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Examples Of Prejudice In Farewell To Manzanar

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Mark Twain once said, “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” Even as we as a globalized society have improved greatly, prejudice appears far too often and is expressed everywhere even in today’s world. During World War 2, prejudice was peaking in society. In Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatuski Houston and James D. Houston, the main theme is that silent prejudice hurts the most. Wakatsuki avoids portraying open racism and prejudice in the book in order to examine he subtle and often unspoken prejudices that occur everyday life, which are often the most hurtful. Overt hatred for which the Japanese Americans have prepared themselves for never materializes. This imagined hatred shows the rarity of open hatred compared to subtle acts of prejudice. In fact, by imagining that all of white America will hate them, these Japanese Americans are accepting overt racism prejudice without it ever occurring. The wrong belief that …show more content…

“‘Gee, I didn’t know you could speak English’’ (113). Radine’s innocent surprise at Jeanne’s ability to speak English, for example, makes Jeanne realize that prejudice is not always a conscious choice but that it can also be a result of conditioning by one’s parents and culture. Radine judges from Jeanne’s Japanese appearance that she shouldn’t be able to speak English, because Radine’s family or culture has taught her to do so. Jeanne’s reaction is described as, “She was genuinely amazed. I was stunned. How could this have even bee win doubt?” (113). She is shocked to discover that people do not really look to see who she is as a person but instead instantly judge her as a foreigner and paint her with the traits they imagine all Japanese people have. Confrontations like these are the prejudices that truly eat away a person and hurt a person

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She read perfectly, But when Jeanne went to sit down, “A pretty blond girl said, quite innocently, ‘Gee, I didn't know you could speak english!’ She was genuinely amazed. I was shocked” (Wakatsuki 141). Jeanne’s Caucasian classmates didn't think she could speak English because she looked foreign to them, proving that even though her classmates did not necessarily want to be biased against her, Jeanne still had to face the consequences of being from her country after the war.

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The author, Jeanne Wakatsuki, presents a meaningful story filled with experiences that shaped not only her life, but shaped the lives of thousands of Japanese families living in America. The book’s foreword gives us a starting point in which the reader can start to identify why the book was written. “We a told a New York writer friend about the idea. He said: ‘It’s a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue.

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“We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced,” said Herbert Spencer, a famous philosopher. Prejudice is frequent everywhere and difficult to stop. It is very difficult to destroy something in someone’s mind, and it will inevitably be expressed through various methods with different degrees of subtlety. Any expression of this can hurt. Subsequently, in Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, the main theme is that prejudice is everywhere, and can be of varying degrees.

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The novel When the Emperor Was Divine tells a story of Japanese-American families during World War Two. During internment, the U.S. government rounded up many Japanese adults for investigation without first producing evidence that they committed any crimes. The father in this story has been arrested for the sane reason. Army would deport all Japanese Americans to military camps, thus commencing Japanese American internment. So, the woman with her girl and her boy have to move to a camp.

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