Japanese Concentration (Internment Camps)

Photographs taken by Ansel Adams
http://www.businessinsider.com/ansel-adams-internment-camp-photos-2013-8/#adams-also-captured-the-recreational-time-at-the-camp-like-in-this-image-of-dennis-shimizu-lying-on-his-bed-reading-16

Do you ever watch a movie and think, "Hey, that person looks just me"? Unfortunately, that rarely happens for this woman.

http://www.upworthy.com/after-being-frustrated-by-hollywoods-portrayal-of-asians-one-woman-took-action?c=ufb1

For as long as she can remember, Villemaire has wanted to be a television personality.  But for most of her life, she figured she didn't have a shot because there was hardly anyone on the big (or small) screen that resembled her.

Throughout history, and even today, many Asian characters are played by nonAsians. Villemaire calls it yellowface, and she doesn't mince words when it comes to how she feels about it.

Check out four stunning examples of Villemaire depicting Asian characters. She appears on the right in all of the photo sets:
1. Luise Rainer playing the Chinese wife of a Chinese farmer in the 1937 movie "The Good Earth."
2. Myrna Loy as the Chinese daughter of Fu Manchu in the 1932 movie "The Mask of Fu Manchu."
3. Katharine Hepburn playing (you guessed it) a Chinese woman in the 1944 movie "Dragon Seed." 4. Yep, it happens in present day movies, too. Emma Stone played a half-Asian woman in the 2015 movie "Aloha."

Mixed with White Isn't White

http://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2014/7/22/why-mixed-white-isnt-white?utm_content=buffer4f33a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
In the 1990s, psychologist and mixed-race scholar Maria P.P. Root wrote the famous Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage, stirred by her examination of mixed-race identity, interviews with hundreds of multiracial folk across the U.S., and the struggles multiracial people face in forming and claiming a positive sense of self. “I have the right not to justify my existence to the world,” it reads. “To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify. To create a vocabulary about being multiracial or multiethnic.”Almost two decades later, these proclamations still ring so true. Some people are completely unwilling to honor my family’s choice to identify as mixed-race and Asian because it doesn’t align with their own ideas about how we should identify. The right of a mixed-race person to self-construct and self-define, even today, endures continual policing from people with their own agendas.

Telling my child he’s white also won’t help him understand why children who were less than one-quarter Japanese were interned during World War II; why a stranger would look at him and say there are no “pure races” anymore; why a leading theatre company in our city unabashedly staged a yellowface production of an operetta; why kids on the playground pull back their eyes in a slant and spit out one of those ridiculous anti-Asian chants that just won’t go away. When I tell my son that he is Asian, mixed-race, multiracial, and a person of color, I’m not denying him parts of his ancestral-ethnic heritage. I'm teaching him about the race politics that intrude upon our lives whether we want them to or not. I’m preparing him to exist in a world that obstinately persists in being racially divided. And I’m trying to let him know something about the ways he has and will continue to be judged throughout his life, not because he’s white -- but because he’s mixed with color.

You've Heard about Micro-Aggressions, but What Are Micro-Affirmations?

What are Micro-affirmations?
http://www.cookross.com/docs/UnconsciousBias.pdf
Micro-affirmations are tiny acts of opening doors to opportunity, gestures of inclusion and caring, and graceful acts of listening.Micro-affirmations lie in the practice of generosity, in consistently giving credit to others – in providing comfort and support when others are in distress, when there has been a failure at the bench, or an idea that did not work out, or a public attack.

Micro-affirmations include the myriad details of fair, specific, timely, consistent and clear feedback that help a person build on strength and correct weakness.I have come to believe that teaching and training about micro-affirmations may help an organization in several different ways: The first effect is obvious – appropriately affirming the work of another person is likely both to help that person do well, and to help him or her to enjoy doing well.

The second effect is that consistent, appropriate affirmation of others can spread from one person to another – potentially raising morale and productivity. It helps everyone, men and women, people of color and Caucasians. It appears to be particularly helpful for department heads, and anyone who is senior to another person, to “model” affirming behavior. The third effect is subtle, and deals with the point that it may be hard for a person to “catch” himself or herself unconsciously behaving inequitably.

I may not always be able to “catch myself” behaving in a way that I do not wish to behave. But if I try always to affirm others in an appropriate and consistent way, I have a good chance of blocking behavior of mine that I want to prevent. Many micro-inequities are not conscious – but affirming others can become a conscious as well as unconscious practice that prevents unconscious slights.

North Central Regional Educational Laboratory

By 2004, we knew how to do it. Citing the Learning Point 2004 publication, "All Students Reaching the Top:  Strategies for Closing Academic Achievement Gaps" by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Affirmative development of academic ability is nurtured and developed through:
(1) high-quality teaching and instruction in the classroom,
(2) trusting relationships in school, and
(3) supports for pro-academic behavior in the school and community.”

