EVENT DETAILS

"Looking Like the Enemy: Islamophobia and the Forgotten Lessons of Japanese American Interment"

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective presents a lecture by Scott Kurashige.

In 1988, the United States Government issued a formal apology for the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and acknowledged it was the product of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In light of calls to monitor, exclude, and detain Muslim Americans, this lecture will highlight the forgotten lessons of Japanese American internment and dissect the racist arguments used to portray those who “look like the enemy” as suspicious and dangerous. It will also critique the ways even those promoting tolerance force ethnic minorities to “prove their loyalty” by serving as government informants and validating repressive state policies.

Scott Kurashige is a professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Senior Advisor for Faculty Diversity and Initiatives at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008) and co-author with Grace Lee Boggs of The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011). He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles and has been a fellow at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.