The Color of Citizenship: Legacies of Japanese American Internment from WWII to Stop & Frisk

Date 

Add to My Calendar Friday, May 2, 2014 12:00am

Location 

CCR Legal Director Baher Azmy will speak on a 3:30 p.m. panel on May 2nd titled, "Legacies of the Incarceration in Surveillance & Policing of U.S. Communities of Color." The panel will address legacies of Japanese American incarceration and how that history remains persistently relevant today. Speakers will make connections between the Hirabayashi v. United States case in the 80's, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Internment, 9/11 and profiling today. These connections speak to how fear of those defined by the government as the "other and dangerous" draws whole classes of people to have their bodies regulated and their lives impacted in ways big and small by official and unofficial government policy. The panel will discuss concrete examples of the need to continue to draw on the history of Japanese American incarceration to inform current issues experienced by communities of color in the U.S. and beyond.

What: The Color of Citizenship: Tracing the Legacies of Japanese American Internment from WWII to Stop & Frisk
Where: Roosevelt House at Hunter College, 47-49 East 65th Street
When: Friday, May 2, 2014 from 9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
RSVP: Click here to RSVP online or email [email protected]

*This event is free and open to the public with RSVP. Please note location is not on Hunter College campus.

Panelists

Baher Azmy, Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, directs litigation and advocacy around issues related to the promotion of civil and human rights, particularly in the areas of racial justice, government accountability, transnational justice and challenging executive-branch excesses in the post-9/11 era.  At CCR, Baher has litigated nationally-significant cases related to “stop and frisk” policing practices, prolonged solitary confinement, the rights of Guantanamo detainees, and accountability for victims of torture

Kathryn Bannai, first lead attorney in Hirabayashi v. United States from 1982-1985, an action that successfully challenged Gordon Hirabayashi's convictions for violating military orders that imposed a curfew on and removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast during WWII.

Amardeep Singh, Sikh Coalition Co-Founder & National Director of Programs, which is the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the United States. He currently oversees the Coalition's use of litigation, advocacy and community organizing to advance social justice goals.

Moderated by Ramzi Kassem, Associate Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law, where he directs the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic.

This conference is sponsored by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College and Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University

Last modified 

April 17, 2014