The racism during World War II proves a couple ideas we have brought up repeatedly in class: racism is reliant on the color of people’s skin and contingent on historical events. When Japanese American internment was seen as justified and German American internment unnecessary, the internment evidences the extent to which Americans, including the government, based their discrimination and fear on the color of people’s skin. It matter more that one attacking country was the home to people of color than that Germany was home to Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Supreme Court upheld what Ngai calls an “abridgment of civil rights” and sanctioned America’s systematic racism because Japanese Americans, no matter how long they had been in the United States, were not white.
Racism around World War II also brings up the ideas of racism being contingent on historical events. While there was racism against the Japanese regardless of the War, clearly the bombing of Pearl Harbor provided a reason for greater racism. FDR’s Executive Order 9066 and the Supreme Court’s upholding of it stripped thousands of civilians of their ‘unalienable’ rights as Americans because they failed to separate the actions of Japan from Japanese Americans. While FDR had always been hostile towards Japan and its people, the bombing of Pearl Harbor enabled him to ‘justifiably’ restrain the influence of Japanese immigrants in the United States. And regardless of the internment camps relatively brief lives, the consequences of internment last as a persistence of racism against Japanese Americans throughout the nation. Even though the WRA attempted to assimilate “Japanese Americans to the mainstream of American life,” the fear that led the Issei's to answer yes to all the registration questions or the way all Americans would view internees, makes it impossible for the United States to refute its execution of internment camps based on the color of people’s skin and the actions of their native country.