In the current political climate, I feel that our American history is questioned less and less by the general public. The period of least examination is the World War IIf era in America. Below is an excerpt of a paper I wrote examining the racial overtones of American media in the mid-20th century.

American Propaganda during the Pacific War can be understood as having a heavy racial overtone. One great characterization of the Japanese people is the generalization of its culture and military. Professor Emeritus of MIT John Dower postulated that the atrocities were attributed to the Japanese race, while the German race faced no such generalization. “German atrocities were known and condemned from an early date, but in keeping with their practice of distinguishing between good and bad Germans, Allied critics tended to describe these as “Nazi” crimes rather than behavior rooted in German culture or personality structure… for in the Asian theater enemy brutality was almost always presented as being simply “Japanese” (John Dower, War Without Mercy).This passage clearly outlines the problem with propaganda during World War II. One strong explanation for this discrepancy was race. The Japanese were viewed as racially inferior by many Americans at the time, and many Americans, especially on the West Coast, harbored resentment towards the Japanese.

The depiction of Japanese was purely based on race, as the German and Italian ethnicities were assimilated into the idea of American “whiteness,” and a racial caricature of Italians and Germans would have been self-deprecating to Americans. Meanwhile, the Japanese were Oriental, mysterious, and foreign, thus allowing racist depictions go unquestioned.