Asian Law Journal - Vol. 7 Articles

ARTICLE: Racial Stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans and Its Effect on Criminal Justice: A Reflection on the Wayne Lo Case

Rhoda J. Yen +

+ J.D. 1999, Georgetown University Law Center. Jones, Foster, Johnston & Stubbs, P.A (Florida), June 1999 to present. I am greatly interested in the legal issues affecting Asian Americans and hope to research and teach in that area one day. Special thanks to Daniel Yen, Stephen and Priscilla Hsia, and Shelly Chen for their continual encouragement. I dedicate this Article to Wayne Lo and his family.

SUMMARY:

... In this paper, I will examine the racial imagery surrounding Wayne Lo's trial as an example of how stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans influence the criminal justice system. ... Subsection A discusses the effects of stereotyping on cases involving Asian American victims, Subsection B examines the influence of stereotyping on cases involving Asian defendants, and Subsection C discusses the "cultural defense" as a development in the criminal law that has been largely initiated by the yellow peril stereotype. In offering hypotheses on how the model minority and yellow peril stereotypes affect cases involving Asian Americans, I hope to generate awareness and stimulate discourse on the existence of racial injustice in the criminal justice system. ... In particular, the model minority stereotype tends to "whiten" Asians and undermine the existence of anti-Asian sentiment. ... The model minority stereotype, which creates the erroneous assumption that Asians cannot be victims of racial discrimination, produces potentially devastating consequences on the enforcement of crimes against Asian Americans. ... The model minority stereotype constructs Asian Americans as easier victims of crime. ... By emphasizing the "foreignness" of Asian Americans, the yellow peril stereotype reduces the likelihood that jurors will attribute culpability to Asian American defendants when a cultural defense is raised. ... Such a characterization belies the fear of Asian superiority inherent in the model minority stereotype. ...

TEXT:

On December 14, 1992, 19-year-old Wayne Lo stormed the campus of Simon's Rock College of Bard, an elite private institution for gifted students, and began a twenty-minute shooting spree that left two people dead and four wounded. In the past seven years, I have followed the news coverage of the Wayne Lo case with increasing interest, not only because Wayne and I are both Chinese American, born in the same year, and raised under similar circumstances, but because the degrees of separation have unwittingly decreased between us. My husband Dan was Wayne's childhood friend, one who slept over at his house and shared adolescent confessions about girls, sex, and religion. Wayne's mother and father are longtime friends of my in-laws and serve as Dan's godparents. Our families have exchanged letters and photographs over the years and managed to pretend that while we graduated from college, married, and landed our first jobs, a young man in a Massachusetts prison did not exist.

Early in law school, I began to think about Wayne more frequently. I prodded Dan for details about the young killer, hoping to discover any clues to Wayne's perplexing identity. Slowly, I arrived at a theory, not about why he killed that chilly day in December, but about how his race may have influenced his conviction and the denial of his appeal.

In this paper, I will examine the racial imagery surrounding Wayne Lo's trial as an example of how stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans influence the criminal justice system. In Part I, I offer two prevailing categories of stereotypes, the "model minority" and "yellow peril," and highlight their criticisms. In Part II, I discuss how these stereotypes potentially influence legal actors in cases involving both Asian American victims and defendants. Finally, in Part III, I return to the Wayne Lo case and propose an explanation of how racial stereotyping may have colored

ARTICLE: Situating Asian Pacific Americans in the Law School Affirmative Action Debate: Empirical Facts About Thernstrom's Rhetorical Acts

William C. Kidder +

+ Researcher, Testing for the Public, Berkeley, California; J.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall); B.A., University of California, Berkeley (1996). Special appreciation is extended to the following for their helpful reviews: Edward Chen, Sumi K. Cho, Malcolm M. Feeley, Herma Hill Kay, David I. Levine, David Benjamin Oppenheimer, Dana Y. Takagi, David M. White and Eric K. Yamamoto. This article originated as a paper for Professor Feeley's course on the Courts and Social Policy in the School of Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley. As always, this work would not have been possible without the editorial assistance and support of my wife Gale Drake Jones. In the interest of disclosure, I have been actively involved in researching issues of standardized tests, meritocracy and affirmative action. I conduct research for Testing for the Public, a non-profit organization highly critical of standardized tests. I have interned at the ACLU, which is one of several civil rights organizations to sue UC Berkeley over its post-affirmative action admissions policies. I have also testified against the UC Office of the President on law school admission matters, and have consulted for Scheff & Washington, the law firm representing student of color organizations in Grutter v. Bollinger, the pending University of Michigan Law School case.

