* Myth #1
Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps during World War II while Italian-Americans and German-Americans were not
The war against terror in the United States has caused many to warn that any erosion of civil liberties could result in a repeat of the government internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Only this time the targeted group would be Arab-Americans. The National Education Association recently released an instruction guide for teachers to help them teach about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The instructions generally call for a warning against American intolerance – not Islamic or Arab intolerance. To better get the message across, one recommendation is to teach children about how the government interned Japanese-Americans during WWII.
Indeed, during a tour to promote his book on American race relations, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (2002), Frank Wu, the first Asian-American law professor at Howard University, appeared on a local black talk show in Washington DC hosted by NPR personality Kojo Nnamdi. Professor Wu also writes for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Nation, so he is no minor character. The two commentators immediately started talking about the history of white American racism and spent considerable time informing viewers about the “fact” that during WWII the American government interned Japanese-Americans but not Italian-Americans or German-Americans. Indeed, if America really did intern non-whites whose ancestors happened to come from Japan, but not whites whose ancestors came from Italy or Germany, what can be more telling about the reality of American racism?
The fact is that about half of those interned by the U.S. government during WWII were white (Mostly Italian-Americans and German-Americans). In Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (1997), Arnold Krammer, professor of history at Texas A&M University, describes the extensive wartime policy of interning Europeans – a policy that has disappeared from history books and that gives the lie to the orthodox view that Japanese relocation was a race-based policy. Using government documents, newspaper accounts, and interviews with former internees, Prof. Krammer has documented the officially forgotten history of the internment of whites…
Myth #2
American slavery (white-on-black) is uniquely wicked in world history
One of the most productive effects of David Horowitz’s 2001 campaign against reparations for slavery was his publicizing some inconvenient facts about the institution. Slavery was a universal institution first stopped by whites, and blacks who came to America were already slaves of Arabs or other blacks. While every American child learns about white-on-black slavery, other forms of slavery that are more prevalent and still practiced are ignored. In fact, black-on-black and Arab-on-black slavery still exists today in parts of Africa such as the Sudan and Mauritania and in the black Caribbean nation of Haiti.
A few proponents of reparations tried to answer Horowtiz by stating that African slavery was benign compared to Western slavery. Typical of this line of thought is the following passage from Randall Robinson’s reparations manifesto, The Debt (2000): “While King Affonso [of Kongo] was no stranger to slavery, which was practiced throughout most of the known world, he had understood slavery as a condition befalling prisoners of war, criminals, and debtors, out of which slaves could earn, or even marry, their way. This was nothing like seeing this wholly new and brutal commercial practice of slavery where tens of thousands of his subjects were dragged off in chains.”
Dorothy Benton-Lewis, head of the National Coalition for Reparations against Blacks, claims that only white slavers were racist and brutal: “It is American slavery that put a color on slavery. And American slavery is not like the slavery of Africa or ancient times. This was dehumanizing, brutal and barbaric slavery that subjugated people and turned them into a profit.”
The claims of Robinson and Benton-Lewis are widely believed but are simply not true. Orlando Patterson studied 55 slave societies for his 1982 book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982). He writes:
“It has often been remarked that slavery in the Americas is unique in the primary role of race as a factor in determining the condition and treatment of slaves. This statement betrays an appalling ignorance of the comparative data on slave societies. . . . Throughout the Islamic world, for instance, race was a vital issue. The light-skinned Tuareg and related groups had decidedly racist attitudes towards the Negroes they conquered. Throughout the Islamic empires, European and Turkish slaves were treated quite differently from slaves south of the Sahara Desert. . . . Slavery [in Africa] was more than simply “subordination”; it was considered a degraded condition, reinforced by racist attitudes among the Arab slave owners.”
Writing on African slavery before 1600, the historian Paul Lovejoy notes: “For those who were enslaved, the dangers involved forced marches, inadequate food, sexual abuse, and death on the road.”
In his book on the reparations battle, Uncivil Wars (2002) Horowitz adds:
“In fact Africa’s internal slave trade, which did not involve the United States or any European power, not only extended over the entire 500 years mentioned by Robinson, but also preceded it by nearly 1,000 years. In the period between 650 and 1600, before any Western involvement, somewhere between 3 million and 10 million Africans were bought by Muslim slavers for use in Saharan societies and in the trade in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. By contrast, the enslavement of blacks in the United States lasted 89 years, from 1776 until 1865. The combined slave trade to the British colonies in North America and later to the United States accounted for less than 3 percent of the global trade in African slaves. The total number of slaves imported to North America was 800,000, less than the slave trade to the island of Cuba alone. If the internal African slave trade-which began in the seventh century and persists to this day in the Sudan, Mauritania and other sub-Saharan states-is taken into account, the responsibility of American traders shrinks to a fraction of 1 percent of the slavery problem.”
Myth #3
Lynching was another racist American institution that viscous whites inflicted upon innocent blacks
Next to slavery, lynching is thought to be the most racist aspect of American history. A lynching museum exists in Milwaukee that focuses exclusively on white-on-black lynchings. In 2000, a traveling exhibit of white-on-black lynching photos came to American’s biggest cities. The lynching exhibit received favorable attention from the major media including the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN. According to CNN correspondent Maria Hinojosa, “All photos show voiceless victims of hate; men and women stripped, lashed, beaten, burned and hung. Often their only crime was one they could not control — the color of their skin.” She ends her review of the display by claiming, “The exhibit is a harsh reminder of America’s responsibility for a horrible chapter of racial hatred.”
This is the official view of lynching. That it was exclusively whites who carried it out against innocent blacks. It is portrayed as a viscous act of officially sanctioned white racism against innocent blacks, designed to keep “Negroes in their place.”
In fact, we know quite a bit about lynching and the facts indicate it was far from a racist design practiced by whites to terrorize blacks. From its founding in 1914 until the early 1930’s. The New Republic ran an annual editorial listing the number of lynchings in the United States for each year. The NAACP’s first big crusade was against lynching and they frequently publicized statistics. The Chicago Tribune also covered lynching extensively.
Robert Zangrando, cites statistics for the period of 1882–1968 in his book, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching. Using figures from the Tuskegee Institute he finds a total of 4,742 for the 87-year period, of which 1,297 victims were white and 3,445 were black. Even though over a quarter of those lynched were white, this does not stop lynching from being described almost entirely in racist terms.
