Interiior Secretary doesn't understand how 'Konnichiwa' was an insult

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke doesn't understand his racist gaffe during a hearing.

SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR Ryan Zinke thought he was being welcoming by greeting Rep. Colleen Hanabusa with a Japanese greeting "Konnichiwa."

During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing today on the Department of Interior’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget proposal, Secretary Ryan Zinke responded to Rep. Colleen Hanabusa (D-HI) by making a racially insensitive comment in reference to her Japanese heritage.

After hearing her appeal to reinstate funding for a program that would preserve the WWII detention camps for Japanese Americans during which he told the secretary that her own grandparents were placed in those internment camps, Zinke's first response was "Oh,  Konnichiwa," the Japanese afternoon greeting.

Zinke got zinged on social meda for what many Asian/Americans saw as an insensitive remark at best, an insult at worst.

On Saturday (March 17), Zinke asked reporters: "How could ever saying 'good morning' be bad?"

RELATED: Zinke's racist remark mars Congressional hearing

Well, let's count the ways.

First, since it was still morning, the correct greeting in Japanese would be ‘ohayo gozaimasu’ as Hanabusa corrected him.

Secondly, Hanabusa was born and raised in Hawaii, which (in case Zinke needs to be reminded) is one of the states in the U.S.A. She is a fourth-generation American.

“Whether intentional or not, his comments invoke the offensive stereotype that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners regardless of how long their families have lived in the United States," said Rep. Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. "What is even more alarming is that Secretary Zinke made this stereotype immediately after my colleague discussed the abhorrent racial prejudice that her grandparents and other Japanese Americans endured during World War II due to government-sanctioned profiling.

“It is absolutely outrageous that Interior Secretary Zinke chose to racialize Congresswoman Hanabusa’s identity after she spoke about the importance of preserving funding for the Japanese American Confinement Sites where nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated during World War II. Rather than greet her like he would any other Member of Congress, he responded to her as if she did not speak any English.

It would have been especially cool if Hanabusaresponded in German, the language of Zinke's immigrant ancestors, "Sprechen wir doch auf Englisch" (Let's speak in English.).

“Secretary Zinke’s remark was both inappropriate for the occasion and insensitive to Congresswoman Hanabusa, who had just imparted a deeply personal story of her grandfathers both being held in internment camps," said the Asian Americans Advancing Justice in a statement. 

"Instead of showing sensitivity toward the subject and Representative Hanabusa, Secretary Zinke chose that inopportune time to share his lack of Japanese cultural knowledge when he responded flippantly, ‘Oh, Konnichiwa’ rather than offer a serious reply to the Congresswoman’s question. His remark also demonstrates the “perpetual foreigner” problem faced by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) tweeted in response: "Nope. Racism is not ok."

The exchange also drew the ire of Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who slammed Zinke for acting "flippant" and "juvenile" in his response to Hanabusa's question.

Hanabusa tweeted Saturday night she wanted to focus on how the "administration ignored one of the most racially motivated periods in American history by defunding the Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant program." She also wrote that when Zinke "decided to greet me in Japanese (when no one else was greeted in their ancestral language), I understood this is precisely why Japanese Americans were treated as they were more than 75 years ago."

The most appropriate response Zinke should have made would have been to acknowledge Rep. Hanabusa’s tragic story and respect the history of the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans as a shameful, a dark chapter in U.S. history that should be remembered as such by this administration.  

"Zinke’s gaffe demonstrates how little we have learned from our history and why the administration must continue to fund these memorials,” concluded the AAAJ statement.
________________________________________________________________________________

115th CONGRESS: AAPI lawmakers will be in a familiar spot - in the minority

INSTAGRAM

California's newest Senator, Kamala Harris, knows what it means to be a minority.

WITH 17 House Representatives and U.S. Senators, the 115th Congress will have the most Asian/American and Pacific Islander members ever. From the day they officially sit in their Capitol offices, they will face probably the most challenging session in modern history.

Two new AAPI candidates were elected to serve in the U.S. Senate and five in the U.S. House of Representatives. The new Congress will convene Jan. 3, 2017.

“The 115th Congress will include more women and minorities than ever before, which means that the people making decisions for Americans will better reflect the diversity of our nation." said said Rep. Judy Chu (D, CA), Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC). 

Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) won her Senate race and made history as the first Thai/American elected to the U.S. Senate. California Attorney General Kamala Harris also won her Senate race, becoming the first Indian/American elected to the U.S. Senate.

