Raising ugly memories
We knew we weren't the enemy
A familiar knot of anxiety over post-9/11 civil liberties issues shows a nisei how far America has come - and still has to go.
By Robert R. Hosokawa
WINTER SPRINGS, FLA. – Human rights can be a fragile victim in a nation's zeal to battle an enemy. We Japanese-Americans learned firsthand how, once lost, individual justice is painfully difficult to regain.
So it is that with every news story about Americans hashing through their uneasy post-9/11 relationship to all things with an "Arab face" - from the outright abuses at Abu Ghraib to the detentions without charge of "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo, to the lingering suspicions on America's Main Streets - I'm reminded of what it was like to be an "American with a Japanese face" during World War II.
