A Right to Rights
Eric Kim
Korean-Canadian illustrator and artist living in Toronto. He has illustrated a number of books, from children’s fiction to graphic novels, and currently works for the Toronto Public Library.
Looking at the internment of the Japanese-Canadians through sociological frameworks shows us how today’s racialized citizens may have their rights overruled by a state that exercises its sovereign power in the name of securitization.
Although the trigger was Pearl Harbour, the internment of Japanese-Canadians could not have happened without the Anti-Asian resentment that had been building since the late 1800s. This was best exemplified by the Asiatic Exclusion League, whose membership included the mayor of Vancouver, Alexander Bethune. Pressure felt by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King would result in the drafting of Order-In-Council 1486 and 21,000 people leaving the west coast of British Columbia for internment camps. Perversely, construction these camps was financed by the sale of Japanese Canadian property.
The Allied forces enlisted a small number of Japanese-Canadians for help in 1945, though this went unpublicized. This led to the government unintentionally acknowledging the loyalty shown by the Japanese-Canadians to Canada. Attitudes began to change in Canada thanks to lobbying groups from other provinces (including the Toronto-based Co-operative Committee on Japanese-Canadians), who produced literature such as “A Challenge To Patriotism and Statesmanship.”
It was the UN Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10th, 1948 that would force Canada to recognize the rights of Japanese-Canadians. Roy Ito, a Japanese-Canadian writer later said, “In the newly created United Nations, Canada pledged to support fundamental human rights, the dignity and worth of the human person, and the equal rights of men and women. Racial prejudice and animosity were no longer popular.”
Unfortunately, conservative politics like Trumpism, have used racism again to unify angry voters and to put pressure on vulnerable politicians seeking re-election. One cannot help but wonder if internment or comparable forms of incarceration loom in the future for marginalized and racialized citizens.
The state of emergency declared by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbour enabled him to use powers as outlined within the War Measures Act. These included the use of internment to maintain national security. Japanese-Canadians in this moment, recognized only as “enemy aliens,” were essentially stateless, without a country. “Human rights are thus revealed to be civic rights,” according to Hannah Arendth, “dependent upon a political community for their actualization.”
Arendt’s critique of the UN Declaration of Human Rights also refutes a common belief, namely that human rights are a defence against the sorts of infringements endured by the Japanese-Canadians. The UN Declaration “was not a source of binding obligations,” legal scholar William Schabas wrote in the McGill Law Journal.
Cases continue where we see Canadian citizens that have had their rights taken from them in the name of national security. Valentina Capurri studied the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, and his ten year imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay.
Looking at the theoretical logic behind this, Khadr’s imprisonment should not have been possible. Khadr’s Canadian citizenship should protect him from these sorts of infringements upon his rights, as he satisfies Arendt’s theoretical conditions.
Capurri reaches a conclusion that refines Arendt’s concept: that Arendt’s debate, in its abstraction, fails to recognize the power dynamics of racism. “The reason for this racialization is that, as Foucault (2003) noted back in 1976, racism is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. The killing of the person as a political subject is what we have witnessed in the case of Omar Khadr. Because of the way Canada has chosen to racialize Khadr’s body, he has been presented to the Canadian public as dangerous and unworthy of those rights that are legally his by birth.” In her paper, “Omar Khadr, Hannah Arendt, and the Racialization of Rights’ Discourse,” Capurri, through her examinations of Sherene Razack, Giorgio Agamben, and Edward Said, understands that the racialization of Khadr is a necessary step to remove his legal entitlements in the minds of Canadian citizens, and also make it acceptable to execute him, if the state chooses.
This examination of Khadr reveals an individual that is stripped down, their human nature politicized. This is Giorgio Agamben’s state of bare life, where the individual becomes subject to state violence, specifically. Agamben refers to this being as homo sacer, taken from an obscure Roman law whereby the individual is put outside the boundaries of the law, out of reach of fellow man, and can only be destroyed by the Sovereign or state.
