Facilitating Injustice : The Complicity of Social Workers in the Forced Removal and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1946

"On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066-the primary action that propelled the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. From the last days of that month, when California's Terminal Island became the first site of forced removal, to March of 1946, when the last of the War Relocation Authority concentration camps was finally closed, the federal government incarcerated approximately 120,000 persons of ""Japanese ancestry."" Social workers were integral cogs in this federal program of forced removal and incarceration: they vetted, registered, counseled, and tagged all affected individuals; staffed social work departments within the concentration camps; and worked in the offices administering the ""resettlement,"" the planned scattering of the population explicitly intended to prevent regional re-concentration. In its unwillingness to take a resolute stand against the removal and incarceration and carrying out its government-assigned tasks, social work enacted and thus legitimized the bigoted policies of racial profiling en masse. Facilitating Injustice reconstructs this forgotten disciplinary history to highlight an enduring tension in the field-the conflict between its purported value-base promoting pluralism and social justice and its professional functions enabling injustice and actualizing social biases. Highlighting the urgency to examine the profession's current approaches, practices, and policies within today's troubled nation, this text serves as a useful resource for students and scholars of immigration, ethnic studies, internment studies, U.S. history, American studies, and social welfare policy/history." "Social work equivocated. While it did not fully endorse mass removal and incarceration, neither did it protest, oppose, or explicitly critique government actions. The past should not be judged by today's standards; the actions and motivations described here occurred in a period rife with fear and propaganda. Undergoing a major shift from its private charity roots into its public sector future, social work bounded with the rest of society into "a patriotic fervor" (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p.ix). The history presented here is all the more disturbing, however, because it is that of social workers doing what seemed to them to be more or less right and good. While policies of a government at war, intractable bureaucratic structures, tangled political alliances, and complex professional obligations, all may have mandated compliance, it is, nevertheless, difficult to deny that social work and social workers were also willing participants in the events, informed about and aware of the implications of that compliance. In social work's unwillingness to take a resolute stand against the removal and incarceration, the well-intentioned profession, doing its conscious best to do good, enforced the existing social order and did its level best to keep the Nikkei from disrupting it. What might social work in the camps have looked like, had it, instead of urging caution to deflect attention to its work, instead of denying that its work was coddling the Nikkei, have attempted, at the very least, to challenge the very logic that made--and continues to make-- assisting the needy and caring for the vulnerable, actions to be mistrusted, defended, and justified? What lessons can today's social work glean from this history?"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Facilitating Injustice 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Preface 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 14 1. Discursive Elusions 34 2. The Start of War 63 3. The Removal 97 4. Incarceration 152 5. Social Work in the Camps—​Part I: Public Assistance 201 6. Social Work in the Camps—​Part II: “Abnormal Communities” 235 7. The Emotional Crisis of Registration 282 8. Resettlement—​Part I: The Scattering 309 9. Resettlement—​Part II: The Work of the Welfare Sections 348 10. Conclusion: The “Value of a Social Work Staff in a Mass Evacuation Program” 396 Appendix A Glossary of Terms 412 Appendix B WRA Incarceration Camps 418 Appendix C WCCA Station List 420 Appendix D Relocation Offices 430 Appendix E WRA Eligibility for Unrestricted Residence 432 Appendix F WRA Administrative Manual—​Welfare 434 Appendix G Job Descriptions 444 Index 458 Nearly the entire Japanese American population was incarcerated by the federal government during World War II, and social workers were heavily involved in all parts of the process: they vetted, registered, counselled, and tagged all affected individuals; staffed social work departments within the concentration camps in which the Nikkei were held; and worked in the offices administering the 'resettlement,' the planned scattering of the population explicitly intended to prevent regional re-concentration. Though the broader history of the forced removal and incarceration has been analyzed by scholars, the role of social work has been entirely overlooked. 'Facilitating Injustice' highlights the profession's contradictory role as well as the dilemma's continued relevance in contemporary social work