In the House, we have our first Vietnamese/American woman Representative-elect, Stephanie Murphy (D-Florida); first Indian/American woman Representative-elect, Pramila Jayapal (D-Washingont); Indian/American Representatives-elect, Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) and Ro Khanna (D-CA); as well as returning member Colleen Hanabusa (D-HI).

"With these victories, CAPAC will have its highest AAPI membership in history, and I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to come together and move our nation forward,” said Chu.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Earlier versions of this post incorrectly counted 18 AAPI members of Congress.

In addition to welcoming newly elected members, Chu also thanked departing CAPAC Chair Emeritus Rep. Mike Honda for his service.

“CAPAC thanks Congressman Mike Honda for his tireless work to champion issues critical to the AAPI community and to all Americans during his 16 years of service in the U.S. Congress,” said Chu. “Our caucus would not be where it is today without his leadership, and his presence and commitment to advancing CAPAC’s mission and goals will be greatly missed.”

Democrats are also looking at reviving their party after the sound thrashing it received last November when Trump upset Hillary Clinton, were not able to gain enough seats in the House and the Senate, and lost heavily in the state legislators and among governorships.

Democrats, and hopefully a few like-minded Republicans who still revere country over blind party affiliation, will face an attempt to do away with the social programs instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt that have helped millions survive hard times, solidified a middle class and brought our country to become the most powerful, admired and influential country in the world.

The new AAPI members of the House of Representatives and Senate are all Democrats, which will be the minority party in both houses, so they will have their work cut out for them, not only to pass their own legislation, but to fight back against GOP attempts to bring the country back to pre-Great Depression conditions by ...

• weakening the safety net of social services and housing, 
• doing away with the Affordable Care Act, 
• privatizing Medicare, 
• weakening Social Security,
• eliminating any government watchdog agencies that would prevent Wall Street and Big Businesses from running amock.

Plus, they will be fighting back some contemporary proposals from the GOP majority, including:

• weakening of the Climate Change strategies advocated by the Obama administration,
• fighting Trump's frightful immigration policies that includes building a wall between Mexico and the U.S., 
• deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and their families, 
• imposing restrictions for Muslim immigrants or people from countries known to have a Muslim presence such as Indonesia, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, and 
• creating a Muslim Registry.
• vetting the controversial nominees for Trump's cabinet

The freshman class of Capitol lawmakers are aware of the hurdles in front of them and some have made it clear that they won't set aside their ideals just to get along with their more conservative members of Congress. 

Already, some big donors are looking at Sen. Kamala Harris as someone to consider for the as a potential presidential candidate. Among the newcomers to the nation's capitol, she probably has the closest ties to the outgoing president. She chaired Obama's campaign in California in 2018 and 2012. 

The fledgling senator, whose immigrant parents hail from India and Jamaica, has made it clear that she will not be holding back to preserve the progress made under the Obama administration. 

Asked to react to Trump’s statement on 60 Minutes that he wants to focus on potentially deporting immigrants with criminal records, Harris, the former Attorney General for California, cited her own experience.

"I have an experience with this kind of approach and what I have seen is when you say criminal, that’s a very broad term. It’s not a monolith. There’s a whole range of behaviors that can qualify as being called a crime. A DUI is very different from rape. And as a career prosecutor I have constantly and consistently seen that one of the best tools in the tool belt of a predator of an undocumented immigrant, be it rape, be it domestic violence, be it fraud, one of the best tools that the predator has is to look at the victim and tell the victim, ‘if you report this it is you who will be treated like a criminal.'”

“I have deep concerns about Sen. (Jeff )Sessions' nomination," Harris said in a statement. "Particularly, I am concerned with his support for policies that would undermine core Department of Justice functions and his views that are incompatible with constitutional guarantees.”

"I will oppose a Muslim registry with every fiber of my being. That is not the American way of conducting afairs and violates every principle we stand for," said Rho Khanna, who unseated Honda and who will represent the mainland's only Asian/American dominated congressional district. "And it's going to be increasingly important at this time in history to make the case that our very founding principles mean that every person should be judged on their merits not based on their race, religion or their last name."

"We have fought and won before," Jayapal told NBC News. "We have been through some incredibly dark times in the history of country, and we have moved forward. It hasn't been as quickly as we want, but we are extremely powerful when we are united."

