Why I love a country that once betrayed me George Takei

[chime]
[water drop echoes]

[TED intro plays]

[applause]

-I'm a veteran
of the Starship Enterprise.

[audience laughs and whoops]

I soared through the galaxy

driving a huge starship

with a crew made up of people
from all over this world:

many different races,
many different cultures,

many different heritages
all working together.

And our mission was
to explore strange new worlds,

to seek out new life
and new civilizations,

to boldly go
where no one has gone before.

Well
[chuckles]

[scattered applause]

I am the grandson

of immigrants from Japan
who went to America,

boldly going to a strange new world,

seeking new opportunities.

My mother was born
in Sacramento, California.

My father was a San Franciscan.

They met and married in Los Angeles

and I was born there.

I was four years old

when Pearl Harbor was bombed

on December 7, 1941

by Japan,

and overnight,

the world was plunged into a world war.

America suddenly
was swept up by hysteria.

Japanese Americans,

American citizens of Japanese ancestry,

were looked on with suspicion,

and fear,

and with outright hatred

simply because

we happened to look like the people
that bombed Pearl Harbor.

And the hysteria grew and grew

until on February 1942,

the President of the United States,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

ordered all Japanese Americans
on the West Coast of America

to be summarily rounded up

with no charges, with no trial,
with no due process.

Due Process is the core pillar
of our justice system.

That all disappeared.

We were to be rounded up and imprisoned

in ten barbed-wire prison camps

in some of the most desolate places
in America:

the blistering hot desert of Arizona,

the sultry swamps of Arkansas,

the wastelands
of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado,

and two of the most desolate places
in California.

On April 20,
I celebrated my fifth birthday,

and just a few weeks after my birthday,

my parents got my younger brother,

my baby sister,
and me up very early one morning,

and they dressed us hurriedly.

My brother and I were in the living room

looking out the front window,

and we saw two soldiers
marching up our driveway.

They carried bayonets on their rifle.

They stomped up the front porch
and banged on the door.

My father answered it,

and these soldiers
ordered us out of our home.

My father gave my brother
and me small luggages to carry,

and we walked out
and stood on the driveway

waiting for our mother to come out.

And when my mother finally came out,

she had our baby sister in one arm,

a huge duffel bag in the other,

and tears
were streaming down both her cheeks.

I will never be able
to forget that scene.

It is burned into my memory.

We were taken from our home

and loaded onto train cars

with other Japanese American families.

There were guards stationed
at both ends of each car

as if we were criminals.

We were taken two thirds
of the way across the country,

rocking on that train
for four days and three nights,

to the swamps of Arkansas.

I still remember the barbed-wire fence
that confined me.

I remember the tall sentry tower

with the machine guns pointed at us.

I remember the search light
that followed me

when I made the night runs
from my barrack to the latrine,

but to five year old me,

I thought it was kind of nice
that they lit the way for me to pee.

[audeince laughs]

I was a child,

too young to understand
the circumstances of my being there.

Children are amazingly adaptable.

What would be grotesquely abnormal

became my normality

in the prison of war camps.

It became routine for me
to line up three times a day

to eat lousy food
in a noisy mess hall.

It became normal for me
to go with my father

to bathe in a mass shower.

Being in a prison,
a barbed-wire prison camp,

became my normality.

When the war ended,

we were released

and given a one way ticket
to anywhere in the United States.

My parents decided to go back home
to Los Angeles,

but Los Angeles
was not a welcoming place.

We were penniless.

Everything had been taken from us,

and the hostility was intense.

Our first home was on Skid Row

in the lowest part of our city,

living with derelicts,

drunkards, and crazy people;

the stench of urine
all over on the street,

in the alley, in the hallway.

It was a horrible experience.

And for us kids, it was terrorizing.

I remember once,

a drunkard came staggering down,

fell down right in front of us,
and threw up.

My baby sister said,
"Mama, let's go back home."

because behind barbed wires was,
for us,

home.

My parents worked hard
to get back on their feet.

We had lost everything.

They were at the middle of their lives
and starting all over.

They worked their fingers to the bone,

and ultimately,

they were able
to get the capital together

to buy a three bedroom home
in a nice neighborhood.

And I was a teenager,

and I became very curious
about my childhood imprisonment.

I had read civics books

that told me about the ideals
of American democracy:

"All men are created equal."

