Jeanne Wakatsuki avoids portraying open ethnic conflict in her autobiography in order to examine the subtle and often unspoken prejudices that affect everyday life, which are often the most dangerous. There are, of course, rumors of Japanese Americans being beaten and abused after they leave Manzanar, but for the most part the direct, open hatred for which the camp residents have prepared themselves never materializes. In fact, by imagining that all of white America will hate them, these Japanese Americans are themselves subcumbing to a kind of prejudice, forgetting that not all Americans are prowar and anti-Japanese. Many Americans, such as Jeanne’s kind schoolteachers and the American Friends Service that helps them find housing, actually help the Japanese. The mistaken belief that white America has a hatred for them obstrcuts the Japanese Americans. They focus so much on what seems to them an inevitable clash that they are not prepared for the subtler prejudice of daily life that is racism’s most common
Jeanne Wakatsuki avoids portraying open ethnic conflict in her autobiography in order to examine the subtle and often unspoken prejudices that affect everyday life, which are often the most dangerous. There are, of course, rumors of Japanese Americans being beaten and abused after they leave Manzanar, but for the most part the direct, open hatred for which the camp residents have prepared themselves never materializes. In fact, by imagining that all of white America will hate them, these Japanese Americans are themselves subcumbing to a kind of prejudice, forgetting that not all Americans are prowar and anti-Japanese. Many Americans, such as Jeanne’s kind schoolteachers and the American Friends Service that helps them find housing, actually help the Japanese. The mistaken belief that white America has a hatred for them obstrcuts the Japanese Americans. They focus so much on what seems to them an inevitable clash that they are not prepared for the subtler prejudice of daily life that is racism’s most common