DON'T LET THIS PUBLIC Community College TEACHER LIE ABOUT THE INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE AMERICANS TO HIS STUDENTS.
Orphaned infants incarcerated at the Manzanar Children’s Village. Many children, some with as little as 1/8th Japanese ancestry, were ripped from orphanages and foster homes for incarceration. (1943, Manzanar concentration camp, California.)
An associate professor at Columbia Basin, a publicly-funded community college, is teaching his students that the Incarceration of Japanese Americans was not racist.
It's the same teacher, Gary Bullert, who asked in his Tri-City Herald op-ed, "Was the Relocation of West Coast Japanese Racist?"
On January 29, the Tri-City Herald published this opinion piece insisting that the Incarceration was not based on racism, but rather on national security concerns. The writing is filled with numerous errors, and paints the Japanese American population as a major threat to national security during World War II. I responded accordingly with my piece, Yes, actually, the "Relocation" of Japanese Americans was racist.
I also contacted the paper, which defended publishing the op-ed despite its flagrant errors and distortions. I discovered that the author of the op-ed, Gary Bullert, teaches political science at CBC. Next, I contacted the school, and they informed me that although the school's president denounced Bullert's deceptive portrayal of the Incarceration, no disciplinary action could be taken since Bullert was acting as a private citizen.
Then I received a message from one of his students.
Through social media channels, I obtained an actual audio recording of the lecture Bullert gave to his students on Wednesday, February 1. He repeated much of the same misinformation, and added some new falsehoods. This changes the situation, since Bullert is acting as a representative of this public community college as he misleads students about our history.
To make it clear that I am not unfairly taking his quotations out of context, I am making the audio recordings available to anyone with doubts. They are available here:
Part 1
Part 2
The recording revealed the impetus for Bullert's op-ed. He claimed that the Badger Club, which had hosted a presentation on the Minidoka concentration camp, had failed to show both sides of the argument when discussing the Incarceration. But Bullert failed to realize that the presentation on the Incarceration was at the Badger Club's annual meeting, not a regular debate forum. The Incarceration, of course, would not have been an appropriate topic for a debate.
I'll take a couple examples of things Bullert told his class:
" ...there were Japanese Americans who were dual citizens. They were both citizens of Japan and the United States, and so their loyalty to the United States in this situation was somewhat suspect."
The Issei (first generation immigrants from Japan) were banned by law from acquiring U.S. citizenship because of the wave of anti-Asian sentiment that resulted in the Chinese Exclusive Act of 1882, as well as the Don't let this public school teacher lie about the Incarceration of Japanese Americans to his students.: