USA TODAY International Edition
For George Takei, ‘ America First’ policy puts us last
George Takei recalls the internment camp of his youth
It has been my life’s mission to ensure we learn important lessons from the past so that we don’t repeat them. That’s why this week, I presented a petition of support for Muslims in the USA, signed by more than 300,000 concerned Americans who oppose President Trump’s immigration ban, to the Muslim Public Affairs Council. It’s why I will speak Sunday at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library about his Executive Order 9066 that placed Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.
Most personally, on Feb. 19, the Day of Remembrance, the film of my Broadway musical Allegiance will have an encore screening in theaters, in partnership with Fathom Events. It tells the story of a JapaneseAmerican family much like mine during the internment.
I remember that day when American soldiers came to our home, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets, and ordered our family out. I was 5 years old. We were put on a train with armed soldiers, and taken to Arkansas.
I remember the barbed wire fence of the internment camp, the tall sentry towers with machine guns pointed down at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from our barrack to the latrine. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. To go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. I could see the barbed wire fence and the sentry tower right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words “with liberty and justice for all”— too young to feel the stinging irony in those words.
Our president has trumpeted an “America First” policy, vowing to prioritize the well- being of the United States. But “America” doesn’t seem to include the brown- skinned, foreign- sounding or non- Christian people affected by his travel ban, his Mexico border wall or his immigration raids. When Trump labels them “bad hombres” he feeds a narrative of “us vs. them.”
Keeping America safe means shutting out Middle Eastern refu- gees and deporting “rapists” and “murderers.” Keeping American jobs means keeping out Mexicans who cross the border to take them. So long as Trump can create a “them” who is out to get “us,” his actions are justified in the minds of many.
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Roosevelt launched his own version of “us vs. them,” authorizing the military to designate military zones and exclude any person from those zones as it saw fit. That order was on its face neutral. But it bore a clear intent.
Nearly 120,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated simply because we looked like “them” — the enemy. Two- thirds of us were U. S. citizens. We lost our homes, our jobs and our businesses and were held for years without charge.
The government had put “America First,” and we suffered.
We all must work together to ensure we do not again begin down a path of racial or religious division. We must identify such practices and call them out: It is a Muslim ban, they are targeting Mexicans, the orders do derive from bigotry. We understand viscerally what those words “America First” truly mean.