California att'y general issues formal apology to Japanese Americans' incarceration

California Attorney General Rob Bonta

On the 35th anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a formal apology acknowledging the role played by the California Attorney General’s Office in unjustly depriving Japanese Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties during and after World War II.

“Today, my office formally apologizes for its past use of legal tools to deprive a generation of Japanese Californians of their liberty and financial security during the World War II era,” said Attorney General Bonta Thursday, Aug. 10.

“The forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese American citizens remains among the darkest periods of our history, and the suffering it caused Japanese American families across California is incalculable. While we can never erase the horrors of the past, we must take steps to atone for past wrongs by answering the call for accountability, truth and reconciliation, racial healing and transformation.

"The California Attorney General’s Office deeply regrets its past complicity in these heinous violations of civil rights, and with this apology, recommits to its mission of protecting and defending civil liberties for all Americans,” stated Bonta, the first Filipino American to occupy the office.

FYI: The formal statement of apology can be found here.

In 2020, the state's lawmakers issued a formal apology for incarcerating people of Japanese descent during WWII.

In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which targeted and imprisoned more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who primarily lived on the West Coast. 

Former California Attorney General Earl Warren testified before Congress in support of this order and enforced the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which took possession of agricultural land owned by Japanese American families. 

In 1943, California Attorney General Robert Walker Kenny formed a special unit within the Attorney General's Office to enforce the California Alien Land Law. The California Alien Land Law prohibited Asian immigrants from purchasing or leasing land until 1952, when the California Supreme Court declared the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1944, the California Attorney General's Office joined the states of Washington and Oregon in submitting an amicus brief in the US Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, supporting the imprisonment of Fred Korematsu — a national civil rights hero who fought against the wrongful incarceration of Japanese Americans — despite the lack of any evidence that he posed a security threat. The Attorney General's Office recognizes today that this was unequivocally incorrect.

As racism, fear, and xenophobia continue to threaten fundamental freedoms, Bonta remains fully committed to fighting for the civil rights of all of California’s diverse communities, evidenced by: 

• Launching the Racial Justice Bureau within the California Department of Justice.
• Holding virtual convening against hate crime with California’s big city Mayors.
• Creating the Community Engagement Office within the California Department of Justice.
• Hosting a public webinar for the National Day of Racial Healing.
• Implementing new guidance, reports, and resources to help public and law enforcement better understand and address hate crimes.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow me at Threads.net/eduardodiok, @DioknoEd on Twitter or at the  blog Views From the Edge.

Pacific Grove ponders issuing an apology to Chinese American community

In 2014, a plaque was placed on the site of Pacific Grove's Chinese fishing village once stood.

Pacific Grove may be the next city to acknowledge and apologize for its history of racism towards its Chinese residents.

The city's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force approved sending a proposed resolution detailing the apology to the Pacific Grove City Council for consideration on May 11, during Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Picturesque Pacific Grove is located on the California coast south of Monterey. The Chinese fishing village at Point Alones, which began in the 1850s, was nearly burned to the ground in a highly suspicious 1905 fire after the residents resisted eviction. 

Task Force Secretary Kim Bui, read the resolution aloud, detailing how a growing anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in the attempted eviction of Point Alones residents in 1905, followed a year later by the fire, during which “hundreds of spectators watched, cheered the flames and looted” residents’ belongings. Remaining residents were not allowed to return.

The resolution goes as far back as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the racist covenants that prevented Chinese from buying property. 

It goes on the cites the Feast of Lanterns, a local celebration that featured racist depictions. The event was canceled because of strong objections by residents. The proposed resolution ties the history to the current anti-Asian sentiment that has surged the past two years.  

The task force wants the city's apology as a “learning moment for the public to move away from prejudice and racism towards inclusion, equity and justice for all.”

"An apology for grievous injustices cannot erase the past, but admission of the historic wrongdoing committed can aid us in healing the pain of the past and solving the critical problems of discrimination and racism facing Pacific Grove and the broader U.S. today," states the resolution.

The task force and its supporters are hoping the apology will get approved by the City Council May 11 as part of the city's observance of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, and be read by the mayor at the city's annual Walk of Remembrance on May 14 that concludes at the site of the former Chinatown, now a valuable piece of property featuring a trail alongside the rocky shoreline.

The Walk of Remembrance "is an authentic event that celebrates the actual history of Pacific Grove and it is also an inclusive event. And the Feast of Lanterns was unfortunately not any of those things," said Klarity Coleman, the former Feast of Lanterns president.

"If we can't make significant change here (in Pacific Grove). I'm really worried for the rest of our country. We have a great opportunity here and now with this instance to set a tone and create a larger change that's going to continue,"  said Coleman.

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San Jose is latest city to apologize for past racist treatment of Chinese

San Jose Research Library & Archives

San Jose residents visit the smoldering ruins of Chinatown after teh 1887 arson fire.

Some jurisdictions in the U.S. are beginning to take a long, hard look and acknowledging their past history of discrimination against Asian Americans.

San Jose, California is the latest and largest city to issue an apology for its treatment of the Chinese community, specifically the torching of the city's Chinatown in the mid-1800s when anti-Chinese bias was at its most blatant.

The San Jose City Council passed the resolution unanimously. “It’s important for members of the Chinese American community to know that they are seen and that the difficult conversations around race and historic inequities include the oppression that their ancestors suffered,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said.

The apologies come at a time of a resurgence of anti-Asian hate resulting in attacks on all Asians, not just people of Chinese descent. According to the community based organization, Stop AAPI Hate, over 9,000 racist incidents against AAPI have occurred since the Trump administration began using racist rhetoric, blaming the pandemic on China.

