Every American knows that Dec. 7, 1941 — the date that Japanese planes attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor — is “a date which will live in infamy.” But few Americans remember a second infamous anniversary: May 30.

Three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that gave specified military commanders nearly total discretion to remove people of their choosing from areas deemed to have military significance. Toyosaburo (“Fred”) Korematsu, an American citizen of Japanese descent, violated the exclusion order and was arrested on May 30, 1942. Thus began one of the darkest episodes in American constitutional history.
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Few Americans would argue that the United States, under attack by Japan, should be forbidden from considering Japanese ancestry combined with evidence of misbehavior to identify potential targets for further investigation. But the Roosevelt administration did not combine nationality with evidence of misbehavior. Japanese ancestry was the sole criterion, and incarceration, not investigation, was the resulting government act. When undefined ethnic profiling, with no basis for assuming that a single suspect had been disloyal, is used to deny liberty to 120,000 innocent persons, we should be outraged.
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