When The Emperor Was Divine And The Outcasts Of Poker Flat

People with differences often create conflicts in communities. Those differences may include religion, culture, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. When an individual or group has one or more of these differences, they are set apart or marginalized from the community. The novel, When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, the short story “The Outcasts Of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte, and another short story “Wilshire Bus” by Hisaye Yamamoto all give various insights and motives on how and why communities marginalize. Communities marginalized others by alienating them because the communities feel threatened by their differences that deviate from societal norms; to prevent marginalization in communities, communities should be inclusive of individuals

and groups by respecting their differences.
Communities do marginalize others because communities feel that people’s differences threaten how they live.

The novel, When The Emperor Was Divine, tells the story of a Japanese family who was told to go to camp to be in surveillance during World War II, where Japan was an enemy of the United States. The story begins with signs being put up in communities to inform people of the internment of Japanese Americans, and one of the main characters, the mother “read the sign from top to bottom… wrote down a few words… then turned around and went home to pack” (Otsuka 3). The mother is told to follow the orders of the government and she complies due to her beliefs about the government, that they have positive intentions. The Japanese family left their home and were marginalized out of their community and were ordered to go to an internment camp. The reason for their evacuation and of other Japanese Americans is that since Japan was an enemy of the United States during World War II, many Americans in the United States believed that Japanese Americans were spies and were on the opposing side of the war. Americans did not trust Japanese Americans anymore and the Japanese were soon discriminated and marginalized in the community, just like the Japanese family in the novel, because the American communities felt threatened by their

presence.
Furthermore, communities marginalize others by alienating them from society due to their actions, that stray from societal norms.

The short story “The Outcasts Of Poker Flat” is about a group of people that are marginalized by their community, and the narrator in the story explained how “A secret committee had determined to rid the town of all improper persons… [and] of certain other objectionable characters. I regret to say that some of these were ladies” (Harte 1). The narrator was alluding to two characters in the story, the Duchess and Mother Shipton, who were prostitutes. The narrator specifically called them “improper persons” and “objectionable characters” because of their profession of being prostitutes. Objectionable means causing or tending to cause a disapproval or objection. Prostitutes are “objectionable” or looked down upon because many people, like most of the people in the Poker Flat community, don’t approve of their morals of sex work. Considering this, Duchess and Mother Shipton’s profession as prostitutes causes them to be alienated because their actions don’t follow the norms of their

community.
The marginalizing of others can be prevented if communities are socially inclusive, by respecting everyone’s differences. In “Wilshire Bus”, an old Oriental couple on a bus was being harassed and humiliated by a white man, who made derogatory comments towards the couple’s ethnicity. The white man in the short story made comments like “Chinks”, “slant-eyed pickaninnies”, and “‘Why don’t you go back to China?”’ (Yamamoto 2-3). The man’s racist comments made the couple feel like outsiders, marginalized by the man because of the couple’s ethnicity. Most importantly, after the white man leaves the bus, a bespectacled man on the bus says to the old couple, “‘I want you to know’ he said, ‘that we aren’t all like that man. We don’t all feel the way he does. We believe in an American that is a melting pot of all sorts of people” (Yamamoto 3). The man’s dialogue exhibits that once you accept an outsider’s differences, the outsider won’t be marginalized. This is important because the bespectacled man and the rest of the people on the bus respected the couple and socially included them to be one of them, no different. As a result, people and/or communities do not marginalize groups or individuals because they respect and accept others differences.
Communities marginalize others by alienating them from the community or society because the communities feel threatened by their differences that stray from the societal norms; to prevent marginalization, communities should be socially inclusive of individuals and groups by respecting and accepting their differences. Ultimately, communities marginalize, in hopes that they create a safer and moral environment, resembling the actions taken by the communities in “The Outcasts Of Poker Flat” and When The Emperor Was Divine, however marginalization should be stopped to bring together a strong, divergent community.