SUMMARY:

... In 1970, Asian Pacific American (APA) students at the UCLA School of Law pushed for the inclusion of two slots for APAs in the school's Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP), which began in the late 1960s. ... Thus, the debate about where to situate APAs in the affirmative action controversy quickly implicates questions of how to define merit, which in the law school context, traditionally means heavy reliance on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). ... APA admission rates have been analyzed relative to Whites only, in order to isolate White privilege issues from affirmative action for other racial/ethnic groups. ... In order to better understand the political discourse surrounding APAs and affirmative action, a little background about law school admission trends is in order. ... In a section titled "The Vanishing Asian," Thernstrom argues that the press improperly fixated on the plunge in African American admissions to Boalt that occurred in 1997, the first post-affirmative action class. ... He ultimately concludes that the end of race-conscious affirmative action at UC Law Schools "has already benefited Asian Americans, who have won 41% more places in the first-year law-school classes than they did the year before." ... Overall, at the three UC Law Schools that ended race-conscious affirmative action, Whites' representation soared from 59.8% of first-year enrollments in 1994-96 to 71.7% in 1997-99. ...

TEXT:

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1970, Asian Pacific American (APA) students at the UCLA School of Law pushed for the inclusion of two slots for APAs in the school's Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP), which began in the late 1960s. The faculty initially refused, arguing that APAs suffered less socioeconomic and educational disadvantages than African Americans, Chicanos and Native Americans. UCLA's Black American Law Student Association (BALSA) and Mexican American and Indian Law Students Association (MAILSA) banded together with APA students to advocate for the change. In the pre-Bakke days of fixed numerical slots, BALSA and MAILSA both offered to give up one of their LEOP slots for APAs. In response to continued student pressure, the UCLA administration added six LEOP slots for APAs in 1971.

Three decades later in the UCLA Law Review, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom reviewed William Bowen and Derek Bok's The Shape of the River. The Thernstroms argued: "The cost of racial double standards in admissions is currently being paid by many Asian students. When preferences are eliminated, they derive the greatest benefit. Thus, Asian-American enrollments at the UCLA School of Law jumped by 73% when race-neutral admissions went into effect."

These two examples highlight the shift in perception that has occurred with respect to APAs and affirmative action. The student activists at UCLA Law School thirty years ago viewed multiracial solidarity around affirmative action as essential to advancing the educational interests of both APAs and other groups of color. Many members of the political Left also hold this view today. Yet, others have increasingly come to view APAs as natural adversaries of affirmative action programs. In particular, the political Right's often-successful attack on affirmative action coincides with a heightened focus on the adverse consequences for APAs of race-conscious admissions. While Thernstrom makes specific claims about APAs benefiting from the ban on affirmative action in California, others have taken the argument further. Professors Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, for example, argue that many feminist and critical race theory critiques of traditional merit standards amount to being "anti-Asian" because APAs have done so well under "objective" merit standards. Thus, the debate about where to situate APAs in the affirmative action controversy quickly implicates questions of how to define merit, which in the law school context, traditionally means heavy reliance on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT).

Professors Michael Omi and Dana Takagi present a useful summary of the ways in which APAs have traditionally been located in the political discourse on affirmative action. Omi and Takagi observe:

Both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum implicate, in varying degrees, Asian Americans in the ongoing debate. . . It may not matter whether specific claims about Asian Americans are empirically correct or not. In fact, much of what both the Left and the Right claim about Asian Americans is contestable.

This article takes Omi and Takagi's comment as an invitation to analyze the empirical data on the consequences for APAs of ending race-conscious affirmative action. The purpose of this analysis is to examine what light this data sheds on the nature of the affirmative action political discourse--particularly that of the Right. The goal of this article is not simply to establish that APAs and others should support affirmative action because "race blind/by the numbers" admissions will harm APA law school candidates (though evidence will be provided that is consistent with this view). Rather, it is to study the gap between neoconservatives' model minority rhetoric and the reality of law school admissions as a way of assessing the integrity and sincerity of the model minority political discourse.