We have inalienable right to life,
liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness.

And I couldn't quite make that fit

with what I knew to be
my childhood imprisonment.

I read history books, and I could--

I couldn't find anything about it.

And so, I engaged my father after dinner

in long, sometimes heated, conversations.

We had many, many conversations
like that,

and what I got from them
was my father's wisdom.

He was the one that suffered the most

under those conditions of imprisonment,

and yet he understood American democracy.

He told me that our democracy
is a people's democracy,

and it can be as great
as a people can be,

but it is also as fallible as people are.

He told me that American democracy
is vitally dependent

on good people

who cherish the ideals of our system

and actively engage

in the process
of making our democracy work.

And he took me to a campaign headquarter.

The governor of Illinois
was running for the presidency,

and introduced me
to American electoral politics.

And he also told me
about young Japanese Americans

during the Second World War.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed,

young Japanese Americans,
like all young Americans,

rushed to their draft board

to volunteer to fight for our country.

That act of patriotism

was answered with a slap in the face.

We were denied service

and categorized as "Enemy non-alien".

It was outrageous to be called an enemy

when you're volunteering
to fight for your country,

but that was compounded with the word,
"non-alien,"

which is
a word that means

a citizen in the negative.

They even took the word,
citizen, away from us,

and imprisoned them for a whole year.

And then the government realized

that there is
a wartime manpower shortage,

and as suddenly as they rounded us up,

they opened up the military for service
by young Japanese Americans.

It was totally irrational.

But the amazing thing,

the astounding thing,

is that thousands
of young Japanese American men and women,

again, went
from behind those barbed-wire fences,

put on the same uniform
as that of our guards,

leaving their families in imprisonment

to fight for this country.

They said that they were going to fight,

not only to get their families out

from behind those barbed-wire fences,

but because they cherish the very ideal

of what our government stands for--
should stand for--

and that was being abrogated
by what was being done.

"All men are created equal,"

and they went to fight for this country.

They were put into a segregated,

all Japanese American unit,

and sent to the battlefields of Europe.

And they threw themselves into it.

They fought with amazing,

incredible courage and valor.

They were sent out
on the most dangerous missions,

and they sustained
the highest combat casualty rate

of any unit proportionally.

There's one battle that illustrates that.

It was a battle for the Gothic Line.

The Germans were embedded
in this mountain hillside,

rocky hillside, in impregnable caves,

and three allied battalions

had been pounding away at it
for six months,

and they were stalemated.

The 442nd was called in

to add to the fight,

but the men of the 442nd
came up with a unique,

but dangerous idea.

The back side of the mountain
was a sheer rock cliff.

The Germans thought

an attack from the backside
would be impossible.

The men of the 442nd
decided to do the impossible.

On a dark, moonless night,

they began scaling that rock wall,

a drop of more than 1000 feet.

In full combat gear

they climbed all night long

on that sheer cliff.

In the darkness,

some lost their handhold
or their footing,

and they fell to their death
in the ravine below.

They all fell silently.

Not a single one cried out,

so as not to give their position away.

The men climbed for eight hours straight,

and those who made it to the top

stayed there
until the first break of light.

And as soon as light broke,
they attacked.

The Germans were surprised,

and they took the hill
and broke the Gothic Line.

A six month stalemate

was broken by the 442nd

in 32 minutes.

It was an amazing act,

and when the war ended,

the 442nd returned to the United States

as the most decorated unit
of the entire second world war.

They were greeted back
on the White House lawn

by President Truman,

who said to them,
"You fought not only the enemy,

but prejudice, and you won."

They are my heroes.

They clung to their belief

in the shining ideals of this country.

And they proved

that being an American

is not just for some people,

that race is not how we define
being an American.

They expanded what it means
to be an American,

including Japanese Americans

that were feared,
and suspected, and hated.

They were change agents,

and they left for me a legacy.

They are my heroes,

and my father is my hero,

who understood democracy and--

and guided me through it.

They gave me a legacy,

and with that legacy
comes a responsibility,

and I am dedicated

to making my country

an even better America,

to making our government

an even truer democracy.

And because of the heroes that I have

and the struggles
that we have gone through,

I can stand before you
as a gay Japanese American.

But even more than that,

I am a proud American.

Thank you very much.

[applause]

[musical sting]
[outro music]