RACISM IN "WHITE" AMERICA

I was raised by my grandparents, as i've so often said. There were no racist comments allowed in that house. The one and only time i said nigger in the presence of my grandmother, i literally had my mouth washed out with a bar of soap. My grandparents were conservative democrats, but they had no patience with bigotry. I had always assumed that my mother, having been raised by them, would have thought the same. So, imagine my surprise when i was about to go overseas and my mother, rather nervously, said "Now don't bring back any little slant-eyed bride!" and then laughed (unconvincingly). I guess this hatred of east Asians is a product of Pearl Harbor and the Second World War--but if it is, it missed my grandparents.

Agree. Ignore by button or attention, either way.

adding a memory to my last post - I remember the words, "dirty protestants".
At this point I can't remember the tone, words not used often by my mother and may have been semi sardonic, even probably were. I don't remember her manner as vituperative, maybe half joking. I know she had friends who were protestant, including her best friend in New York (the woman who let me play in her closet). I think I remember that that was kind of news to her. But I was eight..

[img]Hey folks, i would ask that you ignore the obsessional racist troll who is now posting in the thread. He can post to his heart's content with his hateful bullshit, but if we respond, we're just feeding him. [/img]

LOL!

Setanta calling me racist!

Setanta, who evidently thinks that only whites can be racist.

Setanta who evidently believes that pointing out that blacks can be racist too is in itself racism.

Setanta, who evidently believes that pointing out the "liberal" double standard on race is itself "racist".

The irony! The irony!

Oh I forgot:

Setanta is talking about the "liberal" dogma definition of racism.

Yeh. My aunt's husband worked for Douglas, died just after whatever the plane they were working on was finished, guessing in '44. (I've a photo but manage not to memorize it), and Douglas bigwigs used to pay her visits for a long time later. He was a tool and dye guy, some sort of liaison between workers and management. Anyway, lot of fear was apparently ongoing on the west coast back then. The family church was in Sawtelle, which they used to walk to (look at the catholics, peered people from behind curtains, according to what mother and aunt said, describing when they first lived there back in the twenties.) Sawtelle is the old name for the w.l.a. streets of japanese businesses and families, which underwent a certain decimation back in the day.

So, she only shook her head that I worked with japanese americans and later an actual (hi, Nori!) japanese person. There was nothing I could say to bounce her out of her view.
On the other hand, she was very involved re a woman down the street with a number on her arm, genuinely caring.

I think Setanta has been easy with you because your name rhymes with food, and everytime he sees one of your posts he goes off to make himself a sandwich.

In the children's home where I spent almost 10 years there were only European (white) kids. Never heard anyone say anything considered "racist" though. There were kids who looked a little Latino, obviously the Spanish part was the mother. Odd, altogether, it seems now.

Can't you get it right? It's sammich!

Not to natter at you, Pem - have you written an article (or maybe a book?) about your experience?

We have demonstrably awful foster care these days -
I bet you could shed some light - not that you would just have easy answers re the system.

Obviously the spanish part was the mother?
I'm trying to follow that thought - the mother would have been pregnant and the father disappearant?
Not to get invasive with my question - not re you, but generally.

On the west coast and in California in particular, the anti-Japanese bias goes back to the 19th century. Special legislation was passed in California to prohibit Japanese children from being enrolled in the public schools where little white babies went.

That obsessive hatred of the Japanese in the World War II generation was still being repeated in the late 1960s, twenty years after the war ended. In California, where the Japanese were already the target of an obsessive bigotry, it's understandable if still descpicable. But for the rest of the country, the attack on Hawaii was a profound shock and an humiliation. I think both the idiot conspiracy theories about FDR and Pearl Harbor, and the obsessive hatred of the Japanese stem from the fact that the Pearl Harbor attack completely contradicted the then prevailing racist stereotype of the Japanese.

The Japanese attack was one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed naval operations in history. Yamamoto began planning at least as early as November, 1940. He assigned the operational planning to Commander Genda then, and he and Genda came up wtih a training program which he assigned to Commander Fujita, and which Fujita carried out for months before he was told of the target of the operation. The Japanese naval aviators were not told what their target was until the day the First Air Fleet left Japan and began steaming to the east. Operational security was perfect. They crossed the Pacific outside normal sea lanes in complete radio silence and reached a point about three hundred miles north of Hawaii undetected.

Both before and after he was told about the operation, Commander Fujita trained his pilots relentlessly. There were major difficulties to be overcome. The American battleships, built before or during the First World War, had, nevertheless, very heavy deck armor. Standard bombs would have damaged the superstructures, but would not have penetrated the decks, and could not have sunk those ships. The Japanese artificers built "cradles" for 16" armor piercing naval artillery shells for the dive bombers and the high altitude horizontal bombers to use against the battleships which would penetrate the deck armor.

Air-launched torpedoes dive to a hundred feet or more before returning to the surface to begin their run. That would not work in Pearl Harbor, where the ship basin's mean depth was about 30 meters--considerably less than one hundred feet. So, the Japanese artificers created wooden cradles for the torpedoes which broke off on impact with the water, but slowed the torpedoes enough that they did not bury themselves in the mud of the ship basin before surfacing and beginning their run. Fujita and his pilots tested and trained with the weapons until there was no doubt in anyone's minds that they would work as intended.

