Takei's Revelation About Past Racism Is So Timely

As presidential candidates Tim Kaine and Mike Pence talked over each other and moderator Elaine Quijano during the vice presidential debate, it's clear that former Star Trek star and everyone's favorite Internet celebrity George Takei was listening intently. Needless to say, George Takei's clapback against Mike Pence's immigration plan was amazing. And in revealing his family's traumatic stay in a Japanese internment camp, showed just how disgusting immigration plans like Pence and Donald Trump's truly are.

Takei invoked his and his family's terrible experiences with racist "foreign policy" in response to Pence and Trump's seemingly hard-lined (yet still secret) approach to immigration reform and the refugee crisis that will reverse the alleged amnesty, "open borders" and sanctuary cities that supposedly characterize President Obama's foreign policy . Those same policies might be informed by Pence's own track record as governor of Indiana, some of which includes violating federal law and banning Syrian refugees from entering the state. It's not a far cry between denying refugees and kicking out all undocumented immigrants and internment camps, as Takei implied in his tweet.

Though this isn't the first time Takei publicly discussed his experiences in a Japanese internment camp, his decision to do so in reaction to the legally-sanctioned racism that Pence and Trump's mystery immigration policy seems to imply is incredibly meaningful to me as someone who comes from a Muslim family and bears a Muslim name. The specter of Muslim internment has long hung over the heads of Muslim Americans, and for someone from another minority to stand in solidarity with us by pointing out the terrible parallels between our current Islamophobia and the anti-Japanese racism that fueled Japanese internment truly means the world. It's a reminder that many people believe that this kind of shameful racism has no place in American immigration and foreign policy — and that we must learn from the painful lessons of our racist past.