Japanese Internment, Somalian Patriotism, and Etc.

I. Japanese Internment
Nikiko Massamoto, "My Grandfather's Shovel," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"In 1942, with  no evidence of criminal espionage or proof that the Japanese-American community posed a threat, the US government imprisoned my jiichen [grandfather] and his family without trial in Arizona. The concentration camp was built on the Gila River reservation of the Pima Indians, and that they had been forced onto -- two histories of confinement. "When the removal orders came, Japanese-Americans could take only what they could carry and all other property was sold for dirt cheap. Families hat owned farms were forced to  sell  everything."

II. Somalian Patriotism
Julia Harte, "Minority Report," The Nation, March 16/23, 2020.
"In 2014, the refugee center at Boston Children's Hospital surveyed 120 young people of Somalian descent and found that more than a quarter experienced some kind of contact with police in the past year." Although the Somalian youth were widely feared to be "potential terrorists," only two Somalians were convicted of plotting or committing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 to 2015, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute.

"As long as marginalized minorities are the targets of counter-extremism programs, their mistrust of the government will persist. And as long as they mistrust the government, the authorities will continue to see in them the potential for violent extremism."

III. The Rape of the Tongass
Michael Brune, "Vandals in the Chapel," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"Every hour, human activities destroy 6,000 acres of rain forest around the globe." "Since 2001, many of the Tongass's old-growth trees have been spared from logging by the federal Roadless Rule, which limits road construction and reconstruction, as well as timber harvesting in national forests. Now, the Trump administration wants to repeal that rule for the Tongass."

"According to the Taxpayers for Common Sense, it costs US Forest Service more money to administer timber sales in the Tongass than the agency receives in revenue from the sales, meaning that we are spending at least $30 million a year to cut  down trees that shouldn't be cut down in the first place."

IV. "Black Book" Jingoism
Hilton Als, "Seeing Things," The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
" 'The Black Book' was intended, like 'The Bluest Eye,' to combat the 'Black is beautiful'  jingoism of the time, and to show real lives from the ghastly slave ship of the sixteen-hundreds to America in the twentieth-century." "The point is not to soak in some warm bath of nostalgia about the good old days -- there were none! -- but to recognize those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were such a part of our past, and so useful to us and to the generation of blacks now growing up...To create something that might last, that would be witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every PH.D dissertation, and the focal point of all the mindlessness that seems to have joined the smog of California's movie world."

ADDENDUMS:
*New Mexico became the 18th state to approve a red flag law that allows firearms to be temporarily seized.

*According to Chad Boin of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the average tariff on imports from China will be 19.3%, up from about 3% when Trump took office. The first phase of the agreement says nothing about government subsidies to Chinese firms,and the operation of state-owned enterprises.

*Attorney General William Barr is using a process known as "certification," a historically little-used power of the attorney general's office, that allows him to overrule decisions made by the Board of Immigration Appeals and set binding precedent. He is using it as a check on immigration.

*ICE is targeting "sanctuary cities" with increased surveillance.