This is a piece I wrote for this.  The theme of the night was the Supreme Court. I played a little ukulele during the piece, because, as I have been told over the years, I am a one-trick pony.

Strict Scrutiny

© Chloe Johnston (2012)

For some reason, it’s really easy to picture them, even from a simple description.

10 small children, dressed in elaborate American colonial era costumes, sporting enormous white powdered wigs and holding a pre-revolutionary flag. Their faces are very serious because someone has told the to be still for a photo. Someone else must have given them those costumes to wear and lines to learn. That’s what it’s like to be a kid. Constantly the smallest person in the room and never allowed to eat exactly what you want and told to put this one, say this, stand there, smile. Look—you’re in a play now!

It took two executive orders, one official, one implied, to get them here. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive order 9066 ordering all American of Japanese descent into internment camps for the duration of the war. It’s been four months since Pearl Harbor.

But what executive order demanded that these Japanese American children end up dressed up at Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson?

The American concentration camps. That’s what the Japanese man said to the Jewish girl over Nepalese food. Well, he’s part-Japanese, and I’m only half Jewish, but he’s studying the language pretty seriously and me, I’ve been known to light a Hannukah candle on occasion, and we would have both ended up in camps if we’d had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I spend a fair amount of time around people who are much better schooled in history and oppression than I am, so I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut in key moments. Still, I shudder when he uses the word.
But what else to call them? A group of people defined by race, forcibly concentrated in government-run camps.

There’s a quietness around certain stories. Shouts are left empty and words don’t quite fit the page. There are stories and pictures that fall into the dustbin of history. But these pictures are hidden under the papers in the false bottom of the locked drawer of history.

Fred Korematsu challenged Executive Order 9066 by refusing to report to a camp. The case goes to the Supreme Court, where it is upheld by the principle of strict scrutiny. The order is deemed constitutional because it protects America’s interests.

And these kids. Someone put them in those wigs and handed them that flag and said smile. Someone said to them show them who you are, maybe not who you look like, but who you are, which history is yours and which flag is yours. And the people who did that were the people who wrote the rules but the people who were told where to be. Who were handed the metaphoric wig and flag and told to smile and perform a part of something that were also being told they could never be.

It would be another 40 years before the government releases documents that reveal that at the time of the order, most experts believed none of the internees posed a real threat. Locked drawers of history are never unlocked in time.