Throughout its history, San Jose has had five separate Chinatowns, one of which was the largest Chinatown in the U.S.

The most well-known was the Second Market Street Chinatown. In 1887 the city declared the neighborhood a public nuisance to make room for a new city hall. Days later, before eviction notices could be issued, the Chinatown was deliberately set on fire displacing 1,400 residents.

At the time, “The city said, ‘No, it’s a vile community, and we don’t want it downtown,’” said Gerrye Kee Wong of Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, speaking to the city council on behalf of the resolution.

Today, almost 150 years later, San Jose has 1 million residents. Asian Americans make up 38.1% of San Jose, the largest ethnic group in the city. Latinos are 31.2% of the city, followed by Whites, 23.3%, according to the 2020 Census.

"An apology for grievous injustices cannot erase the past, but admission of the historic wrongdoings committed can aid us in solving the critical problems of racial discrimination facing America today," rads the San Jose's resolution.

In May, the City of Antioch, California became the first to apologize for its treatment of early Chinese immigrants, who dug secret tunnels to commute home from work because they were barred from walking city streets after sunset.

Other cities in the Pacific Northwest have issued apologies in decades past. The State of California also apologized in 2009 to Chinese workers and Congress has apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was approved in 1882 and made Chinese residents the targets of the nation’s first law limiting immigration based on race or nationality.

In November of 2020, the City of Watsonville, a few miles south of San Jose, issued an official apology to the Filipino American community for the racist attacks in 1930 by white mobs against Filipino American farm workers, that became known as the Watsonville Riots. Over several days, hundreds of Filipinos were hunted down and beaten, resulting in one worker's death.

Connie Young Yu, a historian and author of “Chinatown, San Jose, USA,” said her grandfather was a teenage refugee from the 1887 fire. Her father was born in the a new San Jose Chinatown built built after the fire. The new enclave was established in a different location with the help of German immigrant John Heinlen, whose life was threatened. That new Chinatown, known as Heninlenville, eventually disappeared after the Chinese population dwindled.

Yu said San Jose's official recognition and apology gives her an “enormous sense of reconciliation and a sense of peace,” she told the Tri-City Herald.

“This is beyond an apology," added Yu. "It is taking responsibility, which is a beautiful thing to me.” 

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L.A. Times apologizes for its 'history of racism'

To underscore the critical nature of the current state of race relations in the United States, the Los Angeles Times issued an apology for the way it portrayed minority communities in the past as an institution enabling the white power structure and vowed to do a better job of reflecting their readers and reporting on concerns of communities of color.

In its Sunday edition, owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong issued this statement in a letter:

“This year, across America, we’ve engaged in conversations about race and discrimination that have been candid, direct and consequential. They are happening among friends and co-workers, through protests and political debates, at athletic events and in pop culture. And they are happening at the Los Angeles Times.”

His letter continued: "We also feel a deep personal responsibility and duty to fight racism and bias. The national reckoning on race and that within the Los Angeles Times are welcome developments that have already led to productive conversations, concrete plans and accelerated progress for us.

"We are committed to change, both because it is just and because it is mission-critical for our business. Only a diverse newsroom can accurately tell this city’s stories. Only a newspaper that holds power to account and uncovers injustice can truly succeed," writes Soon-Shiong.

"The Times has committed to a close examination of its past, beginning with the project we are launching today. It starts with an overview by the editorial board of The Times’ history in covering and employing people of color and an acknowledgment of the paper’s failings. Over the following days, we will run stories by staff reporters and columnists examining in greater depth, and from a personal perspective, aspects of the paper’s coverage of nonwhite communities and treatment of journalists of color."

The paper's editorial went further by recounting some of the stories and issues where the Times failed by writing from a white, Protestant, suburban perspective when writing about communities of color, which in the past were portrayed as crime-ridden ghettoes, ignoring the hardworking, honest residents.

The Times apologized for past editorial positions including the newspaper's strong support of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and for its endorsement of Proposition 187, which banned health care and social services to undocumented immigrants and which the courts eventually turned down.

The editorial went on to say:

"On behalf of this institution, we apologize for The Times’ history of racism. We owe it to our readers to do better, and we vow to do so. A region as diverse and complex and fascinating as Southern California deserves a newspaper that reflects its communities. Today, 38% of the journalists on our staff are people of color. We know that is not nearly good enough, in a county that is 48% Latino and in a state where Latinos are the largest ethnic group. We know that this acknowledgment must be accompanied by a real commitment to change, a humility of spirit and an openness of mind and heart.

"The Times will redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California — a sentinel that employs investigative and accountability reporting to help protect our fragile democracy and chronicles the stories of the Golden State, including stories that historically were neglected by the mainstream press. Being careful stewards of this new company, privately owned but operated for the benefit of the public, is our first obligation. But that stewardship will also require bold and decisive change. If we are to survive as a business, it will be by tapping into a digital, multicultural, multigenerational audience in a way The Times has never fully done."

It will be interesting to see if other publications that encouraged racist policies or made stitlted portrayals of minorities make similar apologies.

To say that the mea culpa by the Los Angeles Times is long overdue is a vast understatement, but the promises it makes to be more inclusive and to step down from its Ivory Tower should be welcomed, but viewed with cautiously because we've heard these promises before only to have minority journalists leave print careers in droves because they were tired of butting heads against the institution's walls of explicit and implicit bias.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this article is news laced with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.