By now, many of us have heard about the appalling conditions in the detention centers where Latinx migrants are being kept. If not, link here: ‘There Is a Stench’: Soiled Clothes and No Baths for Migrant Children at a Texas Center . There has also been the photo of the father and daughter downed in the Rio Grande (above) and accompanying articles like this one Perspective | We used to think photos like this could change the world. What needs to change is who we are.
Amid all this bad news, the story of Dr. Satusuki Ina stood out to me: Japanese-Americans held in U.S. internment camps to lead protest against Fort Sill child detention: "It's never too late to do the right thing" Dr. Ina was born in an internment camp for Japanese Americans in the 1940s. Internment left such an impact on her and her family that she became a professor and psychotherapist specializing in trauma. Last Saturday Dr. Ina led a group of formerly detained Japanese Americans joined by a number of Native American groups to protest plans to use Fort Sill in Oklahoma as a detention center for migrant children. In the past, Fort Sill has served as an internment site for Japanese Americans and, before that, Native Americans.
The point that historical parallels are key for interpreting the crises and injustices of today, feels especially salient not only as I read about the descendants and former detainees of Fort Sill protesting this last weekend, but also as this week I am in Nebraska on book tour talking about my grandfather’s World War Two memoir. In pulling together my grandfather’s account (and others) who fought against fascism and Nazism in the 1940s, I am struck by the parallels with our own time, with our country of today. Sadly, they’ve always been there and even some recent work has uncovered how even the Nazi’s ideas of racial supremacy and ethnic segregation were imported from the white supremacists of the United States: White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots. But what I find myself grieving today is the contrast between the heroism of the men and women of a generation that fought to end Nazism, fascism, and what they stood for, and the quagmire of inaction/division we are in today. Why does the gulf between the moral resolve and the courage of the 1940s and the 2010s feel so wide? (Not that they were perfect, FDR was putting Japanese Americans in cages and there was still legal segregation of people of color throughout the US, but there seemed to be no doubt that the Third Reich had to be defeated).
Picture taken by Gordon E. Cross, medic in the 134th Infantry Regiment of the Army National Guard while his division (the 35th, also my grandfather’s) was en-route to the Battle of the Bulge. Cross and my grandfather’s accounts are included in the book Finding St. Lo: A Memoir of War and Family link here: Ted Neill
In the work of dismantling racism, we’re often called to see beyond our “categories” our “tribes”, and our self identifying labels, to recognize the humanity in everyone, regardless of ethnicity, creed, or nationality. To bring it back to the Newsweek article, I see Dr. Ina and those joining her (Native Americans and Japanese Americans) as doing just that. The children in these concentration camps (and yes I called them concentration camps because that is what they are) may not look like Dr. Ina, but she and her protest partners see their plight as their own. Recognizing that we are all children of God, with universal humanity and universal rights, Dr. Ina and others are allowing themselves to be moved to action, their hearts to be broken, by the same things that break God’s heart too. Their courage, their moral resolve, their moral clarity, are refreshingly strong and clear. I suspect history will see them as the greatest of their generation.
Post Note: these articles on the importance of historical analogies being central to the spirit of “never again” are great reads I’ve also included Caitlyn Flannigan’s (influenced by Catholic social teachings like myself) impassioned appeal to Christians.
Opinion | ‘Never forget’ is dead. And it was killed on our watch.
Holocaust Museum's Awful Intervention In the Concentration Camp Debate