response- Fit to be Citizens? Natalia Mollina

"The subject of healthfulness is the most important one in the world." (pg 71) This quote appeared early on in the assigned reading and stuck with me throughout my read. I never thought about how important it is to be healthy and how scary it can be to be sick. Back when their was less cures for disease and less money to research or pay for ailments, becoming sick was a much bigger deal.

The fact that disease and race were tied together in this book was very fascinating to me. Those are two things that I personally would never compare or chart next to each other. On top of disease being an actual serious matter, it was also used in a negative way to help almost classify the japanese as even worse than they were already looked at, for example calling Chinatown a "dirty, disease-filled, and immoral space"(page 72). There in the quote, the claim of the Japanese being diseased is said, but they even went as far as to call them immoral-which is where I had a thought, what if sickness and disease is being used as a scapegoat or an excuse as to why whites disliked the Japanese? After further reading I found many more quotes where the Japanese are looked at as "rotten" and "tainting the white residents" and "filth and stench" further helping me to believe that my thought deem true.

It's interesting to me how easy it is to turn against people when that is the norm. This story reminded me of some research I did in middle school on the Harlem Witch Trials and how any one who was said to be a witch was this ghastly evil being that you would never want to look at let alone speak to. In this case I felt like the Japanese were just poor old witches that no matter what they said to the courts or people, they were already witches and no one would believe them otherwise. Even though they did nothing wrong, the non-witches (white people) overpower what the Japanese claim to be by their current opinion and unfortunately, nothing could change that.