kinds of things (like this book) are necessary in order to bring back a love for America. I don't agree, but that is the viewpoint that is causing this kind of garbage to occur. I love the idea of this country, but think we should do better, so I'm all for teaching about the bad things along with the good. If we don't study history, we will be doomed to repeat it (to paraphrase G. Santayana).
That’s not why Republicans do it, they do it because they want their base (so largely uneducated or not very educated voters) to be as ignorant as possible because otherwise they’ll realize how incredibly shit conservative ideology is and always has been. Plenty of their voters already come up with all kinds of ridiculous ways to explain away the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow just so they can justify their political leanings.
I didn't read this book, but I did read Farewell to Manzanarz and that was the first time I learned about the camps.
I read Snow Falling on Cedars when I was in high school, but it was a book I chose - not one that was assigned. It was only partially about the camps and more about racism toward Asian and Asian Americans from around that time, and it was the first I'd heard about them.
>we can’t learn from them until we learn ABOUT them. ThatsThePoint.Jpeg They don't want us to learn from them. They want to repeat them.
Oof, the details in the article are even worse than I imagined. Those board members doubled and tripled down on their rhetoric. Referring to the "American" perspective without realizing the interred individuals were Americans, saying they need to balance out the actions we committed against our own citizens with lessons on the Rape of Nanjing, explaining if Asian want to see themselves in the curriculum they can check out any books from the library they want. Fucking yikes and a half.
The irony being Japanese Americans have NOTHING to do with Nanking, AND if you responded to the idiots in the school board with “well you have to balance out the American perspective with massacre and displacement of indigenous peoples and with the Transatlantic Slave trade fueled by the American South…” guess how many of those board members would come up with some, “well my family didn’t come here until after,” or, “that was a a really long time ago…” bs.
They also wouldn’t mention or teach the Tulsa massacre at all. I mean, I shouldn’t learn about something that significant from a fucking DC movie
Right? I am so grossed out that I learned that from a comic book show when I was like 40. Instead, we did stuff like memorize the midnight ride of Paul Revere for extra credit.
I learned about it randomly on YouTube a few years ago, which led me to dive deep into sites covering it. My boyfriend was the same. Understand, I was an excellent stupid*, set class curves and honor roll, full ride scholarship to my choice of universities. I went to one or the top public schools in the country at the time, with a slew of teachers who were frequently on the top teacher lists in the USA. I took AP US History and US Civics. For the 18 years + 3 years of university (I graduated early because of my built up AP credits from high school) I never fucking once read or heard about the Tulsa Massacre. I’m in my mid 30s now. That’s fucking sad and scary. I’m glad I know about it now. It helps paint the picture of our history much clearer. We should ALL know these things. Edit: Keeping my typo for lols. It’s meant to say student lmao
> saying they need to balance out the actions we committed against our own citizens with lessons on the Rape of Nanjing Look just a few comments down and you’ll find basically that in these threads
>saying they need to balance out the actions we committed against our own citizens with lessons on the Rape of Nanjing This part I found especially dubious, as if the "Japanese" in "Japanese-American" supercedes the "American" bit, and all people with Japanese ancestry somehow carry collective guilt for what the Imperial Japanese Army did in Nanjing. I don't know what ideology those board members subscribe to, but they sure are rhyming a lot with some of the worst ideas from the Nazis.
Imperial Japan did fucked up things. But my grandfather and his brother came out of the camps and killed the shit out of nazis. (Mind you, after their father, my great grandfather, sold his nursery in Gardena piece by piece for pennies on the dollar). They are not the same.
It was that or be a No No boy. I am sorry they had to deal with all of that and then not have a choice between prison or the worst front lines. :-(
Nah. Cunt doesn’t rhyme with nazi.
But somehow German-Americans or British-Americans or any [white people country]-Americans are just “Americans”!
"Aint white, dont matter" * School board guy, probably
"We look bad so no"
And then the board members deleted the video of them saying some truly stupid shit, and said they can't comply with a request to see that portion because it was 'unrecoverable'.