In the August 2004 article by Kiley Walsh Symonds titled, “After the Test: Closing the Achievement Gaps With Data,” Schools and districts may benefit from the following recommendations:
1. Schools need frequent credible data.
2. Teachers need support to use data.
3. Race matters.
4. Focus, especially on reading, is essential.

Closing the achievement gaps between white/Asian students and Hispanic/Latino or African-American students is a primary goal for school leaders.  We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to act… NOW!

Teachers are not in this alone. Although it hurts to read Pedro Noguera’s article, “Closing the Racial Achievement Gap: The Best Strategies of the Schools We Send Them To” (August 2007) in which he states…
Children know when they are taught by adults who care about them and who believe in them. They typically respond by displaying the qualities that are so essential to school success – self-motivation, self-discipline and resilience.

It’s time that we stopped using the term “Caucasian”

Here’s four reasons when we really mean “white.”

1. It’s “highly unlikely” that white people came out of the Caucasus region in Eurasia.

2. In the 18th century, German anthropologist Friedrich Blumenbach devised a flawed classification system that divided humans into five races—Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Malayan (brown), Ethiopian (black), and American (red). Blumenbach believed that the Caucasian race was the “most beautiful” and oldest, ideas that support white supremacy. While Blumenbach’s four other racial terms are considered obsolete, “Caucasian” has sadly survived.

3. People of Indian descent technically fall under the category of “Caucasian”, but they aren’t considered white (and have historically been denied the same rights as white people in Canada and other countries). The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the distinction in a 1923 ruling, which denied U.S. citizenship to Indian-American writer Bhagat Singh Thind.

4. Usage of the pseudoscientific term “Caucasian” reinforces the erroneous notion that there is a scientific basis for racial hierarchies.

Read more at:  http://www.straight.com/print/blogra/526526/five-reasons-why-we-should-stop-calling-white-people-caucasian

and here:  http://mentalfloss.com/article/50202/why-are-white-people-called-caucasian
The Boston bombing suspects are from the actual Caucasus region, meaning they *literally could not be more Caucasian*

Whitewashing Films

Commentary on the film Lucy staring Scarlett Johansson.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/lucy-why-im-tired-of-seei_b_5627318.html

Here's a clip:
I can't accept that. I can't accept that there was only one black woman in the entire film, who delivered one line and who we never saw again. I can't accept that the bad guys were Asian and that although in China, Lucy's roommate says, "I mean, who speaks Chinese? I don't speak Chinese!" I can't accept that in Hercules, which I also saw this weekend, there were no people of color except for Dwayne Johnson himself and his mixed-race wife, whose skin was almost alabaster. I can't accept that she got maybe two lines and was then murdered. I can't accept that the "primitive tribe" in Hercules consisted of dark-haired men painted heavily, blackish green, to give their skin (head-to-toe) a darker appearance, so the audience could easily differentiate between good and bad guys by the white vs. dark skin. I can't accept that during the previews, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a story about Moses leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, where not a single person of color is represented, casts Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton to play Egyptians. I can't accept that in the preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service, which takes place in London, features a cast of white boys and not a single person of Indian descent, which make up the largest non-white ethnic group in London. I can't accept that in stories about the end of the world and the apocalypse, that somehow only white people survive. I can't accept that while my daily life is filled with black and brown women, they are completely absent, erased, when I look at a TV or movie screen.

If _____ Said the Stuff White People Said

Every race has its own annoyingly repetitive tropes to deal with: for Latinos, it's often things like, "I love your accent," or, from the spoof, "I hooked up with a white guy once. He was crazy!" There's always the,"if you went to a really good college it must be because of your race," bit of offensiveness, too.

If African Americans Said the Stuff White People Said

If Asians Said the Stuff White People Said

If Latinos Said the Stuff White People Said

 

Stuff White People Say About Multiracial People

Stuff White People Say About Adopted People

 see above

Ethnic Identity

Great article about the importance of racial and ethnic identity:  http://www.education.com/reference/article/ethnic-identity-and-academic-achievement/
 

Excerpts: 
During adolescence, individuals begin to construct a general sense of their identity, or their personal definitions of who they are, what is important to them, and appropriate ways to think and behave. During this period, youth also differentiate their various social identities, the self-constructed definitions of who they are in relation to the social groups to which they belong. A sense of ethnic identity becomes salient for many ethnic minority adolescents as they explore the significance of their ethnic group membership in defining who they are (Spencer & Markstrom-Adams, 1990; Phinney, 1990). Ethnic identity has multiple components, including individuals' views of the importance of their ethnic group to their self-definitions, the meanings they attach to their ethnic group, and their thinking about how their ethnic group affects their position in society. Thus, ethnic identities are descriptive (e.g., “I am a Mexican American”; “I am an African American”), affective (“I feel positively about being an African American”; “I think others regard my ethnic group positively”), as well as prescriptive (“I know how Chinese Americans act”; “I know how African Americans act”). Adolescents' understandings of the meanings of their social identities influence their adaptations and responses within domains in which those identities are salient. Because race and ethnicity often are salient in the domain of education, adolescents' ethnic identities may be particularly relevant in shaping how youth interpret and respond to their social and classroom contexts at school.

