Facilitating Injustice

Nearly the entire Japanese American population was incarcerated by the federal government during World War II, and social workers were heavily involved in all parts of the process: they vetted, registered, counseled, and tagged all affected individuals; staffed social work departments within the concentration camps in which the Nikkei were held; and worked in the offices administering the "resettlement," the planned scattering of the population explicitly intended toprevent regional re-concentration. Though the broader history of the forced removal and incarceration has been analyzed by scholars, the role of social work has been entirely overlooked. Facilitating Injustice highlights the profession's contradictory role as well as the dilemma's continuedrelevance in contemporary social work.