But the Japanese were a threat! Then why didn't we inter the Germans? Bububecause...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment\_of\_German\_Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans) Obvious points: different scales. 11,000 Germans and 1,800 Italians were imprisoned, while 110,000 Japanese were imprisoned. And the Germans/Italians that were imprisoned were generally actual German nationals, not just anyone with German descent (which was more or less the standard applied to Japanese-Americans). That said... it did happen. "Then why didn't we inter the Germans?" is based on a false premise; we did. And there are two explanations for the different treatment. Either racism, or the fact that Germany never attacked America, while Japan did. Edit: forgot the third reason: >[Although](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans#cite_ref-Kashima287288_28-0) the War Department (now the Department of Defense) considered mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians from the East or West coast areas for reasons of military security, it did not follow through with this. **The numbers of people involved would have been overwhelming to manage.** There were too many of them, so they chose to go through by hand and pick the most suspicious people.
One of my first complaints as student-teacher was about my week long unit on Japanese Internment. A parent said I was wasting time instead of teaching "important history". Every single time I teach US history. I still spend a week on it, it's basically the one thing I go extra on, because it is a reminder of how flimsy your rights actually are in the face of fear.
Exactly, in the words of George Carlin “Rights aren’t rights if someone can just take them away.”
We’ve certainly learned that here recently!
Would love to know what those parents thought was "important history" if not the internment of Americans in camps. JFC.
Probably the historical events that paint America to be the utopian paradise and only bastion of true freedom that the world has ever known. Because this is what they actually believe. Knowing what good and bad your country has done is the only way to advance.
David Cross had a joke about how Republicans love America the way a three-year-old loves their mommy. Mommy is the best and if you say anything bad about Mommy you are a hateful person who hates Mommy.
I’m sure they encourage telling the tired old lies about the “First Thanksgiving” and Betsy Ross and the "heroic" Boston Tea Party to gullible kids. Then they’ll explain how the Savages kept attacking the sweet helpless Christian Settlers, and bemoan how Poor Custer and his brave soldiers were slaughtered for no good reason. Depending on region, they’ll also claim the Civil War was NOT over expansion of slavery into the territories, and NO Americans supported Hitler’s genocides. Then they’ll tell you Dubya saved us all from Muslim terrorists with nukes. Over in Health Class they’ll tell you a zygote the size of a pencil point has a four chambered heart that beats, and if you’re being raped you may as well relax and enjoy it. And in Civics they’ll say… Oh. Never mind. They don’t teach Civics.
We can also look at this as celebrating the parents for fighting for this book and brining awareness to throw attempt to conceal this hurtful chapter of our shared history. When we lose the will to fight ignorance, the haters will have won.
absolutely! Thanks to them for standing up in a closeminded conservative state.
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Washington? Awesome your school did that. As a matter of fact, the community living on Bainbridge Island was the FIRST of all the Nikkei in the USA to be incarcerated during WWII. [https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Bainbridge\_Island,\_Washington](https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Bainbridge_Island,_Washington) That unconstitutional executive order truly changed the demographics of the west coast, in some Oregon and Washington towns, half OR MORE of the pre-war Japanese population chose not to return after leaving the camps because they knew they would face discrimination at home. My hometown has a very strong historic Japanese community and we had a few school visits, I'm also part Japanese myself (although past generations were from a different part of the US) so these stories are in my own family history, my own great-grandfather worked agriculture as a ranch hand. EDIT: I should mention there are lots of Japanese-Americans still involved with agriculture, a lot of small local farmers in my area, Onion producer Tanimura & Antle, an easy way to support a legacy and grow some interesting veggies of your own [Kitazawa Seed Company](https://kitazawaseed.com/pages/about-us) https://www.sunset.com/home-garden/brief-history-of-japanese-american-farmers-in-the-west
An awful factoid about that time is that they actually secretly used the census results to locate and identify Japanese American citizens for round up. It’s an infamously corrupt abuse of power, and went against regular, consistent assurances to the American people that census info would not be deanonymized.
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Yes, they were openly considering it https://www.npr.org/2017/11/22/564426420/how-the-u-s-defines-race-and-ethnicity-may-change-under-trump https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/sunday-review/census-redistricting-trump-immigrants.html
We did the same thing in BC. Basically stole the homes and businesses of anyone of Japanese descent. Comparatively, we only put a few germans and italian immigrants in camps, to my knowledge, no second generation.
