Why does Jeanne decide that if she faces hostility, she will "have to allow it"?

Although Jeanne makes that comment in Chapter 16, when she says that she'll have to allow hostility because something about her deserves it, we'll find a more detailed explanation of that idea in Chapter 20: "A Double Impulse," when Jeanne reflects on the way in which her experiences have shaped her attitudes and her sense of self.

In that chapter, she describes the victims of internment (such as herself and her family) as somewhat...

Although Jeanne makes that comment in Chapter 16, when she says that she'll have to allow hostility because something about her deserves it, we'll find a more detailed explanation of that idea in Chapter 20: "A Double Impulse," when Jeanne reflects on the way in which her experiences have shaped her attitudes and her sense of self.

In that chapter, she describes the victims of internment (such as herself and her family) as somewhat at fault for allowing it to happen. She says that in order for the 110,000 people to allow themselves to be locked up in the camps, those people have to have some kind of "acquiescence," some small belief that they actually deserved to be locked away in the camps.

Consider how Jeanne's elders would tell each other "Shikata ga nai," or "It must be done"/"It can't be helped" when Jeanne's father was wrongly imprisoned and when the family was experiencing the chaos of being moved around. This idea of acquiescence, of interpreting injustice as unavoidable and allowing it to happen, has been bred into Jeanne. "I had inherited it," she tells us in Chapter 20.

So when people see Jeanne as someone foreign and strange, or someone not worth associating with, she doesn't fight back. For example, when she's rejected from participating in the Girl Scouts simply because she's Japanese, she simply accepts it. She simply allows that hostility to exist, although on the inside, she yearns for both invisibility and self-assertion (the "double impulse" mentioned in the chapter title).