Sections II through IV of this article explore the political discourse on APAs and affirmative action--particularly that of conservative Stephan Thernstrom--by testing whether it matches available empirical data. Whereas Thernstrom and the political Right have frequently mascotted APAs, portraying them as the group most victimized by race-conscious affirmative action admissions, the Left has often either omitted APAs entirely or attempted to bring APAs within a simplistic notion of coalition politics.

Section III provides a review of the data from three University of California (UC) Law Schools--Boalt, Davis and UCLA--for the three years before and after Proposition 209 (Prop. 209) and the UC Regents' SP-1 Resolution (SP-1) ended race-conscious affirmative action. The data reveals that Thernstrom's claim that APAs were the primary beneficiaries of the ban on affirmative action is untenable. Not only do the figures for three post-209/SP-1 admission cycles counter Thernstrom's conclusions based on one admission cycle, but his conclusions based on 1997 data border on deliberate misrepresentation. Available data from Boalt Hall also establishes that Prop. 209 and SP-1 coincided with a severe drop in Filipino enrollments. Data from the three UC Law Schools reveals that Whites were the only group to see their enrollments (in numbers and proportion of each entering class) go up appreciably.

Section IV provides a comparison of Thernstrom's critique of Linda Wightman to his other works addressing the consequences of Prop. 209 and SP-1. The comparison reveals a telling inconsistency in Thernstrom's positions: in the former case an acknowledgement that APAs would be harmed by "race-blind" and "numbers only" law school admissions, in the latter case an assertion that APA law school applicants would reap the greatest benefit from Prop. 209 and SP-1.

Sections V and VI situate the empirical analysis of APAs and law school admissions within a broader critique of the LSAT and meritocracy. Section V shows how the LSAT has a racial screening effect for APAs, how the test is a poor predictor of APAs' law school performance, and how the LSAT generally correlates negatively with social activism.

Section VI applies two concepts from critical race theory to APA issues in the law school affirmative action debate. First, the "Miss Saigon Syndrome," Neil Gotanda's term for America's indifference to how institutional racism closes doors for APAs, aptly describes Thernstrom's critique of affirmative action. Indeed, I argue, Thernstrom wields the mistaken notion that APAs do not face discrimination in higher education like a sword. He ignores discrimination against APAs in order to attack other racial/ethnic groups who receive affirmative action consideration.

Second, Derrick Bell's notion of the "tipping point" provides insight into whether or not the real threat to APAs' access to legal education is negative action designed to protect White privilege, as opposed to affirmative action. This theory is empirically tested with 1990s national admission data including nearly every ABA law school. APA admission rates have been analyzed relative to Whites only, in order to isolate White privilege issues from affirmative action for other racial/ethnic groups. The data reveals that APAs' proportional representation in the applicant pool rose significantly during the 1990s. This increase, however, is accompanied by the appearance of sizeable differences in admission rates that favor Whites.

COMMENT: Hate Violence as Border Patrol: An Asian American Theory of Hate Violence

Terri Yuh-lin Chen +

+ J.D. 2000, University of California at Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law; B.A. 1997, University of California at Berkeley. I would like to thank Angela Harris for her encouragement and insightful comments which informed the direction and outcome of this paper. I would also like to thank the Asian Law Caucus for giving me the opportunity to do community work in this area and Victor Hwang for teaching me that community lawyering must include both legal and non-legal strategies. This paper was written in the Spring of 1999.

SUMMARY:

... Violence has been an integral part of the histories and experiences of Asian Americans in the United States from our arrival in this nation to the present. ... Furthermore, there is widespread underreporting of hate crimes against Asian Americans because of linguistic barriers between victims and police and the lack of bilingual law enforcement personnel, a lack of knowledge on the part of Asian Americans regarding hate crime laws and civil rights protections, a mistrust of the police and thus a reluctance to report hate crimes, and finally, shame or embarrassment of being a victim. ... The alien land laws diminished the ability of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian immigrants to earn a living in agriculture. ... Although the deaths of Vincent Chin and Navroze Mody are widely known examples of anti-Asian hate crimes, there are countless others who have suffered the same type of hate violence as border patrol. ... Victor Hwang, in his experience with the Race Relations: Hate Violence Project at the Asian Law Caucus, finds that law enforcement generally does not take hate crimes seriously. ... Even if law enforcement did take hate crimes against Asian Americans more seriously, the issue still remains with legalized hate violence in the form of border patrol. ... This paper has attempted to place hate violence against Asian Americans as part of a larger context of increased border patrol. ...

