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Examples Of Prejudice In Pearl Harbor

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Executive Order 9066: Roots in Prejudice
Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor crippled the US Naval fleet and killed thousands of soldiers and citizens but more significantly, it destroyed American’s sense of safety and the utopian belief that we were beyond the reach of the world’s problems. The resulting fear that pervaded American society, spread like wildfire and led to an emotional and irrational chapter in American politics that would ignore Japanese citizens’ constitutional rights to appease the hysteria. Americans’ response to the attacks on Pearl Harbor revealed decades of existing prejudices as they turned their anger on their fellow American citizens who were of Japanese descent. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attacks, on February 19, 1942, …show more content…

Further yet, the government again complied with the fears of Americans with states from California to Louisiana passing Alien Land Laws that prohibited any ‘alien ineligible for citizenship’ from purchasing agricultural land or leasing it for long periods of time (Ng 9). Japanese immigrants felt the negative sentiment against them as the laws were directed at them, but they still managed to assimilate their lives to American culture. With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war on Japan, the anti-Japanese sentiment that had been accumulating over the past hundred years met its boiling point with the Department of Justice’s issuance of the first federal regulation which discriminated directly against American citizens of Japanese ancestry (Daniels 27). It closed land borders of the United States to all enemy aliens and all persons of Japanese ancestry (ibid). These early influences on the government imposed by biased Americans planted the seed for the passing of Executive Order 9066 and eventual internment of the US Japanese

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