The Politics of Racism

Book excerpt: The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War is the first book to fully document the politics behind the 1942 expulsion order that saw 20,000 Japanese Canadians evicted from their homes in British Columbia and sent inland to work camps, detention centres and farms in Alberta and Manitoba. The book details the relationship between racism and political expediency, and shows how political parties and the affairs of the nation were controlled by a small group of politicians who scapegoated minorities to hang on to power. Most alarmingly, The Politics of Racism shows how easily Canadians allowed themselves to be manipulated by a political process that used fear and war hysteria in a very cynical and calculated way. Ann Sunahara has used previously classified government documents and the wartime records of the Liberal government to reveal a startling new portrait of political connivance that shows Mackenzie King bowing to the pressures of a small number of B.C. politicians who saw the “Japanese problem” as a useful tool to enhance their status and win favours in Ottawa. Branded as traitors in the eyes of many of their countrymen, unaware that the military had opposed their uprooting, without political friends and allies except for the CCF, the Japanese Canadians were powerless – a muffled minority within a country at war. Ann Sunahara has woven together her analysis of government documents with the personal memories of victims of that shameful period. The accounts of the victims and the official records provide a poignant and powerful indictment of the politicians who used racism and fear to further their own careers and of a society whose indifference let it happen. Since the 1981 version of The Politics of Racism (POR1981) was published, it has undergone two further editions: an HTML version in 2000 (POR2000) with an additional afterward about Redress; and an e-book edition (POR2020) with an additional photo essay by the author. Both are published at japanesecanadianhistory.ca.