This study will examine racism as it is experienced by Japanese-Americans in the United States. The specific approach of the study will be to focus on racism against Japanese-Americans as a means for other Americans to relieve their various frustrations and uncertainties through a psychology of exclusion and domination.
What James Baldwin in his essay "Stranger in the Village" says about white prejudice against blacks can be very easily applied to white prejudice against Japanese-Americans. Baldwin writes that "The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply 'contributors' to our own) and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological" (Baldwin, 1953, p. 935).
Baldwin goes on to argue that blacks are so thoroughly a part of every segment of American society that whites can no longer --- for the sake of their own sanity, if nothing else ---pretend that those blacks are somehow some external phenomenon who will one day disappear. As Baldwin writes, in a passage which again can be applied meaningfully to a discussion of racist attitudes on the part of other Americans toward Japanese-Americans: "The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again" (Baldwin, 1953, p. 946).
The modern root of prejudice against the Japanese on the part of Americans is found in the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. "Wartime hysteria," say Girdner and Loftis in The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the...