Bigots come and go, and that includes Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump.
For us in Hawaii, Trump’s latest racist attacks on Muslims, calling for them to be barred from entry to the U.S., should touch a tad closer.
The Statue of Liberty has offered both hope and opportunity to millions of immigrants, while others coming to these shores have been victims of intolerance and discrimination.
It was America that in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act blocking Chinese from coming to the U.S. or becoming citizens, and it was America that during World War II interned more than 110,000 Americans who happened to be of Japanese ancestry.
But it was in Hawaii that the U.S. military suspended the Constitution and its rights and freedoms and substituted martial law to dictate the living conditions of the citizens of the then-Territory of Hawaii.
As Trump tries to back up his No Muslims Here policy by referring back to one of America’s most revered Democratic presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he only doubles down on a racist past.
Specifically, Trump called attention to FDR’s World War II orders classifying of Germans, Italians and Japanese aliens living in the U.S. as “enemy aliens,” but said he would stop short of setting up internment camps.
Still FDR’s internment actions reverberate today.
Jonathan Okamura, University of Hawaii ethnic studies professor, says Trump’s fallback to FDR and relocation is why the history of internment is still important.
“As I told my ‘Japanese in Hawaii’ class, this is the reason why we still discuss internment more than 70 years after the camps opened because Americans forget what really happened,” Okamura said in an interview.
Former Hawaii GOP state legislator Barbara Marumoto was 2 years old when she and her family were forced out of their home and placed in a horse stall at a racetrack near San Francisco for six months before being sent to an internment camp.
“I don’t think racism is something you can totally erase, but it is something that you have to keep fighting and stick to the Constitution, which is what should have happened after Pearl Harbor,” Marumoto said in an interview this week.
Regarding Trump, Marumoto, who is supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said: “We have to be careful not to characterize all Muslims as the enemy.”
In an interview with Time, Trump said he does not know if he would have supported or opposed the internment of Japanese- Americans during World War II.
“I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer,” he said.
The Hawaii angle is that even before World War II, Roosevelt was watching Hawaii and wrote in a memo that AJA citizens who have contact with visiting Japanese “should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”
When war did come, FDR found that it was physically impossible to relocate all of Hawaii’s citizens of Japanese ancestry and their labor was needed in the war effort.
Instead, martial law in Hawaii amounted to, as one judge called it, “a military dictatorship.”
The new military governor of Hawaii proclaimed “good citizens will cheerfully obey this proclamation and the ordinances to be published; others will be required to do so. Offenders will be severely punished by military tribunals.
“If you are ordered by military personnel to obey a certain command, that order must be obeyed instantly and without question.”
The actions of our government in 1941-42 can still teach us about our elections of 2016.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
