Incarceration denied Japanese Americans the equality of opportunity both parties claim to value

Evidence

What it boiled down to was a single commonality: equality of opportunity. Republicans were generally skeptical of government intervention, but like their Democratic counterparts, they still believed in equality of opportunity. According to Ujifusa, “That is precisely what Japanese Americans in camps were denied…. In 1942, what we really wanted was something contemporary conservatives extol—to be left alone by the government.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 223

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘left alone by the government’ appeal resonates with the liberty/equality tension in the reader’s prior work on rights as the lost possession of the dispossessed.