Face-to-Face Response

The stories that stuck out most to me were the ones that affected especially the children of the stereotyped ethnicities.  The first of these narratives was that of Satsuki Ina.  Ina was asked to help Muslim kids who were being bullied after 9/11 because they looked like the terrorist.  This story really upset me, not only because the kids were being bullied even though they had no possible connections to the attacks, but also because the insults that were spoken against these Islamic kids came from the other kid’s parents.

Satsuki Ina had another story that was equally intriguing: her own childhood.  Being Japanese, she faced extreme prejudice herself during WWII.  She was called “a dirty Jap” as a child when she stepped out of the rain onto a porch.  I don’t understand how someone could be so hateful against a child, the characterization of innocence, because one of her ancestors lived in the same country that attacked the US at Pearl Harbor.