When President Obama spoke to media following his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, he adhered to the long tradition of American presidential transitions. He buried partisan and personal differences and called on the nation to offer Mr. Trump the opportunity to implement his vision. The president went on to say of Mr. Trump, "the American people will judge over the course of the next couple of years whether they like what they see." Appropriate. Presidential. Beyond reproach. I'll pass on the wait and see approach. As a student of the late Dr. Maya Angelou, I am reminded of her oft-repeated lesson, "when people show you who they are, believe them the first time." President-elect Trump has shown us who he is. I believe him.
I believed his immigration advisor Kris Kobach when he said the Trump transition team is considering a Muslim registry much like a Bush-era policy prompted by post 9/11 hysteria. I believe Trump supporter and spokesman for the pro-Trump Great America PAC Chris Higbie when he claimed there was a precedent for Muslim registration in the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. The Japanese American Citizens League believed Higbie, too. They immediately issued a statement that reads in part:
Higbie's attempt to cite Japanese American incarceration as a precedent for this type of action is frightening and wrong. It's a statement intended to lay a marker for a misguided belief that ignores the true lessons of Japanese American incarceration.
I did not want to be among those who ignored the true lessons of Japanese American incarceration. So I called on the contributor circle who came together earlier here at ELLE.com when President Obama made his historic visit to Hiroshima in May: Christen Tsuyuko Sasaki, an assistant professor in the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University; Traci Kato-Kiriyama, a writer, performer, and community organizer, based in Los Angeles; and Mari Matsuda an activist, critical race theorist, and professor of law at the University of Hawaii.
Traci: I take nothing for granted at this point. Even if we take lightly the campaign-trail rhetoric of bans and walls and "law and order," we can't possibly ignore his running mate and every potential appointee and advisor. He shows his intentions to us daily. He campaigned on being a straight shooter. I will take him at his so-called word and plan accordingly. When the president-elect and his advisors speak of bans en masse, a Muslim registry, "extreme vetting," or any kind of model of "internment," what rings loud and clear is his intention to have an arsenal of scapegoats—a countless list of targets to keep people in fear, dependent upon him, and focused on a cause to remove, divide, and incarcerate.
Christen: When I first heard that Mr. Trump was advocating for a Muslim registry, I couldn't help but think back to the last conversation that we had together regarding President Obama's trip to Hiroshima. We spoke about the violence of empire. I see this at play again, in the history and memory of xenophobia, racism, and hate that Mr. Trump is invoking when he suggests a Muslim registry. This type of policing is not new to communities of color in the United States—communities that were racialized as other, including indigenous populations. In the years before the U.S. officially entered World War II, the federal government was already watching the Issei and Nisei community [first- and second-generation Japanese Americans]. This was one of the reasons why the FBI was able to start rounding up Japanese and Japanese American leaders, including teachers and priests, just a few hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Mari: My family was among those people who were rounded up. My father was a U.S. citizen born and raised in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. He was incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where he volunteered for combat duty. … Many of his comrades didn't make it. He was the only survivor of his machine gun squad, in the "Purple Heart Battalion." Dad never blamed FDR for the incarceration. He blamed the Hearst newspapersand the relentless barrage of violently racist propaganda against Japanese Americans that began well before Pearl Harbor. No acts of mass incarceration or racist violence happen without an ideology to support it. The first lesson from my dad's experience is to take neo-Nazi propaganda seriously.
