Please join us for a stimulating evening with Professor Michael Omi, for a discussion of Racial Ideology and the “Backstory” to the Incarceration of Japanese Americans

During World War II, why did so many Americans accept the mass incarceration of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry --- 2/3rd of whom were American citizens? Michael Omi suggests that the decision to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast was not simply due to war hysteria in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, but was the product of a half-century of anti-Japanese sentiments. Such sentiments --- circulated among politicians, journalists, and academic scholars --- helped to shape discriminatory laws, policies, and practices that paved the way for the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Michael Omi is a professor of Ethnic Studies and the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. He is the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States, a groundbreaking work that has transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place. Professor Omi is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award --- an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since the award’s inception in 1959.