Read on Twitter
No. No, no, no, no, no. This is precisely the perverse path that elevates only Hiroshima and nothing else about the tens of millions of deaths that Imperial Japan caused. https://twitter.com/BostonReview/status/1291426437183016966
The operation of racism in recounting the history of World War II is such that only white people's actions matter. Pearl Harbor matters because whites died. Hiroshima matters because whites killed. Japs killing chinks and gooks don't matter, because they are not really humans.
Imperial Japan was every bit as bad as its ally, the Nazis. Casting them as the victims of WWII is repulsive. Casting them as the victims of racism on the same plane as George Floyd is completely ignorant.
A bit more on this, which makes a lot of reference to African Am intellectuals like DuBois and Langston Hughes to make the connection between American racism and the Hiroshima bombing - https://twitter.com/BostonReview/status/1291426437183016966
- the real lesson there is how leading Black intellectuals like DuBois and Hughes failed to find solidarity with the people that Japan's imperialism oppressed, and instead preferred to imagine themselves as allies of the "colored people's empire."
To be sure, not all Black intellectuals took this path. A. Philip Randolph specifically denounced the Japanese Empire. Even DuBois had second thoughts later. But there is a real lesson here: the oppressed often don't want to end oppression; they just want to be the oppressors.
