In an instant, the election changed everything. It has profoundly shifted the context of the work we do toward the darkness that is openly promised by a new president.
I gave my first interview five days after the election to Bianca Vandenbos at the Book Notions blog:
“We flatly call the last section of our Penguin Classics anthology ‘Repeating History,’ because it’s too late to talk about “learning our lessons” not to repeat such actions. If anything, the precedent of interning Issei community leaders and heads of households – immigrants from Japan who were denied the chance to apply for naturalized U.S. citizenship because of racial bans – is now cited by the president-elect as the basis for his program of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“And we’ve seen this before: the election of 2016 enabled travel bans from majority-Muslim nations, separations of families seeking asylum at the southern border, and kids in cages. This is no longer ancient history, this is the America voters have chosen today. In our anthology, we quote the prescient words of journalist James Omura from 1942, ‘Has the Gestapo Come to America?'”
This is the reality we must confront. The voters have chosen to transport us to the Germany of 1930. There will be a reckoning of what went wrong and how to fix it. For now, the only course of action is to fight back with fact and knowledge,
Teach the history of wartime incarceration that the president-elect is invoking as the precedent for his program of mass deportation and 21st century American concentration camps.
The next post will offer one new tool to use in the battle for minds and hearts.
