Belonging’s Labor

by Anthro Pop

The Nisei soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team motto was “Go For Broke,” a phrase that meant putting everything on the line in an effort to win big.

In December 1941, the quiet of an ordinary Sunday morning in Hawai‘i was shattered by the roar of Japanese warplanes. Within two hours, Pearl Harbor burned, 2,403 Americans were dead, and the United States was at war.

Fear arrived faster than reason. Across the country, news headlines screamed of betrayal, and whispers in grocery stores and churches turned neighbors into suspects. In a single week, Japanese faces--no matter how American their lives--became symbols of national threat.

In Hawai‘i, where Japanese Americans made up nearly a third of the population, the territorial governor resisted wholesale internment. He understood that detaining that many residents would collapse the islands’ economy and grind the war effort to a halt. But on the continental United States, panic prevailed.

By February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of anyone deemed a national-security risk from the West Coast. The order did not name Japanese Americans specifically, but it didn’t need to. Over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens known as Nisei (second generation) and their immigrant parents, the Issei (first generation), were given mere days to leave their homes.

They were told to bring only what they could carry.

Businesses were shuttered. Pets were left behind and property was sold for pennies on the dollar. Families boarded buses and trains bound for places no one had ever heard of: Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Poston, Topaz, remote landscapes ringed with barbed wire and armed guards.

Inside the ten War Relocation Authority camps, life shrank to a regimented rhythm: lines for meals, lines for showers, lines for mail. The barracks were rough pine and tar paper, no insulation, no privacy. Dust storms swept through in summer; winters froze the pipes. Families slept in tight quarters, overhearing one another’s dreams. Children recited the Pledge of Allegiance beneath watchtowers; adults planted gardens to remind themselves what freedom once felt like.

Yet, from behind those fences, loyalty persisted. Hundreds of young men volunteered for the U.S. Army. Forming the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team went on to become the most decorated military unit of its size in American history. They fought for a nation that had imprisoned their parents.

Four decades later, our nation finally apologized. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was championed by Democrats like Senator Daniel Inouye and Representative Norman Mineta. Republicans also supported this act, such as Senators Alan Simpson, Pete Wilson, and Bob Dole. President Ronald Reagan signed this law, acknowledging a “grave injustice” and called the internment the product of “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Each surviving internee received $20,000 and a formal letter of apology.

It was one of the rarest moments in modern American politics: a bipartisan reckoning, a moral accounting that reached across party lines. For a brief moment the nation confessed that it had betrayed its own citizens out of fear.

But America, as it so often does, compartmentalized its conscience. What the U.S. could do for one injustice, it has conspicuously refused to do for another.

From Internment to Enslavement: Two Histories, One American Project

When the Civil War ended in 1865 and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the promise of freedom rang loudly. But for the formerly enslaved, that promise was hollow: no land, restitution, nor protection. The “forty acres and a mule” that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman briefly proposed were rescinded within months. Freed people were left to rebuild their lives in a country that had not yet decided if they were fully human.

What followed was not freedom, but a new architecture of control: Black Codes, sharecropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and redlining. Reconstruction’s brief experiment in democracy was rolled back by white violence, uprisings, and political retreat. For the next century generations of Black Americans would live in a system that allowed their labor, but restricted their mobility, property, and peace.

Unlike the internment of Japanese Americans, bounded in time and later acknowledged as an aberration, slavery’s legacy was baked into the nation’s DNA. It did not end with emancipation; it evolved. The same Constitution that promised liberty was repeatedly reinterpreted to limit it.

In 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.Res. 194, a resolution apologizing for slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws. The Senate followed in 2009 with a symbolic statement of regret. But these gestures carried no enforceable action--no reparations, no material repair, and no attempt to bridge the 400-year gap between promise and practice.

So here we stand: a nation that could apologize and materially compensate one group (Japanese Americans) within living memory, but has only offered half-measures to another whose suffering spans centuries.

America could name internment a “failure of leadership,” but it has never had the courage to name slavery as an ongoing design and one that built the foundation of its modern economy and continues to shape its inequities.

We can apologize for fear, because fear feels temporary.We struggle to apologize for design, because design is profitable.

The Cost of Omission

The refusal to make reparations, to even speak of them authentically has a cost, and the bill comes due with every generation.