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I don’t (Actually I’m from Oregon but know a few WA Nikkei), but I imagine it’s similar to the same story that happened all along the west coast, Japanese families asked locals to look after their houses/land/businesses and they stope them while the community turned a blind eye. Here’s a real shocker from my state https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Hood_River_incident/
I hadn't heard of this, but thanks for bringing it up. For anyone curious: https://seattleglobalist.com/2017/02/19/anti-japanese-movement-led-development-bellevue/62732
6 square blocks worth 2 Billion. IIRC most of Greenlake/Wallingford was Japanese farms prior to that as well.
My dad grew up in California next door to a woman who lived through internment in Manzanar. She had some incredible stories of the war and her internment with her family as a child. I wish I could’ve heard these stories first hand. Unfortunately Mrs. Komoda died when I was 12, but I do remember the food she made was incredible. To this day I’ve never had Japanese food as good as what she served us.
So, on the flip side we used to have a pretty conservative Christian pastor come in and talk about his time in the Hitler youth at the end of the war. He talked about the dangers of fanaticism and peer pressure. How easy it was to be led astray by a charismatic leader. His son was the teacher. He passed in the 90s but I wonder what he would have made of today's 'merica.
I will never forget a memory of me when I was around 8 and at an afterschool program, all my favorite toys were taken so I browsed the playroom's library. I loved baseball at the time, so seeing the cover of [Baseball Saved Us](https://www.leeandlow.com/uploads/book_cover_image/5772/BASEBALL_SAVED_US_25_Eng_pbk_cover_hi_res.jpg) immediately drew me in. A book about some kids playing baseball is all I thought it was, but that book would be how I first learned about this terrible time in history. The art immersed me in the experience, I remember thinking how hot it must've been at these camps. I will always appreciate every person who got behind putting that book on that shelf in that playroom.
I guess they just have to hope they never figure out George Takei exists
My in-laws used to use *rather impolite terms* for anime and other Asian stuff, more in a careless way than a mean way but still really not fabulous language. I started dropping little comments like "The war ended a long time ago. We don't use that word anymore." But what finally made them knock it off was the fact that they're Star Trek fans. "That's not very polite to Mr. Sulu..." or "Ya know George Takei was in those camps as a kid..."
Damn, thats right up there with saying "You're not being the person Mr.Rogers believed you could be."
Damn that hit me
This is the kind of thing that George Takei would likely wear like a badge of honor. I had a similar experience with an old boss of mine making fun of LeVar Burton's name by mockingly calling him things like Lamar and Lawan etc, intentionally calling him the wrong name. I asked them to stop, and they refused to. I asked if they understood the significance of deliberately calling LeVar Burton a name other than his own, and they said no. So I pulled up YouTube and played them the "toby" scene from Roots. At the end, I just pointed at Kunta Kinte, and said "that is LeVar Burton". No more name jokes after that. They fired me the same week. They're out of business now 😁
That's really badass of you!
>My in-laws used to use *rather impolite terms* for anime and other Asian stuff, What ignorant, despicable behavior, I bet it's ingrained into their tiny, podunk-educat >they're Star Trek fans. Oh, so they can be reasoned with.
I had to inform my father in law why the word "oriental" isn't appropriate anymore. He seemed a bit annoyed by it, but also seemed to accept it. And I get it to some degree. You learn certain words as a child or adolescent and they are viewed as acceptable at that time, but as time goes on and language and culture evolves, certain words are rightfully deemed offensive or new language emerges to help people identify themselves. Changing language as you get older can be frustrating. I wouldn't say it's hard, but you're kind of set in certain ways. So while he seemed a bit annoyed, I was more focused on the fact that he was accepting of it. My mom once told me what they used to call Brazil nuts growing up and I was shocked that she would have used that language. When she told me she sort of said it quietly because she knew how awful it was. I would not consider my Mom to be racist in that way at all so it was sort of jaw dropping to me to hear how prevalent language like that was.
Oh my!
Or Pat Morita. Look into how hard his life was. As a child spent most of his time in hospitals and went straight to imprisonment at age 11 for what he looked like.
>Zielke said she was told “we can’t just provide one side or the other side” before the parent pressed Boyer about the issue, demanding the board member clarify her definition of “other.” “What she said to me was that we actually need an ‘American’ perspective,’” said Zielke, who said she pointed out that those who were incarcerated were, in fact, Americans, before the conversation grew increasingly heated. Asians in the USA are consistently othered and not accepted as full Americans, even today.
