Oregon City mayoral candidate wants homeless to live like 'the Japanese' [View all]

OREGON CITY, Ore. (PORTLAND TRIBUNE) — Leslie Wright announced his second attempt to be elected as Oregon City mayor on talk radio with his plan to use vacant schools for homeless shelters like “the Japanese people.”

Wright’s statement carries the racist undertones of Japanese internment in the 1940s, when American citizens of Asian descent were rounded up in government compounds after their property was seized. Thousands of people of Japanese ancestry in the Pacific Northwest and California were forced by the U.S. military into crowded, hastily constructed buildings where many of them died.

A retired sergeant major in the U.S. Marine Corps, Wright said as mayor he would house people in an unspecified currently vacant school after getting permission from various local and state agencies.

“Have you ever seen the Japanese people, how they live? They live in these small, compact areas,” Wright told Lars Larson. “We’re gonna take each one of those (homeless) people and give them their own little area and give them an address.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-city-mayoral-candidate-wants-homeless-to-live-like-the-japanese/ar-AAYCmDo