No One Is Half Of Anything, But Some Are Double

On This Day In History
1942: F.D.R. orders "enemy aliens" to register

Quote Of The Day
"Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population ..... Anyone who has travelled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results."
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a 1925 column of the Macron Telegraph )

How fortunate I am, then, that when I mixed my European blood with Asiatic blood, it produced the most fortunate result both times. I am sure at least two other blippers have had the same experience.

It's interesting that Roosevelt is regarded by so many people as a great president. In some ways he is, I suppose, but his racism is quite unconscionable. Executive Order 9066 must be one of the most egregious, racist policies ever initiated by a U.S. president; it makes Trump's caging of migrants on the U.S. - Mexico border look like a holiday camp! Interesting that he did not put German and Italian immigrants and first-generation U.S. citizens into detention camps; nice European blood doesn't generate spies, saboteurs and fifth-columnists like filthy Asiatic blood, I suppose.

Was this F.D.R.'s only racist act? Well, there was Red Lining. As part of the New Deal, home loans could only be given to people living in predominantly white neighbourhoods. A red line was drawn around predominantly black neighbourhoods indicating no home loans to be offered there, essentially ensuring that successive generations of black American families would be shut out of The American Dream.

When Jesse Owens went to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, he was not snubbed by Adolf Hitler, but he was snubbed by F.D.R. "Hitler didn't snub me, F.D.R. did. The president didn't even send me a telegram," Owens told a crowd one month after the Olympics. Barack Obama addressed this matter in 2016 when he invited members of Jesse Owens' family and 17 other black Olympians from the 1936 Berlin Olympics for a celebration at the White House.

When Eleanor Roosevelt lead the Anti-Lynching Campaign, F.D.R. refused to support it because he did not want to upset voters in the South. President Biden finally signed a bill in 2022 making lynching a federal crime.

F.D.R.'s first Supreme Court nominee was Hugo Black. Black was a member of the Klu Klux Klan, and a fierce supporter of Executive Order 9066. After Black's nomination to the Supreme Court, there was a lot of controversy when his Klan membership was revealed and so he resigned his membership. (In Black's defence, in later years he did become a supporter of several important civil rights movements, including Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka.)

Anyway, today's blip is a collage made by the children and teachers of my class and a Japanese school that we exchange visits with each year. More than a few mixed-blood children here; again, the results are all quite fortunate, I believe. 

Kenji

Lost Freedom - Pre-Concert Discussion