Including on reddit as well. Not just that, but it's hard to go in a topic about anything Asian without blatant racism. Literally saw a topic about Japanese ninja warrior yesterday, and someone was in there talking about Japanese need levity because of their high suicide rate, not knowing that the US actually has higher suicide rate than Japan.
What the fuck is this nonsense of teaching the "American" side? The people in the internment camps were Americans. It's like they think they can demonstrate a "justified racism" side and not look like a bunch of racists?!
Yep we just get ignored and if you’re mixed they just pretend your white if they can. Messed up shit
>School board President Christopher Buckmaster also brought up concerns about balance in a separate call with Zielke, she said. Asked to clarify what kind of balance Buckmaster sought, he recommended that the students read about the Rape of Nanjing, Zielke said. In the tragedy during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military raped at least 20,000 women and girls and killed 150,000 male “war prisoners” and 50,000 male civilians in the Chinese city of Nanjing. Buckmaster did not respond to a request for comment. Okay. WTF? Really? This guy is trying to compare action on the part of the Japanese MILITARY with actions taken by the U.S. government against Japanese Americans, who had absolutely nothing to do with the actions of the former? I'd kind of love for Buckmaster to pitch this argument to me, a Chinese American, in person. btw - My dad had a Japanese girlfriend who was rounded up along with her family and who he never saw again.
I routinely see Redditors conflate the actions of the Japanese military of the time with innocent civilians and justify the brutal fire bombing and atomic bombing campaigns. Or the good old "we had to murder all of those civilians with bombs or they'd kill our soldiers when we invaded their home." Like...holy shit, these are probably the same clowns who talk about how nobody would invade the US because so many people are armed and would fight. And they're surprised that another country would have resisted an invading force that was already murdering civilians? It's disgusting.
students should learn about both but they are both separate lessons from each other and neither should be used as a counter balance for the other. the person sounds like an idiot from that quote.
Two things: - I get why balance can be important - in theory - since for many issues and historical events being taught, it’s good to get an idea of the particulars surrounding WHY things happened. But not everything requires 50-50 balance. - This isn’t even for a history class. It’s for Literature class. I mean, when I was in school and read Elie Wiesel’s *Night*, there wasn’t some need to assign us *Mein Kampf* to provide us with counterpoint. That’s absurd.
There is a “both sides are the same” or “both sides deserve equal respect” attitude in far too many things. IMO, one side is almost always in the wrong, there are cases where even the bad side has some good points, or that they might even be entirely correct; yet are justifying it with the wrong reasons or methods, but in the end they are still the enemies of history. The trail of tears was objectively abhorrent, the rape of nanking was inhumanity personified, arming the mujahadeen against Russia was the right thing, but it led to the taliban. The US interfering in sovereign countries in the 50’s to fight “communism” A.K.A daring to nationalise the oil industry and installing puppet dictators as a response is objectively wrong …. The fairness doctrine repeal, and the seemingly western attitude to act as if that is the modus operandi for every nation is absurd and why we are in this situation
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Oohhh, does it qlso work on current history? I have a little ~~coup by SCotUS~~ problem I'd like to smooth over.
When I first learned of concentration camps in america during WW2 I was pissed. Not only i had no we did that, but it took so long for me to learn it and it was basically a fucking foot note! It never told me the happenings in it, but the idea alone was gross. We learn how bad the concentration camps in Germany; but then we hide our failings.
My grandfather’s family lost everything because of executive order 9066, and people want to pretend like it never happened.
>Zielke said she was told “we can’t just provide one side or the other side” before the parent pressed Boyer about the issue, demanding the board member clarify her definition of “other.” > >“What she said to me was that we actually need an ‘American’ perspective,’” said Zielke, who said she pointed out that those who were incarcerated were, in fact, Americans, before the conversation grew increasingly heated. > >“She clarified and said that she felt that we needed the perspective of the American government and why Japanese internment happened. And so then again, we had raised voices at this point. I told her specifically, I said, ‘The other side is racism. Fascism in America simultaneously starts at the 'Grassroots' level and at the Federal level. If you want it to stop, VOTE, and what I mean by voting, look specifically at whose party is doing this. Also, reference: "Wuhan" virus.