Relative to younger children, adolescents have more highly developed cognitive abilities related to understanding themselves and their experiences in more complex, abstract, and indirect ways, and this period also involves intensification of particular social-cognitive attributes, e.g., heightened awareness of how they are viewed by others. Thus, they become more cognizant of the relevance of race and ethnicity in society and have a higher likelihood of perceiving experiences in terms of race and ethnicity (Spencer, Dupree, & Hartmann, 1997).

Academic engagement requires linking one's personal identity to the roles of student and learner (Garcia & Pintrich, 1994), showing sustained curiosity and interest in class, and displaying intense efforts in learning tasks (Connell, Spencer, & Aber, 1994; Skinner & Belmont, 1993). Adolescents' academic engagement has been linked to social identities that are made salient in the academic domain (Garcia & Pintrich, 1994). The academic domain is one in which race often is salient for many ethnic minority adolescents. For instance, entry into secondary schools is associated with increased racial cleavage, social comparison, and heightened salience of racial and ethnic stereotypes (Fisher, Wallace, & Fenton, 2000). Thus, it is likely that minority adolescents' levels of academic engagement are influenced, in part, by their ethnic identity beliefs. Theory and research suggests that ethnic identity may serve as a risk factor for lower academic motivation and achievement as well as promote academic motivation and achievement. The risk and promotion approaches are described below.

Also, there is growing evidence that having a strong, positive sense of ethnic identity may protect minority adolescents from the negative psychological and academic impacts of perceiving ethnic group barriers or experiencing interpersonal discrimination based on their ethnic group. For instance, in a 2006 study, Sellers and colleagues found that Black youth having an ethnic identity characterized by feelings of strong group connection and group pride showed more positive psychological well being when experiencing racial discrimination compared to those adolescents with less strong feelings of connection to and positive attitudes about their ethnic group. Wong and colleagues in their 2003 study found that African American adolescents who held a strong connection to and pride in being Blacks were protected from the negative impact on academic attitudes and performance of experiencing racial discrimination at school relative to those with less of a strong, positive connection with their ethnic group.

Thus, school practitioners must receive training about the development of youth from multicultural backgrounds. This training should not only acknowledge the unique risks associated with membership in ethnic minority groups in the United States but also consider how youths' ethnic identities can serve as cultural assets in relation to their achievement and how to use this information to create inclusive classroom contexts for all students. Without such training, it is likely that teaching approaches and practices will be based on popular views of common sense approaches not supported by empirical research. Additionally teachers should be mindful of endorsing their own ethnic identity beliefs in the class contexts they create.

SPECIFIC ETHNIC IDENTITIES

Asian American Identity Development

http://prezi.com/jdsct8dwpzvt/asian-american-identity-development/

World War II Perspectives Lesson

TOUR OF WWII * focusing on multiple perspectives

KEYPOINTS:

• We need to consider all the possible multiple perspectives and actively seek them out.  Then we need to make choices and think about why we want to include or exclude particular perspectives and what that means to the topic and to our students.
• When books don’t exist, it is our job as activists to find additional resources (internet) in order to present “missing voices” until a suitable book exists.
  
• Teacher-created summaries can meet the need of a more inclusive story AND also make the topic accessible to children with language limits – e.g., teachers can adjust language, print size, and readability level, computers can read text to students.
• See the summary samples below.

BOOK EXAMPLES:

The Unbreakable Code – Sara Hoagland Hunter

Passage to Freedom:  The Sugihara Story – Ken Mochizuki

I Am An American – Jerry Stanley

So Far From the Sea – Eve Bunting

The Bracelet – Yoshiko Uchida & Joanna Yardley

Those Incredible Women of World War II – Karen Zeinert

The Invisible Thread: The Powerful Memoir of a Girl Consigned to a Concentration Camp by The U.S. Gov’t – Yoshiko Ushida

Aleutian Sparrow – Karen Hesse

The Tuskegee Airmen – Jaqueline Harris

Baseball Saved Us – Ken Mochizuki

Number the Stars – Lois Lowry

Anne Frank:  The Diary of a Young Girl  – Anne Frank

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs – Jon Scieszka (example of multiple perspectives)

WWII - Native Americans

Carl Gorman died in February, 1998, he was 90 and the oldest of the 400 Navajo code talkers.  He was the father of artist R.C. Gorman from Taos, N.M.  He spent much of WWII in the Pacific on his belly at the front lines, a radio rather than a rifle in his hands, just as other Navajo volunteers did, making sure that the Japanese code crackers, who broke the Army, Navy, and Air Corps. codes, would never learn anything from intercepted Marine radio messages. 

