It was at this time 76 years ago that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration began implementing Executive Order 9066, which forcibly ejected thousands of American families from their homes and transported them hundreds of miles away to a strange land, regardless of the lives these citizens lived. Local small business owners. Doctors. Housekeepers. Decorated war veterans whose translation services won key battles in World War II. The facts of their life were subservient to the one thing the federal government deemed irreconcilable: their race. It was an act that was premised on the fear and hatred of these Americans’ Japanese identity, which discredited their right to be trusted, valued and respected.

We are heading to NYC this weekend for the Day of Remembrance of the first day that this forced internment of an innocent community began: February 19, 1942. It lasted two years and would see lasting trauma to the generations of those families that followed.

In the heat of this moment, this moment where our government has officially renounced our country’s identity as a nation of immigrants, it’s important to see how we got here. It’s the expansion of a fear of the Other that has been with us for a long time, and, to overcome it, we have to look back at our history and face the blood that we have let pool on the living room floor.

As Milan Kundera eloquently put it so long ago, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Let’s not forget, you guys.