August 6, 1945

70 years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 150,000 human beings before the end of the year. I think that it's important to recall the social and cultural context in which this horrific act occurred. Too often, when we Americans consider our history (when, in fact, we deign to consider it at all), we tend to whitewash out uncomfortable details that might cast a pall on events which many believe merit nothing but proud celebration. When we talk about the Constitution, we often can't be troubled to speak about the abhorrent fact that black people weren't even considered human beings by our founding fathers, and that the full-out genocide of the native population of North America was already well under way.

When we think about the end of the Second World War, and about the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, we must recall the unspeakable racism against the Japanese that had become commonplace since the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Caricatures of Japanese men with Coke-bottle glasses, buck-teeth, and squinty eyes were everywhere during the early 1940s, and American pop culture staples such as Loony Tunes and Mickey Mouse proudly joined the raucous chorus of hateful, racist tirades against the Japanese. All of this served to dehumanize the Japanese, which made it acceptable to treat them as animals, undeserving of the rights and consideration normally granted to human beings.

Consider the shameful internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans that began in early 1942 with President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. The American government rounded up over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, most of whom were American citizens, and herded them into camps in the interior of the country. The reason given was that they were somehow a danger to the war effort against the Imperial Japanese government, though no proof was EVER offered to justify this claim. To its everlasting shame, the Supreme Court upheld this grotesque practice in 1944, pointedly avoiding issuing an opinion on whether the United States government could simply round up American citizens and imprison them without providing them with due process.

Given this atmosphere of lawlessness and rampant racism, it is no wonder that most Americans were perfectly okay with dropping an atomic fireball on a densely-populated city and incinerating its people. After all, they were only Japanese, and Americans had greedily sucked in years of anti-Japanese propaganda designed to turn them into lesser creatures.

We could tell ourselves that this little boy deserved his pain and suffering because he was only a Jap. We could celebrate our deep commitment to freedom and human rights and self-determination while simultaneously ignoring such images because these weren't people. They were savages, they were barbarians, they were animals, they were Japs.

70 years ago today this happened. The United States dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima and killed 150,000 human being. Human beings just like you, just like me. Vile, racist propaganda made this abhorrent act acceptable. Do not allow such propaganda to skew your view of the Other around the world.

People are people, no matter where they're from or how they look. Don't let this happen again.