In My Head, Neurons Blaze
A stream of thoughts from yours truly — on history, weather, and how they all come together.
LISTENING: to some jams
FEELING: tired after traveling
SEEING: my usual sights
On Monday, I was on Bainbridge Island off the coast of Washington. I spent a summer there and fell absolutely in love with the ecology and landscape. I have many tortured memories there, but I returned this time with my partner. It was lovely to rewrite the story of a place. Some stories, of course, cannot be paved over anew.
Bainbridge Island is where the U.S. government forced the first Japanese Americans to leave their homes and move into detention camps in 1942. This happened during World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The government held over 100,000 people in detention.
Nearly 70,000 of them were like me — citizens but descendants of immigrants. In the eyes of White America, forever other.
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These families lost their homes and their businesses. They were traumatized and sent to new lands in far-off states. I worry whether our government could repeat such an atrocious act. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that this detention was constitutional. It wasn't until 2018 that the court walked back on that ruling. And it wasn't until Donald Trump began his travel bans during his first presidency.
"We might want to believe that something like the U.S. government's mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry would not happen again," said Maya Sen, a public policy professor at Harvard University, in a 2022 interview. "It’s not impossible that the government could do something like this again, especially in a time of war."
If "time of war" isn't an accurate description of the Current Mood, I don't know what is.
Welcome to Possibilities, a creative climate newsletter on the possibilities that lie where crisis meets community. I’m Yessenia Funes, and my mind has been busy at work, thinking about all the potential ways the incoming president will hurt people who look like me.
If the climate movement wants people to engage on the issue of a warming planet, it needs to urgently prioritize the experiences of the most vulnerable. Sen's research on Japanese-American internment found that the trauma of such an event can last generations. It discourages political involvement and leads to political disillusionment. That's a dangerous place for a people to be.