Navajo is a language without an alphabet and with such a complex, irregular syntax that in 1942 it was estimated that outside of the 50,000 Navajos, no more than 30 other people in the world had any knowledge of it, none of them Japanese.  It was a wonder that Mr. Gorman or any other Navajos still spoke Navajo at all in the face of a long and concerted Federal campaign to suppress Indian languages.  He had once been chained to an iron pipe for a week because he insisted on speaking his native tongue. 

When the Japanese figured out that Marine radio operators were speaking Navajo and tried to torture a captured Navajo soldier, unfamiliar with the code, into translating messages, he was as much in the unknown as his Japanese captors.  He could tell them that cay-da-gahi meant turtle, but he had no idea that turtle meant tank.  The Navajo code, which was never broken, was considered so valuable that code talkers were not allowed to talk about it until 1969.

Source:  The New York Times, Obituary 2/1/1998

 

WWII - African Americans - Tuskegee

Adhering to its own policies of racial segregation, the U.S. Army Air Force had only one facility for Basic and Advanced Flight Training for Black pilots and that was at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, near Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which existed only as a result of a lawsuit brought by an African American who was refused for pilot training because of his race.

The “Tuskegee Experiment” was expected to “prove” racial deficiencies in intelligence and concentration, yet the Tuskegee Institute graduated 926 African-American pilots.  The 332nd Fighter Group was comprised of the 99th, 100th, 301st, and 302nd Fighter Squadrons of the U.S. Army Air Corps.  The Red Tail Angels of the 332nd would end the war as the only fighter group in over 1,578 missions throughout Europe and North Africa to NEVER lose a bomber while escorting over 200 bombing missions.

American pilots were not expected to fly more than 50 missions or so before returning home, yet the Black American pilots - due of “lack of replacements” flew closer to 100 missions. They retuned home, the finest pilots in the U.S. and found themselves back in “Colored Only” lines.  In one case, more than a hundred Tuskegee Airmen Officers were arrested and court martialled for refusing to leave the segregated Officer’s Club at Freeman Field in Indiana.  Three years later (1948), President Truman officially desegregated the Armed Forces.

Sources:  http://www.grunts.net/afamerican/332ndfdg.html

http://www.world-wide-net.com/tuskegeeairmen/

WWII - Japanese Americans - Camps

As a result of the war with Japan, many people in he U.S. did not trust people of Japanese ancestry.  Even Japanese-Americans who were born in this country were mistakenly thought to be loyal to Japan.  On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the forcible removal of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps.  More than two-thirds of those relocated under this order were citizens of the United States, and none had ever shown any disloyalty.  In the entire course of the war, 10 people were convicted of spying for Japan, all of whom were White.

The definition of concentration camp is a place of confinement for political prisoners, which is what happened during WWII to Japanese Americans. To not use this language maintains the mythology that the U.S. has never had these types of prisons (and maintains the ideology that the U.S. is better than many other countries).  In addition, the term concentration camp is the one that was used by U.S. officials, including FDR, at the time.  The government quickly changed its *public* language in order to make the camps more acceptable. Roger Daniels (in his book "Japanese Americans: From relocation to redress") states, "internment is a well defined legal process by which enemy nationals are placed in confinement in times of war."  As he notes, the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and non-U.S. citizens immediately after Pearl Harbor was internment.  The imprisonment of almost 100,000 U.S. citizens because of how they looked and a more powerful group’s desire for economic gain does not fit the definition of internment. (Information in this paragraph from: Karen L. Suyemoto, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts - Boston)

On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that provided a Presidential apology and symbolic payment of $20,000 to the internees, evacuees, and persons of Japanese ancestry who lost liberty or property because of discriminatory action by the Federal government during WWII. 

Sources:

http://www.lib.Utah.edu/spc/photo/9066/9066.htm

http://www.usdoj.gov/kidspage/crt/redress.htm

WWII - Japanese Americans - Soldiers

The 100th Infantry battalion of Nisei (2nd generation Japanese-Americans) volunteers was formed in May, 1942.  By September, 1943, they were sent to Italy where they saw fierce combat and came to be known as the “Purple Heart Battalion” because of their high casualty rate.

Due to the stunning success of Nisei in combat, the draft was reinstated in January, 1944 for Nisei in the detention camps to bolster the ranks of the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  The 100/442nd became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service.  There were over 18,000 individual decorations for bravery, 9,500 Purple Hearts, and seven Presidential Distinguished Unit Citations.