Chico, California 1877

Arsonists of the Order of Caucasians, a white supremacist group that blamed Chinese immigrants for all the economic sufferings of white workers, tried to burn down the Chinatown in Chico and murdered four Chinese men by tying them up, dousing them with kerosene, and setting them on fire.

Rock Springs, Wyoming 1885

A mob of white miners massacred twenty-eight Chinese laborers, wounded fifteen, and chased several hundred out of town. The white miners opened fire at a crowd of unarmed Chinese, burned their huts to the ground, and threw the bodies of the dead Chinese as well as the wounded Chinese who were still alive into the flames. A grand jury did not indict a single person.

Detroit, Michigan 1982

Vincent Chin was a Chinese American male beaten to death a few days before his wedding with a baseball bat by two white laid-off autoworkers who screamed during the killing that the "Japs" were taking all the jobs. The killers were fined less than $ 4000 each and sentenced to three years of probation.

Denver, Colorado 1984

Helen Fukui, a fifty-two year old woman, disappeared in Denver on December 7, 1984. Her decomposed body was found weeks later. The fact that she disappeared on Pearl Harbor Day when anti-Asian speech and incidents heightened racial tensions was considered significant in the Asian American community, but the case was not investigated as a hate crime. No suspects were ever arrested.

New York City, New York 1985

Ly Yung Cheung, a nineteen year old seamstress in New York's Chinatown, was waiting for a subway train when she was pushed into the path of a train by a man claiming to have a psychotic "phobia about Asians." Cheung was decapitated by the oncoming train. She was seven months pregnant at the time.

Jersey City, New Jersey 1987

A Jersey City gang who called themselves the "Dotbusters" (a reference to the red bindi that some South Asian women wear as a sign of marital fidelity) published a letter in the paper stating that they would take any means necessary to drive the Indians out of Jersey City. Numerous racial incidents from vandalism to assault followed. Later that month, the Dotbusters used bricks to bludgeon and beat Navroze Mody, a South Asian male, into a coma. No bias charges were brought against the killers.

Stockton, California, January 1989

A gunman dressed in military clothes entered the schoolyard of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton and opened fire with an AK47 assault rifle. He killed one Vietnamese and four Cambodian children: Raphanar Or, age 9; Ram Chun, age 8; Thuy Tran, age 6; Sokhim An, age 6; and Ocun Lim, age 8. The killings were driven by the gunman's hatred of Southeast Asians because of the Vietnam War.

Houston, Texas, August 1990

Hung Truong, a fifteen-year old Vietnamese American teenager, was walking down the street with three friends when they were accosted by persons in two cars that stopped alongside them. Two men stepped out of one car with a club and began to chase Truong, who was separated from his friends. While shouting "white power," the two men kicked and beat Truong. Truong begged them to stop and said "God forgive me for coming to this country. I'm so sorry." After they left him bleeding on the ground, Truong's friends called the paramedics who claimed that Truong seemed well enough to go home. Truong died the next morning.

Alpine Township, Michigan, June 1995

Thanh Mai, a 23-year old Vietnamese American, visited a teen nightclub with two of his friends in Alpine Township, Michigan on June 18, 1995. Mai was sitting alone and was accosted by three young white males who taunted Mai with racial slurs, including "What the f--k are you looking at, gook?" Mai tried to walk away from the situation, but when his attention was diverted, one of the white men surprised Mai by hitting him in the face. Mai fell to the concrete ground with such force that his skull split open, sending him into convulsions. Mai died five days later from major head trauma.

Southern California, August 1999

Joseph Ileto, a Filipino postal worker was gunned down by a white supremacist on a shooting rampage in Southern California, which included opening fire in a Jewish community center. The killer shot Ileto nine times in the chest and later confessed that he killed Ileto because he looked Asian or Latino. The media initially invisibilized the murder of Joseph Ileto and characterized the rampage as a solely anti-semitic one.

TEXT:

INTRODUCTION

Violence has been an integral part of the histories and experiences of Asian Americans in the United States from our arrival in this nation to the present. Anti-Asian violence can occur at any given moment, but it is especially prevalent during periods of anti-immigrant sentiment. Most hate crimes committed against Asian Americans draw upon notions of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who do not belong in this society. Indeed, Victor Hwang notes how violence based on notions of foreignness has been an integral theme in Asian American history when he writes:

The Asian American community is based on an understanding and appreciation for the fact that we have struggled for nearly two centuries against this violence and exclusion in the plantations, in the courts, and on the battlefields . . . . It is in our struggle against this pattern of violence and its underlying message of physical, political, and historical exclusion that we find ourselves as Asian Pacific Americans.

