George Takei's Speech Analysis

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George Takei, a Japanese-American, speaker for this ted conference, who happens to be an activist also. He gave an explanation about how his family was forcefully taken from their home in Los Angeles, into the internment camp because their appearance and origin were similar to the people that bombed Pearl Harbour. As a result Takei and his baby sister were taken into the internment camp. A host of other Japanese-American families were found in this same predicament. After the war ended, his family was released from the internment camp to go back home, going back home to Los Angeles became a headache, as they were penniless, and had become a spectacle of what they were before. His parent had to start from the scratch again, building from the scratch a life they had once built (2014, July). With time they purchased a three bedroom house in a nice neighbourhood.…show more content…
The Japanese-Americans were then denied the service and were categorized as enemy non-alien (2014, July). They took the word "citizen" away from the Japanese-Americans and were all classified as "non-alien". Similarly, in the text the idea of out-group homogeneity is further explored and can be related to this situation. Out-group homogeneity is the tendency to view all individuals outside our group as highly similar (Lilienfield, 2015, pg. 544). It makes it easy for us to dismiss members of other groups because we can tell ourselves they all share at least one desirable characteristic. For example, we can assume that all people from group X look the same way (Lilienfield, 2015, pg. 544). In relation to Takei's case, all the Japanese-Americans were viewed as enemy non-alien since they looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbour. The Japanese-Americans were seen as highly similar and were therefore categorized altogether as non alien (2014,

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