Katy Perry’s chilling PSA against creating a database of Muslims in the country

By Kristine Guerra · 
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ·   
The video opens with the story of 89-year-old Naru Kuromiya, a Japanese-American who spent her childhood on a chicken farm in Riverside, California.  

Sitting on a chair, with a shawl covering her small frame, Kuromiya talks about that fateful day in 1942, when government officials took her father. They were given tags and numbers to wear, she said. Then, they were placed on a train, and Kuromiya, who would have been in her teens then, found herself living in an internment camp.  

“We had to leave our business, our homes and our possessions behind, even our pets,” she said. “We were an American farm family now living in an internment camp. And our constitutional rights were taken away from us. It all started with fear and rumours, then it bloomed into the registration of Japanese-Americans.”  

Then, the twist.  
About a minute and a half into the video, Kuromiya stops talking. For a few seconds, she stares directly at the camera. She takes off her glasses and her wig. Nothing can be heard except the sound of a piano.  

Then, she slowly peels off her prosthetic mask, revealing a young woman with black hair and dark eyes underneath the disguise.

“Don’t let history repeat itself,” she said.  

The young woman is played by Hina Khan, a Los Angeles-based Muslim actress of Pakistani heritage, according to the Los Angeles Times.  

“#DontNormalizeHate,” a nearly three-minute PSA produced by singer Katy Perry, draws parallels between the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II and the anti-Muslim rhetoric of not only President-elect Donald Trump, but also of his advisers and picks for Cabinet members.  

Perry, a Hillary Clinton supporter, is among the celebrities who will attend the Women’s March in Washington on Saturday, the day after Trump’s inauguration. Other attendees are America Ferrera, Cher, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Schumer, Olivia Wildem Constance Wu, Zandaya and “Orange is the New Black star Uzo Aduba.  

Trump had proposed a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. After it was criticized by Republicans and Democrats, Trump’s campaign amended it, saying immigration should be suspended from countries “compromised by terrorism.”  

But in December, Trump suggested that he’s standing by the proposal he talked about on the campaign trail in 2015.  Trump has made only vague statements to the media about the possibility of creating a database of Muslims in the United States. Those statements also don’t draw a distinction between a database of all Muslims in the country, or a registry of just Muslim immigrants.  

On Nov. 19, 2015, for instance, a Yahoo News reporter asked the then-Republican front-runner about registering Muslims in a database or noting their religion on IDs. Trump said, “We’re going to have to look a lot of things very closely. We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”  

When NBC News asked him again the following day, Trump said he “would certainly implement” a database of Muslims in the country.  

“There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems,” he told NBC News.  

When asked if Muslims would be required to sign into the database, he said, “They have to be - they have to be.”  

Shortly after, Trump disputed reports that he had endorsed creating a database for Muslims.  
In December, his campaign released a statement staying, “President-elect Trump has never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion, and to imply otherwise is completely false.”  

The president-elect’s choices for attorney general, CIA director and national security adviser also raised fears from Muslim civil rights groups and current and former government officials that the appointments could reinforce perceptions that the United States is at war against Islam itself, The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick and Abigail Hauslohner wrote.  

“Trump has created an atmosphere of fear for Muslims Americans in the United States,” Aya Tanimura, the PSA’s co-director, told the Los Angeles Times. “The accountability and responsibility for what you say and do now has been lifted so people feel a little freer to be racist, or act upon racism, because there are not necessarily consequences for it - it’s just acceptable behaviour. If laws are put in place to back that up, it will be pretty scary.”  

The PSA, which was posted on YouTube Wednesday, was co-directed by Los Angeles-based filmmakers Tanimura and Tim Nackashi. Tanimura said casting a Muslim actress for the film was “nonnegotiable,” according to the Los Angeles Times.  

Tanimura and Nackashi were not immediately available for comment Sunday.