The battle of Pearl Harbour caused racial discrimination that negatively impacted Japanese-Americans socially and economically.
The racism stemming from the battle of Pearl Harbour generated negative social impacts on the Japanese-Americans by leading them to believe that since the Japanese attacked, their heritage inherently puts them at fault. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, rumours that Imperial Japan was planning an attack on the West Coast of the United States caused widespread paranoia and uproars from the public calling for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans. Despite over 60% of civilian deaths from the battle being Japanese-Americans and 38% of the Hawaiian population having Japanese ancestry, many Americans believed all
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Although President Roosevelt had already delivered a speech calling for a formal declaration of war on the Japanese Empire, demand for harsher government measures to be taken against Japanese-Americans grew until Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. The order authorized the forced evacuation of all Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to ‘relocation centers’ further inland. Anyone with the slightest Japanese relation was clearly targeted, with the evacuation including those who were as little as 1/16 Japanese and orphans with “a single drop of Japanese blood”. Within weeks of the order being signed into law, over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in the internment camps. They had no choice but to submit to constant demoralization over the three years that the camps were active in hopes of demonstrating their ‘patriotism’. The psychological and physical agony inflicted on the internees caused them to grow increasingly depressed, overcome with helplessness and insecurity. Moreover, even after their return to the West Coast, Japanese-Americans remained the target of violence in the form of fires and explosions aimed at their homes, businesses or places of worship. Therefore, it is clear that the attack on Pearl Harbour led to the American public turning against Japanese-Americans and the romanticizing of their degradation through incarceration and violence, consequently heavily impacting their social lives. However, impacts of this racism went far beyond social