In the United States, wherever there is foreignness, there is also a negative reaction to foreignness. This negative reaction includes setting up borders and expelling foreigners. Robert S. Chang and Keith Aoki note, "in the same way that the cell wall or membrane serves a screening function, the border operates to exclude that which is dangerous, unwanted, undesirable." The United States guards its borders seriously and marks foreigners within its physical borders according to race. Not all foreigners are treated the same by the United States. Angelo Ancheta uses the term "outsider racialization" to describe the construction of Asian Americans and other non-whites as foreigners. Outsider racialization operates on two different levels:

First, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Arab Americans are racially categorized as foreign-born outsiders, regardless of actual citizenship status. Racialization operates on multiple levels: through psychological cognition and learning, social and political discourse, and institutional structures. Second, ostensibly race-neutral categories such as "immigrant" and "foreigner" are racialized through the same social processes. Just as Asian Americans, Latinos, and Arab Americans are presumed to be foreigners and immigrants, foreigners and immigrants are presumed to be Asian, Latino, or Arab.

Thus, some immigrants are able to cross the border into the United States and gain immediate acceptance as un-foreign because of their white appearance. Racialized others may physically enter the country, but not without foreignness stamped on their faces through their racial uniforms. Accordingly, hate crimes against Asian Americans take on the unique dimension of operating as a form of border patrol and protection of the nation against the foreign "alien." An analysis of anti-Asian hate violence must recognize the social context of foreignness in which the violence manifests as well as the reactions that foreignness triggers from the state and from private actors.

Part I of this paper briefly examines violence as a form of systemic oppression against people of color throughout history and its prevalence in particular against the Asian American community. Part II addresses how perceptions of Asian Americans have always been and continue to be informed by stereotypes grounded in foreignness and focuses on the treatment of Asian Americans by the state. Part III explores white American national identity in the context of immigration, white American anxiety over cultural security and over maintaining borders as a way to deal with the resulting identity crisis. This section also focuses on popular and cultural perceptions of Asian Americans as foreigners. Part IV builds upon the notion of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and analyzes how perceptions of foreignness cause Asian Americans to be subject to both official state and unofficial private forms of border patrol. Hate violence is examined as constituting a form of border patrol by both state and private actors. Finally, this section considers how the construction of individual hate crimes as the sole problem ignores the border patrol function of hate violence and the role of the state in perpetrating hate violence.

COMMENT: The Conscription of Asian Sex Slaves: Causes and Effects of U.S. Military Sex Colonialism in Thailand and the Call to Expand U.S. Asylum Law

Elizabeth Rho-Ng +

+ J.D. 2000, Northeastern University School of Law (Boston, MA); B.A. 1993, University of Texas at Austin. Currently a research attorney with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I would like to dedicate this Comment to my parents and my husband, Hawlan Ng, for their continued love and support over the years. I also sincerely appreciate Professor Hope Lewis of Northeastern University School of Law for her inspiration, encouragement and her dedication to the area of international women's rights. This Comment was originally prepared for her course on Gender and International Human Rights.

SUMMARY:

... With a tainted political and economic history in Southeast Asia from the 1950s through the 1970s, the U.S. military was a key figure in the development of military prostitution and institutionalized sex tourism in countries such as Thailand. ... Because of its active participation in developing Thailand's sex services market, the U.S. should acknowledge its moral duty to expand its asylum laws to include Thai women seeking relief from sex slavery and sex trafficking. ... Because Thailand's government effectively condones or fails to adequately protect the women from the violence inherent in sex slavery and sex trafficking, such circumstances warrant recognition of asylum claims on this basis. ... Because of its involvement in globalizing Thailand's sex tourism market, the U.S. should take responsibility for its past actions and remove the asylum law's lingering biases against women by recognizing sex slavery and sex trafficking of Thai women as grounds for awarding asylum. ... As stated previously, the U.S. has a "moral obligation" to assist Southeast Asian sex slaves, given that U.S. policies and strategies have assisted in building the extensive sex trade in countries such as Thailand. ...