In 2021, the median White household held nearly ten times the wealth of the median Black household, according to U.S. Census data. The average Black family with a college-educated head of household possesses less than one-third of the wealth of similarly educated White families. This gap is not a historical artifact; it is a living inheritance. Between 2019 and 2022, the racial wealth gap widened by roughly 23 percent at the median, despite rising wages.

Wealth is not simply money...it’s insulation. It’s the difference between a setback and a spiral: a car repair that drains a month’s income, a medical bill that becomes a collection notice, or a lost job that collapses a family’s housing security. When wealth is absent, the margin for error disappears, and entire communities are forced to live life one emergency away from crisis.

Poverty, when concentrated, becomes a multiplier of harm. Underfunded schools, inadequate housing, limited healthcare, and food insecurity compound each other. Without repair, disadvantage metastasizes into geography. Zip codes more accurately predict SAT scores and determine lifespans more than any other factor.

And into those same communities, we send the police.

In the absence of robust social investment, law enforcement becomes a blunt instrument for social policy. Officers are asked to manage the fallout of poverty, addiction, and mental health crises for which they are not trained and seldom supported. Over time, this exposure can desensitize, harden, or distort judgment. The result is predictable: disproportionate contact, disproportionate force, and disproportionate death.

Nationwide data show that Black Americans are arrested and searched at significantly higher rates than White Americans for the same infractions, despite lower rates of contraband found. In some suburban jurisdictions, they are 4.5 times more likely to be arrested for low-level “quality-of-life” offenses. Black and Hispanic drivers are searched more often but found with contraband less often than White drivers. These are not patterns of criminality, they are patterns of concentrated surveillance.

This cycle of mistrust corrodes both sides. Many police officers operate under stress, trauma, and chronic exposure to violence. Many Black citizens live with generational exposure to profiling and fear. Both are symptoms of a system that treats inequality as a law enforcement problem rather than a civic one.

To withhold reparations is to perpetuate this arrangement: to demand peace while funding tension, to valorize freedom while financing containment.

The true cost of omission of the consistent invalidation of the Black experience is not only economic; it’s psychological and moral. It’s the steady erosion of faith in the American experiment. Every unspoken apology becomes a weight carried by the next generation.

When a government refuses to say “We were wrong” and act accordingly, it tells the wounded that their pain is negotiable. And it tells the privileged that history can be overlooked.

Reparations are not about punishing the living for the sins of the dead; this is about interrupting the inheritance of harm. They are about ensuring that the children from both the enslaved and the enslavers live in a country less distorted by the moral debts of the past.

The price of not repairing is steep: persistent poverty, policing crises, declining trust, and the quiet normalization of despair. The nation pays it in unrest, in addiction, in shortened lives, in broken institutions.

A debt unacknowledged does not fade: it compounds.

Blueprints for Repair

If we can build rockets that touch the edge of space and budgets that exceed the GDP of small nations, we can build a better moral economy here at home. Reparations don’t have to begin with an apology; they can begin with design.

Let’s imagine what repair might look like if we took it seriously, not as a payout, but as a partnership. Not as guilt, but governance.

Tuition and Education Access Offer tuition-free or debt-forgiven college education to descendants of enslaved people and residents of historically redlined neighborhoods. Create pipeline scholarships for teachers, nurses, and social workers from these communities--roles that invest directly back into civic well-being. Education is the closest thing America has to social inheritance; it should be transferable to those who were denied the chance to inherit.

Tax Credits for Homeownership The average White family today has nearly ten times the wealth of the average Black family, due mostly to intergenerational home equity. Repair begins by reopening that gate: down payment assistance, low-interest loans, and property tax credits for first-time buyers in areas historically excluded from lending. Housing is not charity; it’s stability. It’s the soil from which communities grow.

Maternal and Family Health Resources Black women are nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women. Reparations could look like federal investment in Black-led maternal health programs, community birthing centers, and doula services. Healing isn’t metaphorical, it’s measurable. Repair should start where life begins.

Civic Education and Accountability Fund curriculum reform that embeds the history of slavery, Reconstruction, and civil rights into every state’s K--12 education, not as electives, but as civic literacy. Require universities, corporations, and municipalities to conduct truth and reconciliation audits: public reports on if and how their institutions still benefit from racial exclusion and how they plan to redress it. History shouldn’t live only in museums; it should be discussed openly and live in budgets, bylaws, and classrooms.

Community Investment and Public Safety Shift a portion of municipal policing budgets into community safety infrastructures: mental health crisis teams, addiction recovery programs, youth employment, and restorative justice courts. Safety is not achieved through suppression; it’s achieved through opportunity.

