Tell the children the truth

George Takei, the character Hikaru Kato Sulu on original Star Trek, and a "resistance fighter" by his own declaration, has shared what was wrong with hiding from children the hard truths of their own history and the history of their country. He learned the hard way.

These days, a premium is being placed on whether white kids might feel bad about their own heritage after learning about things like American genocide, slavery or internment. But no one asks what it’s like for minority kids to learn about these things.

When I was growing up inside internment camps, my parents tried to shield me from the horror of what was happening. I even recited the Pledge of Allegiance daily from a classroom inside the barbed wire. “With liberty and justice for all,” I said, not grasping the irony.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to question what had happened. It made me very angry, not only at the country that did this to us without cause, but against my own father. “You led us like sheep to slaughter!” I cried. He was silent. “Maybe we did,” was all he said.

That tore at my family. No one wanted to talk about how painful those years had been, not in our household, not in most Japanese American households. To do so was to relive that very real pain. But the truth has a way of pulling you back into it.

I spent the latter half of my life telling our truth, however painful it was. The truth matters because without it we cannot ever truly heal. Without it, we cannot ever learn from our horrific mistakes. To avoid the truth is to avoid our sacred obligation.

When the right tells white parents that their children are being made to feel bad about our history, remember first that this isn’t just about white children. It is about all of us. Japanese American children, Black, Native and Latino children. We owe them the truth, too.

We need to reframe the current debate around truth, not around kids’ assumed fragility. I lived through years of internment and still didn’t know the truth until I came to ask the right questions. Our experience should be more than a thrown away paragraph in a history book.

Without a full accounting of our true history, we cannot ever break the cycle of denial and recurrence. The same system that produced the horrors of the past cannot be reformed without painful examination under the lens of truth. That is what we must demand and teach.

Photo from California Museum in Sacramento.