California Apologizes to Chinese Americans

By Guest Contributor Angry Asian Man, originally published at Angry Asian Man

waiting

Last week, the California legislature approved a landmark bill to apologize to the state’s Chinese American community for racist laws enacted specifically against Chinese immigrants as far back as the mid-19th century Gold Rush: California Apologizes to Chinese Americans.

The laws, some of which were not repealed until the 1940s, barred Chinese from owning land or property, marrying whites, working in the public sector and testifying against whites in court. The new bill also recognizes the contributions Chinese immigrants have made to the state, particularly their work on the Transcontinental Railroad.

It’s about damn time. Thankfully, the resolution moved relatively quickly through the state legislature since it was first introduced in February and promoted heavily by state assembly member Paul Fong.

Unfortunately, most of the direct victims of the laws in question have already passed away. Fong’s grandfather was held for two months at Angel Island, the immigration station near San Francisco where several hundred thousand Chinese immigrants were targeted and detained from 1910 to 1940.

Now, with the resolution passed, Fong plans to take the issue to Congress, where he’ll request an apology for the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only federal law ever enacted to deny immigration based exclusively on race or nationality. I fully support this effort, and hope Assemblyman Fong takes the issue all the way to passage in Washington.

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Photo from ChinaDaily.com.cn of Chinese and Japanese women and children waiting to be processed as they are held in a wire mesh enclosure at internment barracks in Angel Island, California.

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State of New York Bans Orientals « Asian American Movement Blog on 07 Sep 2009 at 10:28 am

[...] for slavery (over 140 years after the fact), or the state of California’s apology for racist laws against Chinese Americans during the nineteenth century, or Bill [...]

Comments

TN wrote:

I sure hope that Australia follows this lead and apologise for all those awful “White Australia” policies…

Posted 07 Aug 2009 at 9:15 am ¶
Karen wrote:

the thing is, i dont understand why people think all this apologizing makes up for everything. people apologize but they dont do anything about the current effects of the things they’re apologizing for. i’d rather have action than words myself

Posted 07 Aug 2009 at 9:16 am ¶
Kjen wrote:

Well, at least the government is apologizing for wrongs done to people who might actually still be alive.

Posted 07 Aug 2009 at 7:58 pm ¶
sandeep wrote:

i’d have to say apologies are very welcome, as it shows some positivety.

Posted 08 Aug 2009 at 3:10 am ¶
ashlynn wrote:

Gosh, Chinese and Japanese history flies so far under the radar in America. I never learned a lick about it in school- it just so happened that I came across a book called Farewell to Manzanar, and of course, the haunting short children’s book Hiroshima, that I even began to get an idea. California has a huge opportunity to do more than just apologize; they can TEACH.

Also, @TN,

I couldn’t cosign that any more if I had a pen and paper in hand. Amen to that.

Posted 08 Aug 2009 at 3:35 am ¶
Chi Li wrote:

Looks like some racists are upset at Racialicious and its message. They don’t think Asians should have anything in common with blacks.

http://hbdbooks.com/2009/08/the-oriental-divirsicrat/

Hopefully, these are a dying breed.

Posted 08 Aug 2009 at 3:00 pm ¶
shah8 wrote:

Well, chinese/japanese*american* are a truly ignored aspect of american history, even though they were not marginal contributers to the nature of this country.

Posted 08 Aug 2009 at 3:53 pm ¶
daniel cunningham wrote:

@Karen–

It doesn’t make up for it, absolutely true. But it is a statement of contrition, which is part of making up for it.

It is necessary.

Posted 09 Aug 2009 at 11:25 am ¶
Lxy wrote:

Speaking of politically disingenous apologies, here is yet another example: the American government’s self-serving “apology” for slavery.

Apparently, there is nothing Amurikans love more than expressions of false contrition to absolve themselves of past crimes.

“No” to Reparations
http://stuffwhitepeoplesay.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/no-to-reparations/

Posted 10 Aug 2009 at 10:46 am ¶
Jess wrote:

I have to say I am always of two minds when it comes to apologies like this.

On the one hand I think it’s good that someone acknowledges past wrongs. On the other I keep thinking it really doesn’t do much. The apologies Germans made for what they did to my relatives, for instance, aren’t going to bring them back.

@Ixy — this is also why I can’t get behind reparations for slavery. As a practical matter, what form would that take? A chunk of land for every slave descendant? Money? How much? What about the descendants of free black people? Do they get anything? The question becomes complicated very fast. And let’s not forget the Native people who owned slaves in areas that weren’t part of the US (officially) at the time. What about them? Do they get counted here?

The only things I can think of that would really matter for people — like altering the way police treat PoC — don’t quite fall under that category and should be part of general policy in any case, you know?

Not that questions of reparations aren’t important. I think it can be useful.

But to take the German example again, I can’t come up with any reparations scheme that makes any damned sense. I mean, they basically wiped out a whole culture. There is no more Yiddish theater, no more current Polish klezmer music, no more Jewish quarters with all of the things they produced. That’s gone. All of it. How much is that worth? A billion? A trillion?

An apology doesn’t come close to matching the sheer moral insanity of what happened. But how do you even start to figure out what they ought to do to make amends, at least in the material sense that reparations imply?

Posted 11 Aug 2009 at 6:58 pm ¶
Reiter wrote:

@Chi Li

A lot of toxic garbage floating around that link you mentioned. I love how the commentators there use the “they’re even more racist than we are!” Oppression Olympics card to justify their own racist views or existing racist policies, or claim that Asians have never and will never stand with other POCs when it comes to combating racist issues. I seem to recall a few Asians touting “Yellow Power supporting Black Power” signs during the Civil Rights movement, and that it was a woman of Japanese descent who cradled Malcolm X’s head as he lay dying (sad the movie left out this little tidbit). So yea, we Asians get ignored or have our presence/existence denied/downplayed by both sides, it seems.

But re: the apology to Chinese Americans, it’s a step in the right direction. At least the government is acknowledging the fact that it had passed this clearly racist law targeting a specific ethnic group. I’m hoping the apology will bring some measure of closure to those still living to have been affected by it. But other than this and giving white liberals some warm fuzzy feelings, I doubt it’ll have much more impact beyond that. Maybe I’m jaded in my old age, heh.

Posted 13 Aug 2009 at 4:00 am ¶
ian wrote:

@reiter yuri kochiyama is the name of the woman that cradled malcolm..

Posted 24 Sep 2009 at 11:20 pm ¶