Facilitating Injustice: The Complicity of Social Workers in the Forced Removal and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1946

by Yoosun Park

Overview

"On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066-the primary action that propelled the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. From the last days of that month, when California's Terminal Island became the first site of forced removal, to March of 1946, when the last of the War Relocation Authority concentration camps was finally closed, the federal government incarcerated approximately 120,000 persons of ""Japanese ancestry."" Social workers were integral cogs in this federal program of forced removal and incarceration: they vetted, registered, counseled, and tagged all affected individuals; staffed social work departments within the concentration camps; and worked in the offices administering the ""resettlement,"" the planned scattering of the population explicitly intended to prevent regional re-concentration. In its unwillingness to take a resolute stand against the removal and incarceration and carrying out its government-assigned tasks, social work enacted and thus legitimized the bigoted policies of racial profiling en masse. Facilitating Injustice reconstructs this forgotten disciplinary history to highlight an enduring tension in the field-the conflict between its purported value-base promoting pluralism and social justice and its professional functions enabling injustice and actualizing social biases. Highlighting the urgency to examine the profession's current approaches, practices, and policies within today's troubled nation, this text serves as a useful resource for students and scholars of immigration, ethnic studies, internment studies, U.S. history, American studies, and social welfare policy/history."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199765058
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Pages:	474
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Yoosun Park, PhD, MSW, is an Associate Professor in the School for Social Work at Smith College and Editor-in-Chief of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. Dr. Park's scholarship, framed within the broad substantive area of immigration, is informed by poststructuralist theories of discourse and methods of inquiry. It pursues two overlapping lines: social work's history with immigrants/immigration and the study of contemporary issues pertinent to immigrants/immigration. Her examinations of the current and past discourses of the profession aim to decenter the usual sites and modes of investigation, question formulation, and conceptualization.

Table of Contents

Preface: An Occluded History
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1. Discursive Elusions
Chapter 2. The Start of War
Chapter 3. The Removal
Chapter 4. Incarceration
Chapter 5. Social Work in the Camps Part I: Public Assistance
Chapter 6. Social Work in the Camps Part II: "Abnormal Communities"
Chapter 7. "The Emotional Crisis of Registration"
Chapter 8. Resettlement Part I: The Scattering
Chapter 9. Resettlement Part II: The Work of the Welfare Sections
Chapter 10. Conclusion: The "Value of a Social Work Staff in a Mass Evacuation Program"

Appendix A. Glossary of Terms
Appendix B. WRA Incarceration Camps
Appendix C. WCCA Station List
Appendix D. Relocation Offices
Appendix E. WRA Eligibility for Unrestricted Residence
Appendix F. WRA Administrative Manual-Welfare
Appendix G. Job Descriptions
Index

Editorial Reviews

"In Facilitating Injustice, Professor Park reveals the hidden role of U.S. social workers in the removal, incarceration, and resettlement of Japanese Americans during World War II. Using meticulous primary research, the author compels us to consider the consequences when the values of a social service profession are compromised in carrying out its government's political and policy agendas. As she demonstrates, Park's analysis holds profound lessons for the human services today." — Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, PhD, Co-editor, NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations.

"Yoosun Park has produced an extraordinary work of scholarship that casts a powerful spotlight on an episode of U.S. social work history that the profession has largely omitted from its master narrative. In this era of heightened xenophobia and racism, examining the moral implications of our past actions has become more critical than ever. This book reveals the consequences of the ethical struggles in which social workers engaged and the rationalizations they constructed for their choices in a period that bears a striking resemblance to our own time." — Michael Reisch, PhD, Daniel Thursz Distinguished Professor of Social Justice, School of Social Work, University of Maryland

"An essential book for our times, Facilitating Injustice provides a compelling and meticulously researched lens through which to examine the social and racial dimensions of mass incarceration. In her lucid reconstruction of the profession's complicity in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, Yoosun Park sheds a timely and critical light on our culture's ability to enact policies that contradict the values we profess." — Ruth Ozeki, Novelist and Author, A Tale for the Time Being

"Yoosun Park's Facilitating Injustice is a well-researched and important book about the role of social work in a dark episode in American history. The book raises a fundamental question about social work's role: whether the social worker is primarily an agent for the state or an advocate for the interests of clients. Some argue that this is a false dichotomy-that social workers can ameliorate unjust policies and make them more humane and less damaging for clients-while others argue that participation in an unjust policy contradicts the ethical imperatives of service and advocacy for the oppressed and powerless. These are significant questions that have taken on heightened importance in the current political climate. The book should have a broad readership." — Paul H. Stuart, PhD, Professor Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of Alabama

From the Publisher