[thereare5lights]

> but you can't chalk it up entirely to hysteria considering it happened in the aftermath of the Niihau incident.

You're right it wasn't hysteria, it was literal robbery. The white farmers were literally waiting to steal everything the Japanese left behind in California.

[darkpuma]

Oh yes, I'm aware. And in Seattle when Japanese-Americans were interned, many African-Americans moved into the property left behind, brought to Seattle by the huge surplus of jobs working for Boeing. Today there are Japanese-Americans who object to that neighborhood being called the "International District" because they feel that perpetuates the wrong done to their community.

Incidentally, Boeing was forbidden by the federal government from discriminating against those African-American workers, as they might well have in an earlier era. The Fair Employment Practice Committee which forbade discrimination against these African-American workers was created to implement FDR's Executive Order 8802. That executive order was motivated in no small part by FDR observing American defense companies discriminating against German-Americans and Italian-Americans, which he considered to be a threat to the war effort. This executive order was one of the first times the federal government ever took any action against racial or ethnic discrimination in the workplace.

Strangely the Wikipedia page for the FEPC suggests it was motivated to help "African-Americans and other minorities", while the Wikipedia page for Executive Order 8802 emphasizes that it was discrimination of German-Americans and Italian-Americans which motivated FDR. (I'm more inclined to believe the later, but either way it certainly had the effect of helping the African-American community find work in the defense industry.)