from Racial Reparations
Japanese American Redress and African American Claims
Eric K. Yamamoto
Eric K. Yamamoto holds the Korematsu Professorship of Law and Social Justice at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was part of the legal team in the Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, has won numerous teaching awards, and has written books and articles on racial justice and redress. The following excerpts are taken from a special issue of the Boston College Third World Law Journal on “The Long Shadow of Korematsu.”
In 1991 the United States Office of Redress Administration presented the first $20,000 reparations check to the oldest Hawai’i survivor of the Japanese American internment camps. I attended the stately ceremony. The mood, while serious, was decidedly upbeat. Tears of relief mixed with sighs of joy. Freed at last.
Amidst the celebration I reflected on the Japanese American redress process and wondered about its impacts over time. The process had been arduous, with twists and turns. Many Japanese Americans contributed,1 and their communities overwhelmingly considered reparations a great victory, as did I.
Other racial groups lent support, often in the form of political endorsements. Support also came as ringing oratory—for instance, the moving speech on the floor of the House of Representatives by African American Congressperson Ron Dellums.2 Yet some of the support seemed begrudging. One African American scholar observed,
[t]he apology [to Japanese Americans] was so appropriate and the payment so justified…that the source of my ambivalent reaction was at first difficult to identify. After some introspection, I guiltily discovered that my sentiments were related to a very dark, brooding feeling that I had fought long and hard to conquer—inferiority. A feeling that took first root in the soil of “Why them and not me.”3
This confession led me to ask about what political role Japanese Americans might play in future struggles for racial justice in America. That question then led to my essay in 1992 about the social meanings of Japanese American redress. The essay started with the recognition that Japanese American beneficiaries of reparations benefited personally, sometimes profoundly. The trauma of racial incarceration, without charges or trial, and the lingering self-doubt over two generations left scars on the soul. The government’s apology and bestowal of symbolic reparations fostered long overdue healing for many. As I observed then, redress was:
cathartic for internees. A measure of dignity was restored. Former internees could finally talk about the internment. Feelings long repressed, surfaced. One woman, now in her sixties, stated that she always felt the internment was wrong, but that, after being told by the military, the President and the Supreme Court that it was a necessity, she had come seriously to doubt herself. Redress and reparations and the recent successful court challenges, she said, had now freed her soul.
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But, I wondered, what were the long-term societal effects of reparations—the social legacy of Japanese American redress beyond personal benefits? Would societal attitudes toward Asian Americans and other racial minorities change? Would institutions, especially those that curtailed civil liberties in the name of national security, be restructured? Would Japanese American reparations serve as a catalyst for redress for others?
I identified and critiqued two emerging and seemingly contradictory views of reparations for Japanese Americans and then offered a third. The first view was that redress demonstrates that America does the right thing, that the Constitution works (if belatedly) and that the United States is far along on its march to racial justice for all. I criticized that view as unrealistically bright.
The criticism is not that reparations are insignificant for recipients; the criticism is that they can lead to an “adjustment of individual attitudes” towards the historical injustice of the internment without giving current “consideration to the fundamental realities of power.” The “danger lies in the possibility of enabling people to ‘feel good’ about each other” for the moment, “while leaving undisturbed the attendant social realities” creating the underlying conflict.
The second view was that “reparations legislation has the potential of becoming a civil rights law that at best delivers far less than it promises and that at worst creates illusions of progress, functioning as a hegemonic device to preserve the status quo.” I criticized that view as overly dark.
As part of this critique, and drawing upon critical race theory insights, I offered a third view.
[R]eparations legislation and court rulings in cases such as [the] Korematsu [coram nobis case] do not…inevitably lead to a restructuring of governmental institutions, a changing of societal attitudes or a transformation of social relationships, and the dangers of illusory progress and co-optation are real. At the same time, reparations claims, and the rights discourse they engender in attempts to harness the power of the state, can and should be appreciated as intensely powerful and calculated political acts that challenge racial assumptions underlying past and present social arrangements. They bear potential for contributing to institutional and attitudinal restructuring… .4
In light of this third view, I posited that the social meaning of Japanese American redress was yet to be determined. I suggested that the key to the legacy of redress was how Japanese Americans acted when faced with continuing racial subordination of African Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Latinas/os, and Asian Americans. Would we draw upon the lessons of the reparations movement and work to end all forms of societal oppression, or would we close up shop because we got ours?
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Six years have passed. During that time, the United States, indeed the world, has gone apology crazy. Japanese American redress has stimulated a spate of race apologies. Some apologies appear to reflect heartfelt recognition of historical and current injustice and are backed by reparations. Other apologies appear empty, as strategic maneuvers to release pent-up social pressure.
Amidst this phenomenon African Americans have renewed their call for reparations for the legally sanctioned harms of slavery and Jim Crow oppression. These renewed claims have gained momentum, perhaps more so than at any time since Reconstruction—when Congress and the President sought to confiscate Southern land and provide freed slaves with forty acres and a mule. The Florida legislature recently approved reparations for survivors and descendants of the 1923 Rosewood massacre.5 The African American victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment received reparations and a presidential apology in 1997. One reparations lawsuit was filed on the West Coast and a reparations class action is contemplated on the East Coast. Representative John Conyers’ resolution calling for a Congressional Reparations Study Commission, reintroduced every year since 1989, has garnered endorsements from an impressive array of political organizations.
And in every African American reparations publication, in every legal argument, in almost every discussion, the topic of Japanese American redress surfaces. Sometimes as legal precedent. Sometimes as moral compass. Sometimes as political guide… .
