Did you know that when the Americans of Japanese Ancestry were interned on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor, some of their teachers who were not AJAs went with them?
The story helps answer the question:
What can you do if you know that the United States is behaving in a way that is repugnant to everything you've ever learned about its Constitution and the Supreme Court is of no help?
The story, below, is of mostly white teachers who joined their pupils to continue teaching mathematics, self-worth, right-from-wrong, and what the Constitution really means, properly understood.
On the theory that everything is relative, when studying Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Endo, the three WWII Japanese Internment cases decided by the Supreme Court, a student from Russia observed that his father had been a soldier in the Red Army under Joseph Stalin, one of history's bloodiest tyrants.
Those Japanese in America didn't have it so bad, the only-mildly-sympathetic Russian student said.
When it came to Russians of German ancestry (RGAs?) living in the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded, Stalin had the German descendants taken out and shot.
Well, thanks for helping us out by clarifying the difference between Stalin and Roosevelt.
The SECOND story, from the New York Times Sunday Magazine Ethics column, addresses a similar question: Should you take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution if you disagree with part of it.
Oaths have been a recurring issue in British and American law. The British had a "Test Oath," designed to smoke out religious dissenters.
We had loyalty oath requirements enacted during the McCarthy Red-Scare period of the early '50s.
How would you feel if someone required you to take a loyalty oath, say as a condition of employment in a prosecutors office?