Foreign wars drive domestic racialization of perceived enemy populations
Evidence
US wars abroad have dire consequences for those seen as domestic representatives of the foreign enemy. Race scholar Nikhil Pal Singh argues that “frontier wars, the wars of the early U.S. empire, and the twentieth century’s world wars all illuminated affinities between war making and race making, activating or reaffirming distinctions between friend and enemy along an internal racial border.” Perhaps the most significant example of this process in the twentieth century involved the treatment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. More than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were rounded up and put into detention camps. Young and old were incarcerated simply for having a Japanese ancestor and forced into harsh conditions in makeshift camps, often without cooking or even plumbing facilities. Of those incarcerated, nearly three-quarters were US citizens. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 548
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to earlier extracted claim that US counterinsurgency fuses foreign and domestic Arabs, and to the Base Nation displacement pattern.
Related
- US wars abroad activate racial borders that target domestic minorities (similarity 0.91)
- Foreign wars redraw internal racial borders that target domestic civilians of enemy descent (similarity 0.89)
- US wars abroad activate an internal racial border against domestic enemy-representatives (similarity 0.88)
- US imperial wars abroad drive the racial exclusion of Arab Americans at home. (similarity 0.82)
- Imperial war abroad delivered refugees directly into domestic racial marginalization. (similarity 0.82)
- Both domestic immigration and international conflict shape American racialization (similarity 0.81)
- Racialization technologies are deployed on internal class others before foreign enemies (similarity 0.80)
- Global events abroad shape domestic racial hierarchies in ways U.S.-centric accounts miss (similarity 0.80)
- US foreign policy reframed Arab resistance to hegemony as racial terrorism (similarity 0.79)
- US empire-building abroad drives anti-Muslim racism domestically (similarity 0.78)
- US foreign wars and Middle East conflicts directly shape Arab Americans’ domestic civil rights. (similarity 0.78)