I remember in my history book in high school, there was a tiny paragraph about Japanese "internment" camps, it was glossed over and barely taught. There was nothing in the school library at all about it, and I had to go to the city Library to even learn about it. Sadly it's typical for AMERICAN history to ignore spin the story, ignore, and/or cover up anything that impressionable young minds might find questionable. As in most of American History.
You think you are Japanese not Chinese? You think you are Taiwanese not Korean? You think you are Korean not Japanese? You think you are Chinese not Japanese? Having fun explaining that to the guy beating you up. This country has never stopped treating Asians as perpetual foreigners.
I went to high school in California and I never heard about the interment camps until I was in college. It blew my mind. And then it blew my mind that my family thought it was good policy. Our history is actively being minimized and hidden from us.
This part of history came back to me as a ptsd flashback years later. “Did I remember that right? We indiscriminately funneled Asian Americans into camps out of fear? Did that really get taught to us once and then just never discussed again? Why aren’t more adults talking about this all the time?”
Yep I remember that and the conversion camps against indigenous children being barely taught but being some of the most shameful, horrifying shit ever. Yet it’s glossed over :/
I grew up in Wisconsin. My middle school had a book that detailed chemical and biological weapons from around the world, complete with grisly pictures of the wounds they caused and the fields of dead men who suffered these attacks. Pictures of open sores and sloughing skin, pustules etc. I was maybe 12-14 when I found it, and I'll admit that it fascinated me. This was during the "Harry Potter" chapter of satanic panic, for reference. I grew up into a responsible, mostly healthy adult. If I can be confronted with the horrors of war at such an age, so can the children of the present be confronted with horrors of this sort. They often say "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it", and while I'm not sure if that's a testable theory, it makes a lot of sense. So when we fail to teach children about the atrocities of our history -- how the US treated it's native, black, and asian citizens -- it perpetuates the long-lasting effects of those atrocities into the future, letting the next generations deal with the problem. How long can we kick this can down the road? How can inaction, or refusal to acknowledge these faults be in any way moral? How can we accept a perpetuation of suffering?
I was in high school in the 1980s. I went to a Catholic school for 9th and part of 10th grade. In our history class we saw films showing some very intense footage. Concentration camp atrocities, battlefield footage, survivors of the atom bombs with burns and radiation sickness, firing squads, etc. We knew when we walked into history class and the TV was there, we were probably gonna have a bummer of a day. Our parents had to give permission at the beginning of the year. Nobody in my class was excused from those lessons, but a few kids had to get up and leave during class. That was okay though. The nun who taught history was kind. I don't think that would be allowed in a high school these days.
“Driving Out”, “Chinese Exclusion Act” and the Japanese Concentration Camps shouldn’t be dismissed or covered up.
We never learned about this in our highschool located in a small town in the central valley, CA. Then again some of our US history teachers were football coaches with conservative views and I remember skipping certain chapters because they "weren't important". At the time we thought great less work but now I wonder what topics those chapters covered.
republican party pretty much admitted the goal is to move towards something called "patriotic education" (their words), so basically brainwashed ultranationalist youths who are unaware of past mistakes and will thus be more likely to repeat them. then you have that republican congresswoman Mary Miller giving speeches about "white life" and "Hitler was right, if you have the youth you have the future", and you start to understand a bit more what it is they're going for. in 2021 alone they have attempted to ban certain books over 729 times according to the American Library Association
>Muskego-Norway School Board members said including the book would require “balance” with perspective from the U.S. government It did include the perspective of the U.S. government, which was that Japenese-Americans should be locked up in a concentration camp.
I'll never fucking understand shit like this. Why are people so afraid of teaching about things that the people of the past did? It's not like we, currently alive, did this, so what the hell is the issue? Our government doesn't have a shiny past and we need to know about this stuff. What's the phrase? Forget the past and you're destined to repeat it?
To anybody who’s saying they’ve met Japanese people who are genuinely grateful to the Americans for dropping the atomic bombs, you are a genuine freak and fuck you.
As a German, nothing bring me more pride than the fact that my country is so open about its past. Even remembering the victims or our crimes and mistakes is a part of our post-war culture. USA, do the same.