In this, both Khadr and the Japanese-Canadians share similarities. Both are Agamben’s homo sacer. Not only are they placed outside of the law in camps (Khadr to Guantanamo and the Japanese-Canadians to the internment camps), but both have the law placed out of their reach. The camps are states of exception, according to scholar of the internment Andrea Pacor, “a zone of indistinction between inside and outside, exclusion and inclusion,” and the “threshold of articulation between nature and culture.”
Worse yet, the camps themselves are seen as being preventative measures. Pacor quotes Agamben with respect to Nazi concentration camps, “…the juridical basis for internment was not common law but Shutzhaft (literally, protective custody), a juridical institution of Prussian origin that the Nazi jurors sometimes classified as a preventative police measure insofar as it allowed individuals to be ‘taken into custody’ independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state.”
In a strange manner of thinking, the Sovereign can claim that an emergency exists because there are individuals exemplifying it. However, these individuals are unable to access the legal tools to try and proclaim their innocence because there is a state of emergency, caused by their very existence. Agamben states that the legitimacy for the emergency is not a fact, but rather is “the product of a subjective decision based on a goal-oriented interpretation of existing conditions.” For the internment of the Japanese-Canadians, the federal government’s motivation was their removal from the west coast of British Columbia and ultimately, from Canada. It was mostly the UN Declaration of Human Rights, crafted by Eleanor Roosevelt and Canadian John Peters Humphrey, which challenged the legitimacy of the claim that instigated the emergency in the first place.
Both Capurri and Pacor argue that these situations will keep occurring. Capurri attributes this recurrence to the fact that racial dynamics remain, whereas Pacor believes recurrence is because the state of exception is never ending, since the Sovereign constantly defines homo sacer in order to maintain a perpetual state of emergency.
The concern that I have had lately has been one of a variation of what Heather Hermant dubbed homonationalism, or in this case, perhaps ethnonationalism: nationalism performed by collected diasporas in exchange for the protection of this country. A protection that is never guaranteed.
To answer the question of whether internment of a group of people can happen again, the answer is that it likely already has. It happened to Khadr under the pretext of Islamophobia, it happens to Indigenous people at alarming rates through their targeted incarcerations, it happens in Black communities through overpolicing, to trans communities targeted by legislation. We see it happening now to Asian people during this pandemic, the racialization taking place serves as the pretext for assault and murder, as occurred in Georgia on March 19th when the Atlanta shootings took place.
Although my initial fear was of being imprisoned, the questions I now have are, how can we help North Americans understand that racial ethnicity is unrelated to citizenship? And can the definition of what is a Canadian or an American be broadened to encompass more than just a white person?
References:
Capurri, Valentina. “Omar Khadr, Hannah Arendt, and the Racialization of Rights’ Discourse.” Studies in Social Justice vol. 10, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 147-66.
Mills, Catherine. Giorgio Agamben (1942– ). n.d. https://iep.utm.edu/agamben/. Accessed March 23rd, 2021.
Oman, Natalie. “Hannah Arendt’s ‘Right to Have Rights’: A Philosophical Context for Human Security.” Journal of Human Rights vol. 9, Issue 3, 2010, pp. 279–302.
Pacor, Andrea. Natural Life, Manufactured Feelings: National Identity, Bio-Political Power and the Japanese American Internment. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2007.
Schabas, William A. “Canada and the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” McGill Law Journal vol. 43, Issue 2, 1998, pp. 403–441.
Yatabe, Susan. Remembering Japanese Canadian efforts in the World Wars. 14 November 2017. Nikkei Research and Education Project of Ontario. http://nikkeivoice.ca/remembering-japanese-canadian-efforts-in-the-world-wars/. Accessed March 23rd, 2021.
Sunahara, Ann Gomer. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Lorimer, 1981.
Black, Norman F. “A challenge to Patriotism and Statesmanship.” http://nikkeimuseum.org/www/item_detail.php?art_id=A41059. Accessed April 25th, 2021
Library and Archives Canada. ” Japanese Canadians: From immigration to deportation.” https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/immigration/history-ethnic-cultural/Pages/japanese-immigration.aspx. Accessed April 25th, 2021.
