Books like Dear American: The Diary of Piper Davis- The Fences Between Us Seattle Washington, 1941

This book represents so much of what I hate about racial representation in American pop culture. Fences is about a young white girl whose father ministers at a Japanese Baptist church during World War II. When the Japanese are interned after Pearl Harbor, he moves with his daughter to Idaho to continue to minister to his flock in the camp. Piper Davis is his daughter and the book is her diary.My problem is that, while the preacher is based on a real person. Piper is not. This story simply did not happen. It is yet another attempt to insert a white person and a white perspective on what is essentially a non-white story. Stories like this simply "white wash" American history. We have countless stories of white people's imagined stories during the Civil Rights movement, the extermination of Native Americans, and now, with this story, it's Asian Americans' turn.As a minority, I find these stories offensive as they attempt to erase our own presence from our own stories. As a writer, I don't get it because it's purposely ignoring the real drama in these historical events.Isn't it more compelling to hear from the actual victims of oppression? What it was like to be Japanese-American, viewing yourself as an American, and then suddenly having your family uprooted and jailed and then having the government that jailed you ask you to fight for them in their war. What was that fear, anger, resentment, and counter-intuitive display of patriotism like? That's what I want to know.Instead, we get to see what it's like to be a privileged witness to the horror that the Japanese-Americans experienced. Oh yeah, that's really rough.Also, since this is part of the "Dear America" series, which offers fictional portrayals of what it was like being a teenage girl during different eras in different regions of America--this Anglo angle on Japanese-American internment is even more insulting. Just like the American government during the War, this series, in giving the internment story to a white girl instead of an Asian one, implies that to be of Asian descent in America makes you somehow NOT American.