It was the 100/442nd that liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Source:  www.nikkeiheritage.org/research/442html

WWII - African Americans - Overseas

Like other Allied forces that landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, they faced the German enemy on the beach in front of them. Their role on D-Day isn't well-known. One black face appears briefly in the movie "The Longest Day"; none is seen in "Saving Private Ryan." Most histories of the climactic assault on Normandy also fail to notice that black soldiers were there.

In fact, blacks were among the assault troops that June 6, and one unit was responsible for maintaining barrage balloons over the beachhead that protected troops landing.

The Stars and Stripes newspaper in 1944 reported that the unit suffered casualties setting up the balloons, which were floated across the English Channel on invasion day. Army photographers recorded black troops in operations liberating French villages around the beaches, and stories of the time cited black troops who were awarded medals for bravery and meritorious duty.

The exact number of blacks involved in the D-Day landings is unknown, as is the number of casualties. He estimates that from 1,500 to 2,000 of the 57,000 troops involved were black. The Army didn't record racial or ethnic differences when counting the dead.

Sources: 

startribune.com

Remembering Role of Black GIs on June 6, 1944 by Lance Gay

Scripps Howard News Service, Published May 30, 2004

  

WWII - Mexican Americans - Bracero

On August 4, 1942, the U.S. and the Mexican governments instituted the Bracero program.  Thousands of impoverished Mexican farm workers abandoned their rural communities and headed north to the southwestern part of the U.S. to work the fields once harvested by Americans who were off to war.  The Bracero could return to their native lands in case of an emergency, only with written permission from their boss.  When their contract expired, the Bracero were required to turn in their permits and return to Mexico.   The Bracero suffered harassment and oppression from extremist groups and racist authorities.

The Bracero were a very experienced farm labor who became the foundation for the development of North American agriculture.  The program under which more than three million Mexicans entered the U.S. to labor in the agricultural fields ended in 1964.

Source:  http://www.farmworker.org/bracerop.html

WWII - American Women - Soldiers & Nurses

An average female clerical salary was only $850 per year, few could afford the $750 required for obtaining a pilot’s license, unless they had family backing. Over 25,000 women applied to be WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilot), yet only 1,839 of that number were accepted and only 1,074 received their silver wings.  Although all of those applying had some previous flight training and many were already licensed pilots, few survived the rigorous screening and training standard set up for the WASP.

WASPs flew U.S. military aircraft during WWII in a special program designed to free male pilots for overseas duty.  Female pilots utilized their skills to transport new war birds from the factories to needed airfields.  With the enormous losses of male aviators, there were now more planes available than pilots to fly them, especially for ferrying duties.  These women often transported top secret documents, including parts for assembling the world’s first atomic bomb.  They offered both basic and instrument instruction to men and even flew highly classified experimental aircraft such as the first jets. 

Many female pilots were mistaken for mail carriers, flight attendants, boat captains, doormen, and even as members of another country's military because uniformed women soldiers were so rare.

Women were also military nurses.  With a nudge from Eleanor Roosevelt, the Navy began authorizing a Women’s Naval Reserve and the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.  These women were WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services).  The WAAC (Women’s Army auxiliary Corps) was changed to the WAC establishing it as part of the Army and not an auxiliary by a second bill in July of 1943, signed by President Roosevelt. 

In July of 1944, WACs landed on the beach at Normandy.  There were over one hundred thousand women in uniform at this point in time.

Sources: 

http://www.womenofcourage.com/guide.htm

http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/femvets5.html

WWII - Mexican Americans - Soldiers

On March 14, 1944, President Roosevelt agreed to accept the participation of one or two Mexican air squadrons.  This event marked the first time the Mexican troops were trained for combat.  

Although only in the Philippines for six months, the squadron actively participated in 59 combat missions totaling over 1,290 hours of flight.  They successfully participated in the Allied effort to bomb Luzon and Formosa in an attempt to push the Japanese out of the islands.  Assigned to the 58th Fighter group of the U.S. 5th Air Force, the “Aztec Eagles” were also used as ground support after the aerial threat from Japan weakened.

Source:  http://www.utexas.edu/projects/latinoarchives/narratives/vol1no2/ESCUADRON_201/ESCUADRON_201.HTML

WWII - American Women - “Production Soldiers”

In July 1941, the American Red Cross called upon “every woman and girl in Huntsville and Madison County, Alabama who knits, crochets, or sews“ to cooperate in meeting the deadline for completing the area’s assigned quota of sewing.  In addition to sewing and winding bandages, the female inhabitants were active participants in the civilian defense effort.

In April 1942, the University of Alabama offered a course in chemical laboratory techniques for-women-only; those who desired to qualify for jobs in defense laboratories.  While many male factory workers went to war, at the Huntsville Arsenal, black and white men did the heavy work, while white females were employed for production work.  No demand was made for large numbers of black females until the local labor market was exhausted of white females.

