Even though individual liberties are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, throughout American history aggression, laws or social customs have severely limited the freedom of large segments of the population, particularly Native Americans and African Americans. As other ethnic groups arrived, they too experienced restriction of their rights and freedoms by racism and other forms of prejudice.
Ethnic hostility and distrust frequently arise during wartime. Associating an ethnic group here with a government abroad has often resulted in discrimination, injustice, or physical violence toward members of that group. German Americans were suspected and attacked during World War I; more recently Arab Americans have been subject to prejudices stirred up by American involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts.
World War I also offered the millions who had immigrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a chance to define themselves as patriotic Americans. While appealing to newcomers with images and slogans celebrating freedom and opportunity, at the same time government posters challenged immigrants to prove themselves as Americans by joining the military, conserving food, and buying bonds.
A major movement to "Americanize" the newly arrived masses from eastern and southern Europe was fueled by the war effort. The core of the campaign was an attempt to teach newcomers to read, write, and speak English and to give up their traditional manners of speech and dress. Resistance to the use of languages other than English implied a deeper rejection of the immigrants' native cultures as inferior or unworthy.
The internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War is one of the most dramatic and extreme cases in which people were denied their constitutional rights because of their ethnicity. In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and United States entry into World War II, over one hundred thousand persons of Japanese ancestry, seventy thousand of whom were American-born, were rounded up along the West Coast. Because of the assumption that the immigrants and their children would be more loyal to their ancestral country of origin, Japanese Americans were uprooted from their work and homes and forced into prison-like camps, in most cases for the duration of the war. The internees drew upon their artistic heritage to interpret and transform the bleak environs and desolate desert landscapes of the camps.
Barriers established by racism often are perpetuated by groups that, generations earlier, were immigrants and targets themselves. But although nativism and racism persist and periodically flare up, common concerns of safety, housing, education, and the quality of life have begun to join together diverse ethnic groups in urban and rural communities across the country. The poverty and discrimination that historically have been disabling for minority groups now are becoming rallying points for empowerment.
[From Exclusion to Inclusion: Image Archive]
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© 1996 The Balch Institute For Ethnic Studies
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