I suspect some people may not have paid close attention in history class 
I would bet it rated a sidebar in textbooks of my time to provide context.
I certainly didn’t know about the Tulsa Massacre or Washington Court House though.
I checked my personal library and found a book I got in high school called “The Cartoon History of the United States” by Larry Gonick. It was published in 1991, though many cartoons come from earlier work published in 1987-88.
It says: “And yet - over 100,000 Japanese-Americans (80% of them citizens) were rounded up as “security risks” and interned in camps for the duration.
(An irony of the war was that American propaganda depicted the Japanese as inhuman - while Hitler, who really was a monster, usually appeared as a comic-opera buffoon.)”
Then there is a picture of a Japanese man in an internment camp looking sad saying “That Hitler was pretty smart to be born white.”
I’ll take your word for it, but I have to say it sounds pretty farfetched.
I forgot to mention, it was also something brought up several times in my college literature classes, there were many seminars and events explicitly about it or which mentioned it in college, it was a part of my Con-Law and Civ-Pro courses in law school, and there was an entire legal course on the subject as well…in addition to being mentioned in seminars and other school events.
The logical conclusion here is that people who aren’t well educated are quick to see that the US is systemically racist.
But but but…these are all upper middle class, well-educated white (although what their skin color has to do with it I’m not exactly sure) people. 
no. i have concluded.
I had not heard about Tulsa till a few years ago, but definitely grew up (70s and 80s in a few US states) knowing about the interment camps through school and TV.
I think those that learned about Japanese internment in college as part of legal studies or some other civics class as @Mithrandir mentions is fine, or as @tempogain mentions it being a sidebar in a larger context of WWII studies is fine.
But when the goal is to push the idea the US is a systemically racist country, in a school that is apparently catering to Americans, at the age of 9. This is pushing profoundly shameful and negative impressions of the self, people who identify as Americans and telling them their country is irredeemably racist.
I don’t know what you do with that as a nine year old except to feel disappointment in your country.
Have him read this:
and consider that in the context of why Roosevelt ordered the internment of citizens who seemed to be really interested in acting as fifth-column resistance fighters behind “enemy” lines in their adopted country.
While you’re at it, you might point out to him that Roosevelt was a Democrat, and the Democrats have a long history of racism, from starting the Civil War (so that they could keep their slaves) to imposing “Jim Crow” laws all over the South after they lost the Civil War (so that they could keep abusing blacks). That legacy didn’t end until Lyndon Johnson decided that the Democrats could get more votes by throwing money at black people than they could by continuing to crush them.
You must have had exceptionally poor teachers, then. It was taught in my high school forty years ago, along with Jim Crow, slavery, and all therest. The Niihau Incident, however, was never mentioned, nor were the German and Italian internment camps that the U.S. government locked up “might be Nazis and fascists” in.
But that’s ok, they were white people so it isn’t racist.
Yep. Even the movie “Midway”, which used to be shown on TV pretty much annually, includes a love story between a pilot and an interned Japanese woman.
Garth is also asked by his son, naval aviator Ensign Tom Garth, to help free his girlfriend Haruko Sakura, an American-born daughter of Japanese immigrants, who has been interned with her parents, by calling in favors to have the charges against the family dropped.
Then of course there was this:
And let’s not forget all the discussion about “the most decorated unit” in the U.S. Army in WW2, the 442nd.
Every time they’re mentioned, it’s always with a discussion about how they were Japanese-Americans who were, in part, fighting so hard because they wanted to show the U.S. that Japanese-Americans weren’t traitors who needed to be locked into internment camps.
Fully agree with your comments here. Even on Civil War era history, such sanitizing and one-sided views are not healthy. Yes, slavery and racism were/are horrible, and there are certainly racist parts of US history. But the Union propagated it as well (General Grant’s order on Jews, the treatment of the Irish) vs. the Confederacy that had Jewish Secretaries of War, Attorney General and State. The point is that with Reconstruction, Civil Rights movements in the 20th Century, the bipartisan support for passing the Civil Rights Act, etc., there was the impetus to correct historical wrongs and that should be celebrated. But don’t adopt a Vandal sacking of Rome type of approach where you criticize your own country as being systemically racist. Compared to most places in the world, the US is exceptional. In a good way.
Of the 127,000 Japanese Americans who were living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack […] More than 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forced into interior camps
In 1942 there were 695,000 Italian immigrants in the United States. Some 1,881 were taken into custody and detained under wartime restrictions
Among residents of the United States in 1940, more than 1.2 million persons had been born in Germany, 5 million had two native-German parents, and 6 million had one native-German parent. Many more had distant German ancestry. During WWII, the United States detained at least 11,000 ethnic Germans, overwhelmingly German nationals.
Oh come on.
Yeah, I was mostly joking. The argument about high-income families having more choice makes sense, but doesn’t really apply to TAS.
I’m kinda curious about what’s going on there. I’m cautiously pro-CRT, and I’m definitely pro- teaching honestly about racist incidents in the US’ past, but Mith’s kid certainly doesn’t seem to be getting a good understanding of it there.
I thought choice would apply more to parents at TAS. They have every option available.