Pay was not equal.  For examples, men who worked in mustard gas production were paid $5.76 daily, while women were paid $4.40.  The principle of “equal pay for equal work,” adopted by the War Labor Board in 1942 was subsequently implemented at arsenals as part of the basic War Department philosophy of wage administration.  Even lingering doubts about the suitability of hiring black women for defense work were soon overridden by the pressing need to meet production demand.

The movement toward all female work crews was a gradual one, particularly in those areas where women had never been assigned duty.  But by 1943, a women supervisor and her “all female crew of 15” had acquired the reputation for being “one of the most efficient crews at the arsenal.”  By May 1944, Huntsville peaked in employing 6,707 men and women, 63% male (11% were black, 52% white) and 37% female (11% were black, 26% white)

Redstone Arsenal implemented its first reduction in force in June 1945, when about 200 employees were terminated, mostly black women.  By October, the number of female production employees was reduced to zero.  Huntsville Arsenal placed 500 operations employees, almost all women, on a 90 day furlough in August 1945, then continued a layoff through September. The reason given for this decision was based on the belief that women were “not suited for transfer to the heavy work.”

Source:  http://www.redstone.army.mil/history/women/welcome.html

WWII - Jewish Experience in Germany

The beginning of the Second World War brought millions of non-German Jews under German rule, mostly in Poland. But still no clear concept existed about what to do with them. In Poland the SS often forced Jews to live in ghettos, most prominently in Warsaw and Kracow, and resettled them in big cities or along railroad lines. The official policy was still expulsion and exclusion from the rest of society, not extermination, but shootings occurred, and living conditions in the ghettos were so terrible as to produce a high mortality.

But in the fall of 1941 the SS constructed death factories with gas chambers. A Europe-wide extermination program started. In the following three years the remaining Jews from Germany and all occupied countries were rounded up, put into freight trains, and driven across Europe to the death camps in Poland, most notably Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka. There the survivors of the transports were led to a ramp on which Nazi doctors separated the most fit and sent them to the work camps right next to the extermination camps. The others were led into windowless chambers. After they had undressed (presumably to take a shower), gas dropped in from the ceiling and killed them within minutes. Most of those who had to work did not survive either.

Besides Jews, the "death factories" also killed opponents of the regime (German and non-German), Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, and many other innocent people. The gruesome mass murder intensified toward the end of the war, as Hitler believed that the extermination of the Jews would be his lasting "achievement" in history and that future generations would be grateful. The Holocaust claimed roughly six million Jewish victims. Around five million other people were killed as well, including between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war, many gypsies, German resisters, communists, homosexuals, and other groups. The death machinery worked as long as German troops held Poland. When the Russians advanced in late 1944, the SS destroyed the death camps and the relating documents (making the task of historians to establish exact numbers and procedures more difficult).

Sources: 

http://www.colby.edu/personal/r/rmscheck/GermanyE4.html

http://members.aol.com/TeacherNet/Holocaust.html

WWII - Aleut Internment

In response to Japanese aggression in the Aleutians, U.S. authorities evacuated 881 Aleuts from nine villages. They were herded from their homes onto cramped transport ships, most allowed only a single suitcase. Heartbroken, Atka villagers watched as U.S. servicemen set their homes and church afire so they would not fall into Japanese hands. 

The Aleuts were transported to Southeast Alaska and there crowded into "duration villages": abandoned canneries, a herring saltery, and gold mine camp-rotting facilities with no plumbing, electricity or toilets. The Aleuts lacked warm winter clothes, and camp food was poor, the water tainted. For two years they would remain in these dark places, struggling to survive. Illness of one form or another struck all the evacuees, but medical care was often nonexistent, and the authorities were dismissive of the Aleuts' complaints. Pneumonia and tuberculosis took the very young and the old. With the death of the elders so, too, passed their knowledge of traditional Aleut ways.

Despite their poor treatment at the hands of the U.S. government, twenty-five Aleut men joined the Armed Forces. Three took part in the U.S. invasion of Attu Island, and all were awarded the Bronze Star.

The Attuans suffered severe deprivation during the war. For three years, they were imprisoned in the city of Otaru on Hokkaido Island, subsisting almost soley on rice. What the war had not done, a stroke of the pen had accomplished – four communities had met with extinction. Those villagers allowed to reoccupy their homes found them ravaged by the weather and vandalized by U.S. servicemen, the windows smashed, doors and furniture gone. Worse still was the theft of religious icons and subsistence equipment – boats and rifles. Some Aleut worked until their hands bled to repair the damage that had been done, but it would take years to recover, to fashion new communities and a new order for themselves. Politicized by their stay in the camps, the Aleut began the long battle for restitution. The evacuation had taken place for humanitarian reasons, but racism too had played a role in their abrupt evacuation and poor treatment in the camps.

It would be forty years until restitution would be made, but on August 10, 1988 Public Law 100-383 was signed calling for financial compensation and apology from Congress and the President in behalf of the American people.

