My parents were just children when they were wrested from their homes into tarpaper barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The message: They were not welcome.
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent — an entire group of people maligned and mischaracterized as a threat.
My parents both died late last year. Sadly, in their final days, they witnessed a resurgence of fabricated fear as justification for unnecessary, unfounded and unlawful action to strip other groups of people of their rights and dignity. They lived to see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents here in Chicago forcibly rounding up neighbors for detention camps.
The premise of a threat again is being used to create a sense of “us versus them.”
But once again, many of us see “them” as neighbors rather than threats.