I'm an infantryman. That's what I'm paid to do, that's what my country expects me to do . . . The only reason we're here is to deter the communist aggression . . . We're needed over here . . . If you look at it, the fact is we spent so much money comin' down here . . . Their weapons are ours. Their equipment is ours, their vehicles, their chains . . . Everything is ours.

Hey Joe, try taking a little excursion

You'll feel good from a little perversion

Massage requiring total immersion

Some strange positions they say are Persian.

She grew up on a farm northeast of Chiang Mai. When she was 16, an American came to the farm and told her parents he wanted her for his wife. He paid his gift of money and took her to an army base. She thought the marriage was forever. But after her daughter was born, the "husband" was transferred back to the United States, and just before he left, he "gave" her to his buddy. Then there was another and another. Now there are no more Americans to "marry" and she lives in the Village of Night Girls."

TEXT:

INTRODUCTION

With a tainted political and economic history in Southeast Asia from the 1950s through the 1970s, the U.S. military was a key figure in the development of military prostitution and institutionalized sex tourism in countries such as Thailand. As such, Thailand came to be known as the "sexual Disneyland of the world." Since then, entertainment establishment owners and individual procurers have developed ways to mobilize the inordinately high number of prostitutes left over from the "militarized prostitution" industry which was created for and by American GIs.

The power relationship between industrialized countries and the underdeveloped countries in the Southeast Asian region has been essential to the sale of sexual labor in tourist areas in Thailand and in other countries with U.S. base towns or rest and recreation ("R & R") centers. As soldier or commercial tourist, men who have partaken in the sex industry have systematically perpetuated the model of Thai women as military sex slaves. Thus, these sex tourists have greatly contributed to the political and economic forces rendering Thai women and girls as international sex trafficking victims.

Part I of this Comment highlights some of the relevant passages from U.S. military and political history in Southeast Asia. Paradigms of military sexual exploitation are highlighted, with a particular focus on the U.S. military's role in spearheading the grand-scale R & R/sexual services industry in Thailand. Part II focuses on militarized prostitution and sex trafficking as human rights violations warranting international intervention. This section includes a review of the ineffective Thai anti-prostitution laws, which are biased against prostituted women, as well as key international human rights instruments pertaining to the global offenses of sex slavery and sex trafficking. Part III addresses the moral impetus to wage advocate asylum relief for women subjected to sex slavery or international sex trafficking. By applying an expanded definition of "particular social group" to permit asylum claims by such women, reparations warranted by the U.S.'s effective conscription of Thai women as sex servants may be effectuated.

SPEECH: Beyond Redress: Japanese Americans' Unfinished Business

Eric K. Yamamoto +

+ Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai'I at Manoa. Professor Yamamoto is a civil rights and human rights lawyer and scholar. He served as a member of Fred Korematsu's legal team in the coram nobis case successfully reopening Korematsu v. U.S. His special appreciation goes to Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Min Yasui, and their coram nobis legal teams, and particularly to Karen Kai for her kind words at the Day of Remembrance and to Dina Shek for her insight and organizing. This Keynote Address was delivered on February 20, 2000 at the "Remembrance Through Action" San Francisco Day of Remembrance Program (Anniversary Commemoration of President Roosevelt's Internment Exec. Order 9066), sponsored by Asian American Improv Arts, Justice Matters and Bay Area Day of Remembrance Consortium.

SUMMARY:

... It will mean one thing for those who suffered the internment, struggled for redress and received an apology and reparations. ... But that perception exists out there. And rather than simply dismiss it, we can use it as an opportunity for looking thoughtfully and forthrightly in here. In doing so, we need to ask this larger question: is Japanese American reparation, which we rightfully commemorate today, solely about redress for Japanese Americans? Or is it also about racial justice, indeed social justice, for all suffering harsh societal discrimination? ... I say "Japanese in America" because not only are there those Japanese Americans like Chester, whose families still feel the internment's pain but have received no redress, there are also Japanese Latin American families like the Oguras still excluded from basic justice. ... What does this say about the hard struggles of poor Asian women immigrants without strong support communities? Do we engage, recoil or distance ourselves? Is this our struggle too? ... I will conclude by naming just of few of the people here who have worked actively in multiple communities, who have transformed the lessons of the internment and redress beyond the Japanese American community into movements, small and large, for social justice. ...

