The US Air Force Academy distributed to cadets the graphic briefs of actor and activist George Takei “They Called Us Enemy”, which chronicles his family’s incarceration during World War II, as part of a new initiative reading.

In the bestselling book, Takei, known for playing Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the original “Star Trek” television series, describes what it was like to be a 5-year-old who was among the 120,000 or so. people of Japanese descent who were forcibly evicted from their homes on the West Coast and placed in concentration camps in the 1940s.

The dean of the faculty of the academy, the brigadier. Gen. Linell Letendre, shared her enthusiasm for the program’s book selection this year as she welcomed the new class of cadets on social media.

“Our common institutional reading this year has focused on dignity and respect,” she said in another Instagram Publish. “We are preparing our bases for what lies ahead.”

In 2019, Takei said on NBC’s “TODAY“show that he wanted to educate young people about this” dark spot “in American history. As someone who grew up enjoying comics, he said he thought it would be the best way to share the trauma of his childhood that he lived.

Although Takei has said that some of his memories of that time are fuzzy, he clearly remembers when soldiers came to his family in May 1942, a few weeks after his fifth birthday.

“Suddenly we saw two soldiers walking down our driveway, carrying rifles with shining bayonets on them. And they stomped on the porch and with their fists started knocking on the door,” he said.

The graphic novel explores not only his incarceration, but also how the experience planted the seed of his activism later in life.

Takei shared in a separate interview with NBC10 Boston how the country repeats “the endless cycle” of cruelty and injustice. He wants his book to inspire young Americans to break it.

“My hope is, and I take this as a hope book, that people will grow up knowing this story so that we have more people determined to prevent this kind of thing,” he said.

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