"The Potential That Was in All of Us": Carceral Disability and the Japanese American Redress Movement

Abstract

The mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II has usually been assessed in terms of devastating economic and property losses, racist profiling, and the abrogation of constitutional rights. However, survivors also claimed incarceration as an experience of individual and collective disablement. In a break from decorum, survivors testified about a range of mental and physical disabilities at the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Hearings (CWRIC) held across the United States in 1981. This article discusses how a grassroots redress movement for government restitution brought the experiences of disabled, chronically ill, and mad people into the Commission hearings. Informed by 1960s-1970s Asian American and Third World Women's movements, intergenerational redress organizing transmitted and amplified the subjugated knowledge of disabled survivors. These efforts to involve ordinary people in redress produced an unanticipated yet profound record of what I call carceral disability: the aggregate disabling effects of mass incarceration and state violence. I further deliberate on the unresolvable ambiguities and ongoing anticarceral legacies of the Redress Movement.