The Muslim Registry and restricted immigration  "are the kinds of things that being Asian American, having recognized what happened to the Japanese internment, how every time there's a different type of crisis, it's people who are recognizable; in other words, people of color, people who are different, who are the ones that are singled out and how we have to protect against it. That's what it means to me," said Hawaii's Hanabusa.

THE HILL

This graphic  from 'The Hill' does not include the two representatives of  American Samoa and Guam.

Except for fourth-generation American Hanabusa, the new AAPI members of Congress are all first- or second-generation immigrants, so we would expect that the memories of the immigration experience is still fresh with them.

Being members of the minority party shouldn't be anything new to the AAPI legislators, they've survived the hard knocks of being minorities before in their private and public lives, so that experience will serve them in good stead.

Eighteen doesn't seem like a whole lot of influence, but there is cause for some hope. The 115th Congress is the most racially diverse Congress in our history. It would seem that the AAPI contingent would find natural allies with the African/American, Latinos, and those who identify themselves as LGBTQ, another minority whose rights are endangered. 

Women, too, no matter what race, could provide an opening among Republicans. There are some women Republicans (not a lot, but some) who are open for dialogue around family-planning and health issues.

Good luck to oru AAPI representatives in Congress! They must know that besides their constituents in their respective states and districts, they will be our voice, too. They will need luck - and our support.

###

2016 Elections: Congress will have the most AAPI members in its history

By Louis Chan
REPRINTED FROM ASAM NEWS

THERE WILL be more Asian American & Pacific Islander members of Congress as a result of the Nov. 8 elections.

Fourteen AAPI voting members of Congress were elected, surpassing the previous record of 12.

Those elected include California Attorney General Kamala Harris who will become the first Indian/American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. She beat Rep. Loretta Sanchez almost two-to-one.

Harris is already looking forward to her job in the Senate.

“Whatever the results of the presidential election tonight, we know that we have a task in front of us,” Harris told her cheering supporters early in the night. “We know the stakes are high. When we have been attacked and when our ideals and fundamental ideals are being attacked, do we retreat or do we fight? I say we fight!”

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Chicago), a purple heart veteran of the Iraq War, won election to the U.S. Senate to represent the state of Illinois by beating incumbent Senator Mark Kirk 54 percent to Kirk's 40 percent.

“Just as I try every day to live up to the sacrifice my buddies made to carry me off that battlefield, I will go to work in the Senate looking to honor the sacrifice and quiet dignity of all those Illinoisans who are facing challenges of their own,” she said Tuesday night.

Three Asian/American women will now serve in the U.S. Senate. The other will be Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono, who became the first Asian/American woman elected to the Senate in 2012.

New to Congress will be Pramila Jayapal who beat fellow Democrat Brady Walkinshaw for the 7th Congressional district in Washington state 57 percent to 43 percent. Jayapal becomes the first Indian/American woman elected to the House of Representatives. Just like Harris, Jayapal, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, looked toward working under a Trump presidency.

“If our worst fears are realized, we will be on the defense as of tomorrow,” she said. “We will have to fight for social justice as never before.”

Another newcomer to Congress will be Democrat Stephanie Murphy who beat 12-term incumbent John Mica in the 7th District of Florida 51 percent to 49 percent.

She is the first Vietnamese/American woman elected to Congress. “Tonight, the people of central Florida rejected partisan deadlock and dysfunction and embraced a new approach,” said Murphy. “In Congress, I will work with both Democrats and Republicans, and I will always put people over politics.”

In California, high-tech entrepreneur Ro Khanna defeated eight-time incumbent Mike Honda 60 percent to 40 percent in California’s Santa Clara County. Honda was saddled by an ethics investigation that dates back to his 2014 reelection. He is accused of using his staff during taxpayer time to work on his reelection.

Replacing Tammy Duckworth in the House of Representatives will be S.Raja Krishnamoorthi. He beat Pete DiCianni 58 percent to 42 percent for the 8th District seat in Illinois.

Colleen Hanabusa returns to Congress to represent District 1 in Hawaii. She once held the seat, but gave it up to run for the U.S. Senate. She replaces the late Mark Takei who died of cancer earlier this year.

Reelected to Congress were Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento), Rep. Judy Chu (D-Los Angeles County), Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Santa Monica), Rep. Mark Takano (D-Rivrside County), Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Ami Bera(D-Sacramento County).