Source:  http://www.nps.gov/aleu/ForKids.htm

WWII - Gay/Lesbian Experience

The history of the pink triangle begins before WWII, during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law prohibiting homosexual relations, was revised by Hitler in 1935 to include kissing, embracing, and gay fantasies as well as sexual acts. Convicted offenders -- an estimated 25000 just from 1937 to 1939 -- were sent to prison and then later to concentration camps. Their sentence was to be sterilized, and this was most often accomplished by castration. In 1942 Hitler's punishment for homosexuality was extended to death.

Each prisoner in the concentration camps wore a colored inverted triangle to designate their reason for incarceration, and hence the designation also served to form a sort of social hierarchy among the prisoners. A green triangle marked its wearer as a regular criminal; a red triangle denoted a political prisoner. Two yellow triangles overlapped to form a Star of David designated a Jewish prisoner. The pink triangle was for homosexuals. A yellow Star of David under a superimposed pink triangle marked the lowest of all prisoners -- a gay Jew.

Although homosexual prisoners reportedly were not shipped en masse to the death camps at Auschwitz, a great number of gay men were among the non-Jews who were killed there. Estimates of the number of gay men killed during the Nazi regime range from 50,000 to twice that figure. When the war was finally over, countless many homosexuals remained prisoners in the camps, because Paragraph 175 remained law in West Germany until its repeal in 1969.

In the 1970's, gay liberation groups resurrected the pink triangle as a popular symbol for the gay rights movement. In the 1980's, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) began using the pink triangle for their cause. They inverted the symbol, making it point up, to signify an active fight back rather than a passive resignation to fate.

One additional note:  Alan Turing was a gay mathematician and THE founding father of computer science who was instrumental in the British war effort during World War II. After the war, he was convicted of having homosexual sex and forced to undergo drug and hormone treatments.

Source:  http://www.wright-counseling.com/Safezone/safezonesymbols.htm

Filipino Language

Filipino words
http://www.filipiknow.net/rare-tagalog-words/

Alex Dang - "What Kind of Asian Are You?"

John F. Dovidio speaks about Inclusion and Exclusion

John Dovidio does research on race relations - he calls his work Aversive Racism.  You may be more familiar with other words for it, like, Modern Forms of Racism or Passive/Covert Racism or even Implicit Racism.  It is beyond the current micro-aggression work done by Sue and Sue for Asian Americans and replicated by other researchers for different populations.

He says that doing cultural awareness "celebrations" and activities make everyone "feel good" and not notice that there is still a problem so no change happens.  Cognitive dissonance is necessary in order for change to happen.

I saw him in person where he spoke of the research.

Play It Foward (Start a Ripple Today): A Doctor's Gift Giving

This Three Minute Commercial Puts Full-Length Hollywood Films to Shame.  It certainly says something about the state of Hollywood today that a three minute ad produced at a fraction of the cost of most movies is more moving and poignant than almost anything the big studios have to offer.

A Lot Of People Are Very Upset That An Indian-American Woman Won The Miss America Pageant

Racism alive and well - hint - if you begin a sentence with "I'm not a racist, but… " then there's probably a problem there.   America IS DIVERSE!  http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/a-lot-of-people-are-very-upset-that-an-indian-american-woman

But Don’t Call Them Racist: Right Wing Freaks Out Over First Indian-American Miss America http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/09/16/miss-america-right-wing-racism/
Moments… no, seconds after the new Miss America was crowned, the Twitterverse exploded with racist Tweets. Miss New York, Nina Davuluri, is the first woman of Indian descent to win the title of Miss America. The 24-year-old from Syracuse is studying to be a doctor. After she became Miss New York, Davuluri told the Syracuse Post Standard:

“Everything happens for a reason. If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be. It’s a win-win just to be in it.”

If Ms. Davuluri is correct and everything does happen for a reason, maybe the reason she won the title of Miss America was to demonstrate that Americans come in all varieties. After all, in a competition that included one contestant rocking a knee-brace (Miss Florida) and the first ever contestant with tattoos (Miss Kansas), this year’s batch of beauty queens was pretty diverse.

For some, steep odds to find a bone marrow match

For some, steep odds to find a bone marrow match
http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2013/08/20/awaiting-transplant-cancer-patient-chances-depend-her-korean-heritage/oXksbeVUYTNez8KcaS6trM/story.html
Now, the 40-year-old’s Korean heritage has suddenly become central to her life in a way she never expected. After being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in July, Manocchio-Putney faces a disturbing reality shared with many minorities in the United States — getting a bone marrow donation to save her life will be much harder for her than it would be for one of her two Caucasian siblings.

