"I hope that the younger generation will remember that discrimination of any kind is wrong, and that it is important to speak out against it and to stand up for what is right"
About this Quote
Korematsu frames the lesson with the plainspoken clarity of someone who knows how easily a country can tell itself the wrong story. “I hope” is doing quiet work here: it’s not a triumphant victory lap, it’s a warning delivered without theatrics. He isn’t asking for admiration; he’s asking for memory strong enough to resist the next wave of “special circumstances” that always arrive wearing the costume of necessity.
The line compresses his lived context - a Japanese American who refused internment during World War II, lost at the Supreme Court, then watched decades pass before the nation half-admitted what it had done. That history explains the quote’s insistence on “any kind.” It’s a refusal of carve-outs: not just anti-Asian discrimination, not just wartime abuses, not just the obvious stuff. The subtext is that prejudice rarely announces itself as prejudice. It arrives as policy, procedure, and “public safety,” and it recruits ordinary people with the promise that someone else will handle the moral burden.
His two verbs, “speak out” and “stand up,” target the real audience: bystanders and future jurors of public opinion. Korematsu learned the hard way that institutions can be perfectly legal and catastrophically wrong, so he shifts the responsibility away from courts and toward civic reflexes. The point isn’t performative outrage; it’s practiced dissent - the kind that costs you something when the crowd feels righteous.
Calling on “the younger generation” isn’t sentimentality. It’s strategy. Power changes hands; the rationalizations don’t.
The line compresses his lived context - a Japanese American who refused internment during World War II, lost at the Supreme Court, then watched decades pass before the nation half-admitted what it had done. That history explains the quote’s insistence on “any kind.” It’s a refusal of carve-outs: not just anti-Asian discrimination, not just wartime abuses, not just the obvious stuff. The subtext is that prejudice rarely announces itself as prejudice. It arrives as policy, procedure, and “public safety,” and it recruits ordinary people with the promise that someone else will handle the moral burden.
His two verbs, “speak out” and “stand up,” target the real audience: bystanders and future jurors of public opinion. Korematsu learned the hard way that institutions can be perfectly legal and catastrophically wrong, so he shifts the responsibility away from courts and toward civic reflexes. The point isn’t performative outrage; it’s practiced dissent - the kind that costs you something when the crowd feels righteous.
Calling on “the younger generation” isn’t sentimentality. It’s strategy. Power changes hands; the rationalizations don’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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