The graphic novel, “They called us enemy” was focused on a family of Asian heritage who were being brought and sent to concentration camps. The family had a bright future, before being moved to an unknown place where people had discriminated against and hated them due to the color of their skin. Through this graphic novel, we were able to see many ways that the family coped with this pressure as the war progressed, and we were able to see sacrifices being made. Along with this, we were able to see a family with first-hand experience on how to survive and bear with the conditions of being put into concentration camps. So along with demostrating themes of racism and xenophobia, there were also themes of love, trust, and family.

The anti-racist resource, Aliens in Their Own Land: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans, it tells stories and experiences about how the Japanese were unfairly chased away from their home due to their skin color. They were stated in the passage to be a “racial threat to the integrity of the nation” The details in the passage talk about the wars, the bombing, and the racial discrimination that the Japanese had to do through even after being a part of the close-knit community of Americans for years. An example given in this passage was a young girl named Jeanne Wakastuki, she had her father taken away from their family as he was accused of being “questionable” to the Americans. This left the young girl to survive with only her mother and her younger siblings at the time, which also proved to be difficult because of workplace racism.

I chose to connect these two resources because it shows how much people, not only Asians but other minorities as well have suffered from racism. Both sources, it shows how unfairly people were being treated because of their skin color. Although their skin color has nothing to do with their actions, and it is just a trait that they were born with, skin color would determine how they would be treated for the rest of their lives. On the surface, nowadays people don’t see racism so they don’t think that racism exists anymore just because some people of color had managed to rise past the stereotypes that society has put on them. But that is far from the truth. Even now racism still exists in many forms, just nothing as extreme as back then. Back then, when fairness and equality were not as widespread as now, people were taken away and forced back to their own countries just because of their skin color, this separated many families who were now forced to live and provide for themselves. On top of that, people of the same skin color were often grouped together in places they called concentration camps. This was a way for the government to keep an eye out on these people, a way for the government to track their moves since their skin color is a dangerous hazard to the rest of society. These two sources show the extreme ways that Asians have been treated back then. I think that it helps with awareness, to spread information about those who have suffered, and to share their stories so their actions can show us how to correctly form an equal society.