On Dec. 7, 1941, Yoshiko Uchida, an educator and writer in her last year at University of California Berkeley, listened to the unbelievable news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On that day, her family’s life changed forever.
When she returned home that night, her father, a pillar in the Japanese-American community, had disappeared, taken away by U.S. government officials. In her memoir, “Desert Exile,” she recounts her mother’s hope that night: “Let’s leave the porch light on and the screen door unlatched. ... Maybe Papa will be back later tonight.”
He did not return. For several days, she and her family lived with uncertainty, not knowing where Papa had gone. Throughout the Japanese-American and Japanese immigrant community, children were calling out in the night for their fathers who had been taken away.
Last Saturday, a convoy from our church visited the Topaz Museum in Delta, Utah, that stands as a witness to the history of separated families. First, fathers were ripped from their families and then Executive Order 9066 separated out and incarcerated families of Japanese descent, in desolate outposts such as Topaz in central Utah and Heart Mountain in northern Wyoming.
The museum in Delta holds the history, showing that this one act was part of the larger evil of racism that had been informing our immigration laws, limiting the immigration of Asians, represented by the Immigration Act of 1924 that created a national origins quota which limited the number of immigrants by country and excluded all immigrants from Asia. The museum uncovers the racism that formed the foundation of human rights’ violations during World War II. We must remember, their voices call to us. We must remember because we must not do this again.
We are doing this again.
Evidence is flooding social media, radio, newspapers, and television. Children under reflective silver blankets are calling out for Mami and Papi. A Honduran man, separated from his wife and three-year-old child at the border, took his own life in a jail cell.
Oh America, when will we learn our lessons of history? When will we weep with the Ute, Shoshone and Paiute children crying in the dorm rooms of Indian schools, separated from their parents, corporally punished for speaking their native languages?
When will Sojourner Truth’s face emerge in the faces of parents crying for their children on the border in her words, said in 1851: “I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me!”
Are you listening, America, to what has been allowed under our watch for hundreds of years? Do you wonder, what if those of us who lived in privilege had stood with Sojourner Truth and formed a human shield around the auction block that wrested babes out of her arms?
When will we stand together for the protection of children calling for their parents and parents calling for their children? When will we be a country that stops a human rights disaster as we are entering it?
If you are waking up to this ancient tragedy being enacted again, write to your representatives in Washington, in Salt Lake City, in the Governor’s Mansion. Tell them to use their power to bring families back together.
Come to the Capitol on June 30 at 10 a.m. and join the “Families Belong Together” gathering. Let us weep together and raise our voices in anger and solidarity, saying “We hear the cries of parents and children separated on our borders. It is time to stop!”
Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Rev. Patty Willis, South Valley Unitarian Society, calls for support of the Muslim community during a news conference where religious and community leaders gathered at the Madina Masjid Islamic Center in Salt Lake City to show support, Friday March 10, 2017.
Rev. Patty C. Willis is pastor of the South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society.