WWII & New Consciousness

Source: Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.

WWII encounter with racist nazism (ideology of Aryan racial supremacy)

Americans look critically at the racism in their own society

 FIRST time Americans write so openly about racism as wrong: 

• Ashley Montagu 1942: war = conflict between “spirit of Nazi racist” & “spirit of democracy” = Nazi, wrong-headed, dangerous thinking that “the shape of the nose or the color of skin” had something “to do with human values & culture”
• 1943 Ruth Benedict denounced racism as unscientific & urged US to “clean its own house” & “stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race”
• Gunnar Myrdal writes that Americans must apply principle of democracy more explicitly to race. America must stand before whole world in support of racial tolerance & equality “this country has a national experience of uniting racial & cultural diversities & a national theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom & equality for all. The main trend is the gradual realization of the American Creed”
• Wendell Willkie: “We cannot fight the forces of imperialism abroad and maintain a form of imperialism at home . . . . Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities self-evident. When we talk of freedom of opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our society become so clear that they have wrecked the theories of the master race with which we were so contented so long.”
• New York Times (1941): “A nation making an all-out effort cannot neglect any element in its population. If it is engaged on the side of democracy it must leave open the doors of opportunity to all, regardless of race”
• FDR: US stands for 4 freedoms: Freedom for speech & worship & Freedom from want & fear; “Americanism is a matter of mind and heart. Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry”

 CRUCIBLE of AMERICAN HISTORY

    ·        Asians & Mexicans had emigrated to America searching for freedom but found selves facing barriers because of race

·        On WWII eve Asian immigrants still excluded from citizenship (& not          allowed to own land in many states)

·        Mexican immigrants found selves pushed from welfare rolls & targeted for deportation

·        Indians confined to reservation where they’re governed by federal regulations & beaurocrats

·        African Americans in North restricted to reservation-like ghettos and in South trapped in system of peonage (sharecropping)

Yet ALL these groups had been appropriating America’s principle that “all men are created equal” endowed with “unalienable Rights” of life & liberty. Frederick Douglas: “’We the People,’ not ‘we the white people.’”

Hitler’s demonic program of Jewish genocide “Final Solution” & eyewitness accounts of gas chambers, death camps, leads to RAGE that sweeps through Jewish communities in America (though US sanctuary for Jews fleeing Europe is limited to 26,000)

July 21, 1942 demonstration of 20,000 at Madison Square Garden vs Hitler’s racist atrocities (6 million Jews killed in Holocaust)

Forges bond between oppressed minorities

“Ghastly lesson of how an ideology of racial superiority could ultimately lead to genocide”

DURING WWII solders fight together as one – for democracy

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