Reparations, if thoughtfully conceived, offered and administered, can be transformative. They can help change material conditions of group life and send political messages about societal commitment to principles of equality. When reparations stimulate change, however, they also generate resistance. Proponents suffer backlash. Thus, when reparations claims are treated seriously, they tend to re-create victimhood by inflaming old wounds and triggering regressive reactions. This is the dilemma of reparations.
Seeing these dual possibilities in all redress movements, Joe Singer describes the potential for further victimization in two contemporary situations.6 He recounts Jews’ highly publicized demands in 1997 that Swiss banks account for and restore Jewish money and gold held by the banks for Nazis during World War II. Bank acknowledgment and restitution treats Jews as worthy human beings with rights, including the right to own property. Restitution counters the anti-Semitic myth of Jews misappropriating the property of others. Jewish “victimhood is acknowledged, but Jews are not treated as mere victims, but as agents calling the Swiss banks to account… .”
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One problem, however, is that Jewish demands for monetary restitution resurrect for some the harsh historical stereotypes of Jews “as money-grubbing, as having both accumulated secret bank accounts in the past and as caring now about nothing more than money… .” Another, and broader, problem is that additional Jewish reparations claims may spark resentment among other groups whose reparations claims have gone unmet (such as Hungarian gypsies who were exterminated by Nazis in Auschwitz and elsewhere).
Singer also describes reparations demands for African Americans. Some understand those demands as a call for redress of past injustice; others understand the demands as a “refusal to grow up.” The result, evident in the volatile affirmative action debates, is that “calls to repair the current effects of past injustice are met with derisory denials that continuing injustice exists and that the problems of African Americans are now purely of their own making.” As Singer observes about mixed healing potential in both situations, the “very thing that restoration is intended to combat may be the result of the demand for restoration.”…
The socio-psychological benefits of apologies and reparations are often significant for recipients.7 As previously mentioned, one woman said the Japanese American redress process had “freed her soul.” Other beneficiaries responded with a collective sigh of relief. Ben Takeshita, for instance, expressed the sentiments of many when he said that although monetary payments “could not begin to compensate…for his…lost freedom, property, livelihood, or the stigma of disloyalty,” the reparations demonstrated the sincerity of the government’s apology.8
In light of both the dangers and the transformative potential of reparations, I offer two insights into specific reparations efforts, insights drawn from Japanese American redress that bear on the shape of African American reparations claims and strategy. One is normative: reparations by government or groups should be aimed at a restructuring of the institutions and relationships that gave rise to the underlying justice grievance. Otherwise, as a philosophical and practical matter, reparations cannot be effective in addressing root problems of misuse of power, particularly in the maintenance of oppressive systemic structures, or integrated symbolically into a group’s (or government’s) moral foundation for responding to intergroup conflicts or for urging others to restructure oppressive relationships. This means that monetary reparations are important, but not simply as individual compensation. Money is important to facilitate the process of personal and community “repair” discussed below.
A second insight is descriptive: restructuring those institutions and changing societal attitudes will not flow naturally and inevitably from reparations itself. Dominant interests, whether governmental or private, will cast reparations in ways that tend to perpetuate existing power structures and relationships. Indeed, traditionally framed, American interests in racial reparations, including international credibility and domestic peace, tend to reinforce the social status quo.
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Those seeking reparations need to draw on the moral force of their claims (and not frame it legally out of existence) while simultaneously radically recasting reparations in a way that both materially benefits those harmed and generally furthers some larger interests of mainstream America. Moreover, those benefiting from reparations in the past need to draw upon the material benefits of reparations and the political insights and commitments derived from their particular reparations process and join with others to push for bureaucratic, legal and attitudinal restructuring—to push for material change. And their efforts must extend beyond their own reparations to securing reparations for others.
These insights point toward a reframing of the prevailing reparations paradigm—a new framing embracing the notion of reparations as “repair.” Indeed, reparation, in singular, means repair. It encompasses both acts of repairing damage to the material conditions of racial group life—distributing money to those in need and transferring land ownership to those dispossessed, building schools, churches, community centers and medical clinics, creating tax incentives and loan programs for businesses owned by inner city residents—and acts of restoring injured human psyches—enabling those harmed to live with, but not in, history. Reparations, as collective actions, foster the mending of tears in the social fabric, the repairing of breaches in the polity.
For example, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid and mainstream resistance to integration inflicted horrendous harms upon African American individuals and their communities, harms now exacerbated by the increasing resegregation of America. Reparations directly improving the material conditions of life for African Americans and their communities are especially appropriate. In addition, the racial harm to African Americans also wounded the American polity. It grated on America’s sense of morality (do we really believe in freedom, equality and justice?), destabilized the American psyche (are we really oppressors?), generated personal discomfort and fear in daily interactions (will there be retribution?), and continues to do so. As Harlon Dalton observes, “perpetuating racial hierarchy in a society that professes to be egalitarian is destructive of the spirit as well as of the body politic.”9 Reparations for African Americans, conceived as repair, can help mend this larger tear in the social fabric for the benefit of both blacks and mainstream America.
So viewed, reparations are potentially transformative. Reparations can avoid “the traps of individualism, neutrality and indeterminacy that plague many mainstream concepts of rights or legal principles.”10 Reparations are grounded in group, rather than individual, rights and responsibilities and provide tangible benefits to those wronged by those in power. As Mari Matsuda observes, properly cast, reparations target substantive barriers to liberty and equality. In addition, coupled with acknowledgment and apology, reparations are potentially transformative because of what they symbolize for both bestower and beneficiary: reparations “condemn exploitation and adopt a vision of a more just world.”11
(1998)