Rep. Beth Fukumoto posted the letter on Twitter and was sure to tag Trump in her tweet.
State Rep. Beth Fukumoto (D-HI) received a letter in the mail written by a Trump supporter shortly after the Charlottesville tragedy and accompanying controversy.
“Dear b*tch,” the letter begins, followed by “Your poor grand parents got put into a camp in the USA? Boo hoo hoo ― you Japs murdered thousands of servicemen at Pearl Harbor ― did you forget that detail?”
The letter goes on to complain that Japan only accepted 27 total refugees last year [no clue where they got that figure from, but whatever]. “But…America should open their doors to millions of parasites.”
The letter, from a self-professed Trump supporter, includes a laundry list of groups of people that “We Trump people hate,” to include: immigrants, people of color, Muslims and members of the LGBT community.
As Huffington Post reports, the letter “conflated Japanese-Americans with Japan, suggesting that they weren’t actually loyal Americans and were responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor. It also got other facts about Fukumoto’s family wrong: Her grandfather was in Honolulu and was not imprisoned in an internment camp in the U.S. during World War II.”
Fukumoto decided to post the letter on her Twitter account, tagging Trump in her tweet.
“Got this in the mail today,” she tweeted, adding “You need to understand your words have consequences @realDonaldTrump #racism #WhiteNationalism.”
She was able to post a longer response on her Facebook page, writing:
I just got this in the mail today. It’s so painfully relevant to everything we’ve been watching on the news the past few days. #Racism & #WhiteNationalism are real issues in America – even in Hawaii. Our President’s words have consequences, and it’s time for all of our political leaders – Republicans, Democrats and everyone else – to work together to oppose his continuing incitement of hate in our country.
Fukumoto told Huffington Post that she recently resigned from the Republican Party out of concern for what she called Trump’s marginalized rhetoric” towards minorities and other ethnic groups.
“One of the reasons that I switched parties is that I felt the Republican Party was unwilling to confront racism,” Fukumoto said, adding that: “Racism specifically in the party and racism as promoted by the nominee at the time, and now the president.”
“I felt like my opinion always counted last because I was a minority and I was a woman,” she continued.
That’s how it feels like. To know you’ll always have to work that much harder to be taken seriously is sort of the minority and the female experience in America. To see what’s going on nationally – and really has been going on nationally for a long time – minorities are being told, “You’re scared for no reason. You’re making things up. You’re the one inciting violence.”
She went on to explain that although she is no stranger to racist hate-mail, this particular letter “was more upsetting than usual,” considering the recent events in Charlottesville.
“Here’s a letter that came directly to me from somebody who says they support Trump, listing out all these people that they hate,” she told Huffington Post.
“I don’t like receiving those letters,” she continued, adding: “But there are worse things happening [in the country] because he’s talking the way he is.”
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