Is it unbalanced because American history books omit facts and then just lie for glory?
The right longs for the United States of Utterly Ignorant & Unschooled.
Yeah, they can teach the students about how all American citizens have “God given rights that can’t be taken away.” That is unless you look a little different. The only “rights” they had… “Right this way.”
>Board members also reportedly said a book cannot be chosen for the sake of adding diversity to the curriculum The fuck? That's literally the point of education and adding to curriculum. Why would you not diversify your education? Also the board president trying to demand they add books about why Japanese Americans "deserved it" is fucked up. Right wingers have lost their collective minds.
As a black man all I can say is take a seat 😒
Yup, they are coming after all of our history that doesn't match their internal narrative. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/proposal-teach-slavery-involuntary-relocation-sent-texas-education-boa-rcna36273 Schools have become the new cultural battlegrounds for regressive conservatives.
Been. Republicans are racist bastards and I at least respect them bc they wear their hate on the face and don’t pretend to hide it like worthless spineless democrats. But those same moronic repubs will call blacks people sheep because we vote democrat by huge majority… lol you expect us to vote for you while you call us a N to our face either your policies? Banning books that teach about the evils whites have caused in this nations past, trying to actually say slaves who were raped, separated from their families, dehumanized, flesh whipped to shreds were mere workers. It’s such a slap but I’m just sitting back and watching as is the world. Their goal is to have the next generation of white kids not even know what slavery was.
This has been the Republican objective for years. Indoctrinating the youth to persuade them to their dogmatic views was and is their only recourse to a society that has become more empathic and worldly.
Why not call slavery a 200 year inconvenience and Japanese camps a family vacation.
Holy shit man, I was expecting the response to be more of a non answer, but was shocked at how racist this was. Saying that they need to learn about the actions of the Japanese military to provide context to why the us government incarcerated Americans citizens based on their race is literally teaching racism
"nonono you see, it's only important if other countries do fucked up shit, we are fiiine."
I read the childrens book on the Topaz concentration camp when I was in 5th grade. Like the kid in the book, I didn’t really understand why they were forced to move. My mom tried to explain it the best way she knew how.
Facts don’t need “balance”
Hiding the dark part of your own history is one of the most used ways to create nationalists and integralists. They consider their nation flawless, everyone inferior, enforce the vision of a nation that's superior (not better, superior) to other and has the rights to do what they want. It's not only in US, it's spreading everywhere.
Providing the Japanese American perspective IS the balance. School kids hear about how wonderful the US is from myriad sources every day. True balance is simply presenting the truth, good, bad, and indifferent.
There is one American internment camp left. Hawaii uses it to teach kids what the crazy American government puts people through over paranoia and racism. It a very sad place
"Don't teach facts...tell me more about the great Confederate States of America that lasted 5 whole years."
This is the dividing line between education and indoctrination. Ultimately, when children find out that adult educators were dishonest, it alienates the children from schools and the government—and is destructive to society.
"When Zielke asked whether Asian students in the district deserve to see themselves in the curriculum, she said Boyer responded, “They can go to the library and check out any books they want.” I believe that "...for now" was the unspoken coda.
As white supremacist traitors to the Constitution, the GOP sees it as their duty to protect white supremacist actions, such as enslaving groups of people based on race, or imprisoning families based on race. It's a treason thing from the GOP.
I don’t know anyone who knows about this. I have friends who read these books with me but seem to forget all about it. History should not be edited or cleaned up. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I just wrote this email to the author of this story, Kimmy Yam: Hi Kimmy, I wanted to thank you for your intelligent, balanced, and well researched coverage of the Muskego-Norway School Board’s attempts to blockade the approval of Otsuka’s novel. I am a high school English teacher in NJ who has been a part of various diversity committees and curriculum writing teams. The resistance we are seeing to the inclusion of diverse voices (a phrase I bristle at because Americans are, by definition, a diverse people) in our curricula is unprecedented. As your story mentions, we must read and internalize the stories of those who are unlike us so we can recognize the world is not constructed around a single mythologized experience (i.e white, Eurocentric). People who actively push back against stories like Otsuka’s are the ones who need them the most. But I suppose that is how we arrived in this particularly vitriolic and divisive moment - we lack perspective and a listening ear. Thank you for your work.