These are not radical ideas. They are overdue ones.

They represent what reparations could look like if we stopped treating them as a single transaction and started thinking as a series of national practices of ethical design and as normative civic maintenance, not moral theater.

Repair is not about the past. It’s about the conditions under which the future can finally be shared. Until America confronts this truth, its wounds will continue to reopen. And as history has shown, when one group’s pain festers, the infection spreads.

The New Inflammation: Latinx and the Politics of Belonging

Today, the political spotlight often turns toward Latinx immigrants, particularly the undocumented, who have become the newest faces of America’s anxiety about change. They are labeled threats to sovereignty, job security, and public safety. They are the scapegoats for economic uncertainty and cultural unease.

When times get hard, myths return: They’re taking our jobs. They’re bringing crime.

But the data tells another story. Research from the Migration Policy Institute, the Brennan Center, and the American Immigration Council shows that immigrants, legal and undocumented alike, commit crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens. In Texas (the only state that tracks immigration status in conviction records), both legal and unauthorized immigrants are significantly less likely to be convicted of violent crimes than native-born Americans. Meanwhile, as the immigrant share of the population has doubled since 1980, overall crime in the United States has dropped by more than 60 percent.

Fear persists anyway. Fear, after all, is easier to weaponize than evidence.

Roughly 70 percent of crop-farm workers today are foreign-born, and about 40 percent lack legal work authorization. Immigrants make up nearly one-fifth of the national labor force, and their presence is even higher in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and caregiving--the essential industries that keep daily life running, yet remain undesirable, undervalued and underpaid.

We depend on these workers to pick our strawberries, clean our hotels, and care for our aging parents. We rarely invite them into full civic belonging. The table is set with food grown by people who are never seated at it.

When immigration enters public debate, the conversation often turns to legality: who deserves entry, who does not. But legality, like belonging, has always been a moving target in America. The process for gaining lawful entry or asylum is slow, inconsistent, and often detached from reality. People fleeing political violence, poverty, or climate displacement face decades-long backlogs, opaque bureaucracies, and narrow definitions of “worthiness.”

To question the system is not to reject vetting or national security; it is to ask whether our criteria for humanity have become too rigid, too transactional. If the United States wants to address migration sustainably, it must meet people where the gaps exist and at the points where instability, climate crisis, and opportunity intersect. It is possible to critically analyze and rebuild the pathways of entry with the same moral and logistical imagination it once reserved for Ellis Island.

Otherwise, the pattern repeats: we construct belonging through exclusion, then repair it through apology, but if--and only if--the politics are convenient.

What We Can Still Learn From Each Other

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the American story is a cycle of forgetting and rediscovery. Every generation inherits its own reckoning: who we harmed, who we ignored, and who we failed to understand.

Breaking that cycle begins not in Congress or the courts, but in our neighborhoods and workplaces, where we encounter living histories every day.

Learning begins when we listen beyond headlines. Every person carries a story of migration, of aspiration, of trauma and survival. Asking someone, “Where are you from?” can still open a door, if we listen for meaning and depth rather than category.

Learning begins when we study where we live. Every city, town, and county carries the echoes of displacement and labor: who owned the land, who worked it, who was forced out. Local history is the antidote to national amnesia.

It begins when we learn our own roots honestly. Who were our ancestors, and what did they inherit: freedom or advantage bought by another’s exclusion? Which stories did our families tell, and which ones did they erase by their silence?

And it begins when we speak truth in the face of lazy narratives. When someone says, “They don’t belong” or, “They’re bringing crime,” ask: Based on what history? Based on what evidence? Thoughtful curiosity is the simplest form of civic courage.

Repair is not only material; it is relational. If reparations come, they must be more than a paper check--they must include meaningful inclusion and acknowledgement for interdependence. Policy should help us rebuild trust and shared opportunity, not just redistribute guilt.

Belonging, too, is not a status; it is a practice. No one is born with perfect belonging. Belonging is something we learn, build, and teach together, through alliance, empathy, and work.

The tragedies of internment, slavery, and modern immigration tensions are not isolated chapters. They are pages of the same story: who America has chosen to include, who it has allowed to heal, and who it has left waiting outside the gates.

We will not become a better nation by sweeping wounds under rugs. We become better by facing them, by learning from each other, by risking discomfort, and by seeing ourselves in the faces we once feared.

Let our labor of belonging begin now.

-AP