While 93 percent of Caucasians are able to find a match among the 10.5 million potential donors registered nationwide, the likelihood of finding a match is lower for Asian-Americans — 73 percent — said Chris Mulcahy, northeast district supervisor for Be the Match, which oversees marrow drives and registries.

And it’s even more difficult for mixed-race individuals, African-Americans, and some subsets of Asian-Americans, particularly South Asians, to find a match, said Dr. Joseph Antin, chief of stem cell transplantation at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Bone marrow donors must have similar genetic history to recipients, Antin said. Though race has no genetic basis, the genes that determine the success of transplanted cells, called human leukocyte antigens, correlate with individuals’ ethnic backgrounds.

Humans developed distinct resistances to pathogens depending on what diseases proliferated in which parts of the world, meaning different ethnic groups evolved with different HLA genes. 

That genetic diversity in human leukocyte antigens makes it hard for everyone to find a bone marrow match. But it’s even tougher for people of Asian and African descent, because the more diverse an individual’s evolutionary history is, the harder it becomes to find a match. Since populations in Africa and Asia developed in the face of some of the most diverse conditions, many of its people have unique genetic types.

But sometimes, in cases like Manocchio-Putney’s, one individual’s case can generate enough momentum to expand the registry. For many years, Antin said, it was nearly impossible to find bone marrow matches for Ashkenazi Jews, whose families came from Europe. When one such Jew got sick, the community mobilized, and now many are registered as potential donors.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/sunday-review/has-caucasian-lost-its-meaning.html?_r=0

The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations. In one, the court ruled that a Japanese man could not become a citizen because, although he may have been light-skinned, he was not Caucasian. In the other, an Indian was told that he could not become a citizen because, although he may have been technically Caucasian, he was certainly not white. (A similar debate erupted more recently when the Tsarnaev brothers, believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, were revealed to be Muslims from the Caucasus.) 

The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.” 

  

In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted that the term Caucasian had been “practically discarded.” But they spoke too soon. Blumenbach’s authority had given the word a pseudoscientific sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your “vehicle” instead of your car.

Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.” 

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.” 

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.” 

IN the South, I was often asked about my ethnic origins, and I had a ready answer. “My father is from India,” I would recite, phrasing it in such a way as to avoid being mistaken for an American Indian. “And my mom is white.” Almost invariably, if I was speaking to black people, they would nod with understanding. If I was speaking to white people, I would get a puzzled look. “What kind of white?” they would ask. Only when I explained the Norwegian, Scottish and German mix of my ancestry would I get the nod. 

Such racial boundaries have increasingly been called into question in the debate over affirmative action, once regarded as a form of restitution to descendants of slaves, but now complicated by all sorts of questions about who, exactly, is being helped. “What if some of them aren’t poor, what if some of them don’t have American parentage, what if some of them are really stupid?” Ms. Painter, the historian, asked. “There’s all kinds of characteristics that we stuff into race without looking, and then they pop out and we think, ‘I can’t deal with that.’ ” 

Doubtless, this society will continue to classify people by race for some time to come. And as we lumber toward justice, some of those classifications remain useful, even separate from other factors like economic class. Caucasian, though? Not so much.

Shaila Dewan is an economics reporter for The New York Times.

Racism in Harry Potter Series

This is one Chinese woman's spoken word piece about movie stereotypes of Asian women, using Cho Chang from the Harry Potter series as a starting point.  There are two videos, her piece and her response to the criticism of her piece.  Her response is eloquent and clear, highlighting important issues about race/racism that we might want to consider when having conversations and when selecting films to view.  The pair of videos make a powerful teaching tool. http://blog.angryasianman.com/2013/04/a-letter-to-jk-rowling-from-cho-chang.html

A Letter to J.K. Rowling

Response to Critiques

 

Make Me Asian

Make Me Asian http://www.npr.org/2013/01/12/169201593/make-me-asian-app-sparks-online-backlash:  Tens of thousands of people have downloaded two apps from the Google Play Store that are sparking accusations of racism.

The "Make me Asian" and "Make me Indian" apps allow Android smartphone users to take a picture and superimpose characteristics the developer thinks relate to those ethnic groups. An online petition is urging Google to remove the apps from its store.

My comments: This is similar to "Black Face" and for the same reason, should not be tolerated.  It is offensive to take characteristics of an ethnic group, assuming they can be distilled down to just a few characteristics, and reinforce stereotypes and prejudices of society at large, especially when that group is historically oppressed and under-represented in accurate imagery.

Chinese Artist Comments on China (and Modern Life)

From http://www.visualnews.com: Although it would be much easier to photoshop people into a stock image to achieve a similar effect, all of Li Wei’s shots are taken on location, relying solely on wire harnesses to suspend his subjects in mid-air; thus making them all the more incredible. According to the Beijing-based artist, “There’s a visceral feeling of shooting on location that can’t be duplicated on a computer,” although he does use photoshop to remove the visible wires from his images.