In chapter five of Impossible Subjects, Mae M. Ngai describes the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, enabled by President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which was in large part based on the presumption that Japanese Americans were racially inclined to disloyalty, "a Jap [being] a Jap". Within the camps, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) didn't quite share this view, but took another, also damaging stance: that of "benevolent assimilation". In the push for "Americanizing projects" was a kind of racism as well: the assumption that in and of themselves, Japanese Americans were not American enough; the belief that manifestations of traditional culture, including the use of the Japanese language, among others, served as barriers to "Americanization"; the suspicion of anyone who practiced Shintoism. And over all of this loomed the view of Japanese Americans as "racial children in need of democratic tutelage" — the belief that no longer how long they'd been in the United States, they needed to shun their culture in proving themselves to be truly American, and, in doing so, proving themselves loyal to the country that pushed them into the contradiction of democratic concentration camps. This raises, of course, a number of questions. What exactly is it to "be American"? Who gets to determine how American someone is — whether they are American "enough" or in need of "Americanization"? At that point in time, it was the gatekeepers: the people who could look at a group of Japanese Americans and say that their "Americanness" needed proof and improvement. For a long time, "Americanness" has been seen as a standard — one that whiteness provides a FastPass to; one that people of color are told they must change themselves and renounce their cultures to reach. I am reminded of a time when I was volunteering, when a white man asked probing questions about where I was from and told me that "my people" had been taking "their" land; their jobs; their resources — that they wouldn't have enough. In some perspectives, Americans of color remain "perpetual foreigners".