"Farewll to Manzanar" (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston), autobiographical account of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, might be used in a writing class to help students think deliberately about race and ethnicity. Writing about the book and researching the history surrounding it could serve to complicate student views of the world; it allows them to write about the government and the role the individual citizen plays in preventing the government from committing atrocities. In short, the autobiography is a means of confronting naivete. An instructor at Marquette University, however, found that her own naivete was confronted along with that of the students. If she was prepared for her students to find the internment disconcerting, she was not prepared for their "resistance": some denied that the internment was racially motivated; some suggested it was necessary; some condemned the Japanese Americans for their passive compliance with the government order and their continued belief in that government. Through a pedagogy that capitalizes on such resistance, however, students can be moved toward what Fletcher Blanchard has termed "interracial competence," a stance that would respect race and appreciate difference. In their writings, students register an increasing awareness of the complexity of racial and political issues. Having read the autobiography's first chapter, one student writes that she is ashamed of her country, while another student wonders how she could have allowed herself to wonder if those in the camps did not have it better than others. (TB)