The incredible stupid complacency of American officers, from Admiral Kimmel and General Short on down to the duty officers working the night before the attack only meant that the Japanese--who expected losses of 10% or more of their aircraft--suffered negligible casualties. By the time the First Air Fleet left Japan, nothing the Americans could have done with the information available to them would have prevented the attack.

That is precisely why Americans were so infuriated. They had long nutured a stereotype of the Japanese as undernourished, bandy-legged, myopic little men, hardly better than monkeys. Yet that despised people struck the United States in the heart of her biggest naval base, and did it with near impunity. Easier to cobble together incredibly stupid conspiracy theories to blame Roosevelt for the attack. Far, far easier to hate the Japanese with an irrational, obsessional hatred, than to acknowledge the magnitude of their accomplishment.

Yeah, I've written some, and still.

Greatest friend on earth, her name was Zona Brewster, her brothers were Zeke and Albert. Nobody ever mentioned that the mother was Mexican, the dad an Englishman named Brewster.

Man that Albert was dashing, looked like Tyrone Power. Zona was the tiniest girl with the lowest, loudest voice I've ever heard. She and her husband owned a hotel on The Las Vegas Strip, their son competed in horse jumping at the Olympics one year. Sad story about Zona's mother.

Thanks for that post. I don't think I knew about the antipathy pre the 40's (me born late '41) and the lead into the 40's... at least until relatively recently and probably from your posts. I thought in the fifties, when my aunt was in her fifties, that it was just my stuck in her ways aunt. Both my mother and she didn't go past high school, but that was an accomplishment for women of their age.

Adding, it's not that I equate schooling years with my most valued trait - curiosity. My husband's father had only four grades, and remained curious the rest of his life, where I think of my mother and aunt as a set in their ways early.

Theodore Roosevelt had a major international incident to deal with because of anti-Japanese legislation in California in the first decade of the 20th century. He was very exasperated, and complained long and loudly about the idiots in the California legislature.

Makes me wonder what Carey McWilliams said about all that. That got to be a rumpled book of mine that I gave to a friend and now only remember that I liked the book.

(Island on the Land)

As a boy in Fresno, CA, in the 1940s, I saw a different perspective on race. It was a unique situation, I suppose. First, the school I attended was fully integrated. It was roughly one third black, one third Mexican and the final third was a mix of whites like myself (Okie types, mostly), Portuguese, Armenian, Japanese - don't recall what else anymore. All got along remarkably well. I hung around with a Porto gee and an Armenian, mostly. The history teacher once told the class, "I am going to have a talk. Anybody who does not want to hear me or will get their feelings hurt is welcome to leave the room at any time." - (This guy claimed to be a cousin type descendant of Sam Houston). He had hurt my feelings early in the semester, by asserting that only uncivilized persons don't wear an undershirt. I had no money to buy undershirts. - He began speaking of hurtful language, spoken aloud, versus thoughts kept to one's self. He pointed to a Japanese boy and said, "If I get mad at at someone, I might call him a squint-eyed Jap." He pointed to a black kid and used the N word. "But, I don't do that. I might think it, but I don't say it." I don't recall the talk, in its entirety, but the whole class remained seated and were on his side, at the end of it.

Although we were in California, I was unaware of the overt bias against the Japanese. At least some of the farmers in the area were of Japanese extraction. I recall, while walking to the Saturday matinee, my brothers and I got on top of a great irrigation pipe. The Japanese farmer came up, got out of a Jeep and kicked us in the butt, or tried to. Told us to keep off his property.

My aunt had moved to Fresno from Virginia. She had all the southerner's prejudices, when she arrived. But, Fresno, in the 40s was special. The black lady who owned the laundry on the corner was very friendly. She came to my aunt's house, one day. My aunt served the lady some cake and coffee, but she could not bring herself to sit with her and eat cake, too. But, bit by bit, the laundry lady wore away her resistance. They became best friends.

After I moved to Texas, nine years passed, before I returned to Fresno. The entire section of land across the street from my aunt's house had been wiped away and new houses built there. The laundry lady's son came from one of the houses and invited me to his home. I was being treated like family. I struggled to find a job, however, and moved away shortly after. Since that final visit, in 1965, I have not been back. Don't know if that special quality survived.

Yours is an interesting experience, EB. Here's an article about anti-Japanese legislation in California.

More!!

Thanks for the link, set. I know CI had a terrible time of it, when very young. Oddly, I met one Japanese fellow, who told me he was happy while in the camp. But he told it so flippantly, I thought perhaps it was mere bravado on his part.

This argument has gone on since the first humans formed into tribes. Of course racism is still rampant. Anyone who won't admit that has some very selfish motives at work, or is just blind. We humans are pack animals. We form into many different kinds of packs. In the beginning it was for protection. You fought with the members of the other pack to steal food or keep the food you had. Our civilization has progressed a bit, food is easier to find, but the basic motives are still at work. There are so many packs we can identify, race is just one, and also one you can't change about yourself. Look at how angry people get with those who show that they are fans of a different football team. How irrelevant is that? But, never the less there have been riots from just that.

Clearly there is no justifiable reason to judge an individual based on what group, tribe, pack, race they belong to, but we all do it all time. It's part of human nature, based upon needs from long ago, and very difficult to change.