Manzanar: Prejudice In Everyday Life

h each other, preferring to spend their daytime hours working or volunteering rather than cooped up together in the cramped barracks. Papa’s return from his arrest as a suspected spy accelerates the erosion of the Wakatsuki family structure. Papa is no longer the source of strength he was before the war, and his return kills all hope that the family will rally around him as patriarch. That most of the older children eventually abandon Mama and Papa and relocate to New Jersey shows the deep divide that Manzanar creates in the once happy Wakatsuki family. hThe frustrations of camp life shorten tempers and result in outbursts of violence such as the December Riot and Papa’s attempt to beat Mama with his cane. These disturbing images show that the divisions that developed within families and within the Japanese-American community as a whole resulted more from the conditions of life …show more content…
Jeanne Wakatsuki avoids portraying open ethnic conflict in her autobiography in order to examine the subtle and often unspoken prejudices that affect everyday life, which are often the most dangerous. There are, of course, rumors of Japanese Americans being beaten and abused after they leave Manzanar, but for the most part the direct, open hatred for which the camp residents have prepared themselves never materializes. In fact, by imagining that all of white America will hate them, these Japanese Americans are themselves subcumbing to a kind of prejudice, forgetting that not all Americans are prowar and anti-Japanese. Many Americans, such as Jeanne’s kind schoolteachers and the American Friends Service that helps them find housing, actually help the Japanese. The mistaken belief that white America has a hatred for them obstrcuts the Japanese Americans. They focus so much on what seems to them an inevitable clash that they are not prepared for the subtler prejudice of daily life that is racism’s most common