Open Letter to Norm Mineta, former Transportation Secretary
The Honorable Norm Mineta
Former http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2094
May 28, 2008
Dear Norman Mineta:
Your recent participation in the University of Washington’s awarding of honorary degrees to all Japanese-Americans who were forced into internment http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=376 in the 1940s prompts this modest request.
I do understand that you were also interned, and I wonder if there were German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the camp(s) in which you were interned. For although Japanese-Americans have been honored with apologies, reparations, statues, national park sites, honorary degrees, praise, awards and honors of every kind, nothing has been done to resolve the treatment of German-Americans and Italian-Americans.
Instead, a vast edifice of “unique” suffering and Japanese-racial entitlement has been built upon the lie that Japanese Americans are the unique victims of American-White-racism. The posturing of Japanese-Americans over this unique racial victimization, each of whom who must know and conceal the truth, is shameful and will ultimately shame and discredit the Japanese-American community forever, unless this injustice is addressed.Indeed, German-Americans suffered worse treatment than Japanese-Americans in the era of internment, with some American born German-American children actually being deported to prison camps in Germany after the end of World War Two. And the manufactured public hatred of Germans has never abated, in all these decades.
Separately I am asking the University of Washington to award the same honorary degrees to German-Americans and Italian-Americans similarly victimized (the University of Washington will not respond, of course), but I am asking you to undertake this mission, not only as a measure of simple human justice, but to restore true honor to the Japanese-American community as one of three communities victimized by the internment policy. Not as “unique” sufferers of “unique” racism, but rather as one people among three who were all victimized. It will be a braver initiative than shutting down the air traffic after 9/11 (and that was impressive demonstration of personal courage).
Ultimately, the transformation of Japanese-Americans into a race of poseurs, eager participants in the aristrocracy of false victims, surely the most squalid of supremacist movements in modern times, will have a cost. Unless something is done, future race relations between Japanese-Americans and Americans will inevitably confront the truth of decades of Japanese-American pious race hatred that was cultivated in a garden of purposeful silence and lies, and which masqueraded as honor, integrity and innocent victimization. It may be true that unless you, personally, do something to reverse this process, you will live to see the day when the monuments and statues to the “unique” victimization of Japanese-Americans are pulled down by Americans who love freedom and truth.