The Pass

Aloha No!
The Pass -
I read an article recently about the internment camps a few months back and I didn't think to save the link at the time.  It was difficult seeing the pictures seeing the pictures of "No Japs allowed" spray painted on signs and wondering how that must have made people feel.  The Nisei were signing up for the Armed Forces, determined to prove how American they were, fighting for a country that did not trust us and for many outright hated us.  It is a common experience we have with African Americans, a country that hated them and yet they were willing to die proving that they were American.

The internment camps were during a time of segregation.  One Nisei's account was of riding a bus, a time when African American's sat at the back of the bus.  So they went to the back.  The bus driver told them that only coloreds sat at the back and to move towards the front but they eventually sat in the middle.  There was a bit of confusion as to where to sit.  She said that in retrospect she wished she sat in the back.  In my mind I guess we were the yellow devil that America was at war with but somehow less evil than African Americans.

It is what I like to refer to as "The Pass", we are seen in most instances as non-threatening.  To the outside world we have assimilated into American culture and are no real threat.  The majority of people are not really  aware of Asian Civil Liberty groups.  According to the 2010 Census a snapshot for the last decade, 2000 to 2010 census numbers the "Asian alone or in combination" category shows relative to the total population numbers we have experience a significant growth of 46% expanding numbers by 11.9 million in 2000 to 17.3 million in 2010.  The total population being 281,421,906 and 308,745,538 respectively.

Is it because our civil liberty groups are a little more "quiet" than other groups, make up a smaller portion of society or because we have "assimilated" so well?

I have not done a lot of reading thus far for Asian Ethnic Studies and have started to dip my toes into it.  What I have found out thus far is that during the 60's our people were there fighting for civil rights.  Which leads me back around to the question, with the war, internment camps and civil rights, how are we not seen as a threat?  Please make no mistake, I don't want us to be seen as a threat, I simply wonder about what appears to be an anomaly.  I realize that during the Jim Crow era because our numbers were concentrated primarily on the west coast that the majority of the laws were based there; could this be the reason that more laws were not created elsewhere?  A simple perception on lack of need, we were simply not in other parts of the country in larger numbers; i.e. no threat.

Perhaps across the rest of the nation we were just too few and far between to really worry about.