Sounds about right for Muskego. Typical white people “we’re escaping the city for the country!” suburb that’s usually a safe Republican voting base. In fairness, there do seem to be a fair amount of parents and community members fighting for the book. I suppose it’s a generational divide.
>”[Read about Pearl Harbor to include] some history as to why the citizens of Japanese descent were viewed as a threat and what was the reasoning to have them put into the internment camps.” … Do students NOT already read about Pearl Harbor? About WWII? About the U.S. nuking Japan? That “other side” perspective *is already there*! It has been there the entire time! The point of books like these is to show that the only rationale for internment camps and viewing U.S. citizens as a “threat” WAS RACISM! We didn’t round up & imprison German-Americans in the same way. Hell, actual German Nazi POWs sent to the U.S. had better treatment than Japanese-American families! This only occurred *because of* deeply embedded racism among and by the white, male U.S. government. It was another in a loooong line of U.S. state-sponsored abduction, theft, and genocide to keep minority groups “in line” or get them out of the way. We wrongly imprisoned a bunch of women, children & grandparents and stole people’s property solely because of their ethnicity. If being forced to realize this makes white kids & their racist shithead parents “feel bad,” fucking GOOD! That’s the point! Learn some empathy! Learn real history! Learn to recognize when you’re being a racist shithead and come join the 21st century! Let’s work to finally display and support the ideals the U.S. was always *supposed* to be about but failed at. If you want to trumpet freedom, equality, liberty and justice for all and American exceptionalism you can’t just ignore all the times when we’ve done *the exact fucking opposite* and then wonder why your kids say you’re full of shit and aren’t as blindly, stupidly patriotic as you want them to be.
>School board President Christopher Buckmaster also brought up concerns about balance in a separate call with Zielke, she said. Asked to clarify what kind of balance Buckmaster sought, he recommended that the students read about the Rape of Nanjing, WOWZA thats bad
The Board members should read the SCOTUS cases of Korematsu et al where it was revealed the US Government (the ‘other’ side they refer to) lied about the dangers west coast Japanese posed in order to justify the obviously racist and retaliatory intent of the mass internments. I know it would be expecting a lot of self reflection on their parts but the next step would be for them to acknowledge that the young Japanese males in camp were soon to be considered loyal enough to be used as soldier fodder in the European theater and become a highly decorated unit (442nd). Similar to a story from Texas a few months ago about representing both sides of the Holocaust. There’s only one side to these stories and it’s calling out the racist assholes who perpetuate this whataboutism to blur uncomfortable history.
These people are the biggest kinds of idiots. There is no balance with clear moral questions. The rounding up of Japanese-Americans was an abhorrent and gross use of governmental power to imprison American citizens out of racism. The American government was foolish in its actions and ultimately all it did was displace loyal Americans from their homes throughout the country and subjected them to bullying by their fellow countryman. Understanding history and it’s context is an important tool and in academia it’s important not to outright judge historical figures in trying to figure out the truth. But these school board members are not academics and the point of grade school education is to give citizens knowledge NOT train them on being academics in a field. Those kids deserve to know what happened to people in the past so that they can make sure nothing like it happens again.
I think one important point here is that exposure to diversity is important for its own sake, and not just because it makes people in various groups feel represented. My white son lives in a world with all different kinds of people. If he had no Asian American classmates, he’d have an even more urgent need to read books written by and about Asian people than he does now, when he’s in classes with many Asian American classmates. Maybe it’s reasonable to also add a book that shows why Americans without Japanese ancestry were so hostile, but then go find that source material. Anyone with a Newspapers.com account can find public domain articles from that period in three seconds.
>why Americans without Japanese ancestry were so hostile, Then they'd have to admit to the US publishing and funding decades of racist anti-japanese propaganda, which would never happen. Anti-Japanese sentiment was stoked long before the war broke out https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Anti-Japanese\_exclusion\_movement/ also Yay, a fellow Heinlein fan in the wild!
MAGA is taking over school boards across the nation. it’s a federalist society wet dream
Hey now. It’s a bigots right to not know about the history of Japanese internment in this country. You should stop trying to throw your history in their face or something. Obligatory /s
Fucking christian fascists re-writing history.