"On the right, AOC praises the man who put Japanese people in concentration camps during WWII"
Apparently he did a lot more than just put people in camps. So did Earl Warren.
The Unacknowledged Lesson: Earl Warren and the Japanese Relocation Controversy
One episode of Warren’s career, however, received significant, although sparse, attention in his memoirs—the Japaneserelocation decision. Warren said that he had “since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens.” He then articulated his guilt feelings in terms that, for a father of six and a devoted family man, were vividly personal: “Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was consciencestricken.” On reflection, Warren believed that “t was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty. .?.?.”
Warren’s confession of error in the Japanese relocation controversy raises several questions. How did Earl Warren, one of the most vigorous advocates of civil liberties in the history of the Supreme Court, come to advocate and defend a policy that constituted a wholesale deprivation of the civil rights of Japanese-Americans? How could Warren, a principal force behind the Court’s unanimous attack on racism in Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny, have ignored the racist character of the relocation, which was imposed only against Japanese nationals and aliens, leaving unaffected people of Italian or German origin? How did Warren, a champion of equality and fairness under the law as chief justice, justify the patently inequitable nature of a relocation process reserved only for Japanese? And why did Warren, whose strength of convictions was well-known to his acquaintances, who almost never admitted that he had been wrong on an issue, and who rarely changed his mind once he had formed an opinion, decide to recant on the Japanese relocation issue? An examination of these questions takes one inside the mind of one of America’s least penetrable public figures.
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