State and local governments independently excluded Japanese Americans from employment.

Evidence

By this time, more than two thousand Japanese residents like Gensuke had already been arrested. But the federal government was not the only racist actor. In several instances, states, cities, and local governments also took action to harass or exclude Japanese Americans. For example, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the State of California required its Japanese American employees to answer a long questionnaire, providing “whether they could speak Japanese, their citizenship status, their membership in Japanese or Japanese American organizations.” None of the questions or criteria were relevant to their job performance. They were all summarily suspended from their jobs without pay and eventually “dismissed from their jobs without any further paychecks or severance pay.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the ‘saturated system’ claim — harm came not just from the federal executive order but from all levels of government acting in concert.