TEXT:

INTRODUCTION

I am honored to be here at such a diverse gathering. This Day of Remembrance will likely mean many different things for different people. It will mean one thing for those who suffered the internment, struggled for redress and received an apology and reparations. It will mean something different for children and grandchildren of internees who have lived with the family tremors of the racial incarceration. And it will mean something else for Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Southeast and South Asians, and for Native Hawaiians, Latinos and African Americans as well as for those who are politically active in social justice movements. I hope to speak to all of you today, and especially to those drawn by the theme for today's commemoration: Remembrance Through Action.

I will begin by weaving together three stories that illuminate the experiences we commemorate today.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: Bridging the Gap: The Role of Asian American Public Interest Organizations in the Pursuit of Legal and Social Remedies to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

Michael Chang +

+ Ph.D. candidate (expected Spring 2001), Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley; M.A. 1997 The New School for Social Research; B.A. 1992 Vassar College. This Essay is written for the community-based activists whose dedication remind me that academic work should be relevant. In particular, I would like to thank Victor M. Hwang of the Asian Law Caucus and the members of the Justice for the Kao Family Coalition for the opportunity to work with them. I must also thank the hard working staff of the ALJ for shepherding this Essay through its many editorial phases and to faculty and activist such as Eric Yamamoto and Mike Wong of Break the Silence for their comments on drafts. Finally, this Community Development Essay is dedicated to Kuan Chung Kao, who gave the ultimate sacrifice, his life. My experiences in the summer and fall of 1997 as the hate crimes intern at the Asian Law Caucus provide the majority of the data in this Essay.

SUMMARY:

... The April 1997 shooting death of Kuanchung Kao by Rohnert Park police in Sonoma County, California galvanized the Asian American community in the Bay Area. ... The third section describes the limitations of current federal hate crime legislation, and advocates for the more inclusive category of "hate violence" that public advocacy groups support. ... Given the political conflicts and the legal landscape, Asian American public advocacy organizations are forced to constantly monitor hate violence against their communities. ... Asian American public advocacy groups must deal with the gaps between the narrow application of current hate crime laws and the broader understandings of hate violence. ... It is by publicly advocating the remuneration of a case and by bringing the outrage of community members over an incident of hate crime and hate violence to the attention of legal institutions, that public advocacy organizations are able to promote the interests of the Asian American community. ... This practice continues today, as Asian Americans, working on the "margins" through public advocacy and community involvement, push for enforcement and revision of hate crime laws and the broader understandings of hate violence. ...

TEXT:

INTRODUCTION

The April 1997 shooting death of Kuanchung Kao by Rohnert Park police in Sonoma County, California galvanized the Asian American community in the Bay Area. Rohnert Park police argued that Kao's shooting was justified on the grounds that he posed a "martial arts" threat to the officer. Michael Lynch, one of the two officers at the scene, described Kao as a "ninja fighter." In response to the killing, the Asian Law Caucus became involved in the Kao case to pursue legal and social remedies to hate crimes and hate violence. The Asian Law Caucus played a pivotal role in organizing community involvement to seek a legal remedy to Kao's death through the formation of the Justice for the Kao Family Coalition. A strong community-based response was critical to the Asian Law Caucus in order to "bolster" the potential for a legal remedy in the Kao case.

This Essay argues that Asian American public interest organizations are simultaneously marginal and central to mainstream American legal frameworks. They occupy an "interstice" between formalized legal frameworks and the methods and functions of community-based public advocacy. The term "interstice" describes the proactive political practices and the role of Asian American public interest organizations as intermediaries between their locally based ethnic community interests and official government legal frameworks and institutions. It represents a "political space" where public advocacy in what is normally considered the "margins" of law, is brought to bear on the "center" or mainstream of law. This social and political space is both contestatory and mediative. This interstice is contested political space since strictly defined categories of formal legal frameworks can complicate and conflict with public advocacy. It is mediative because community organizing is crucial to protecting civil rights, which are a manifestation of formalized legal frameworks.

This Essay examines the role of Asian American public advocacy organizations in defending and extending civil rights by navigating the contradictions and harnessing the benefits of the interstice. The role of the non-profit, community-based organizations, such as the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) of San Francisco, in the Kao shooting exemplifies the necessity of navigating this interstice. The reader will also get an "insider's" perspective of the Justice for the Kao Family Coalition's strategizing sessions. The description of the issues discussed in these strategy meetings should de-romanticize the work of public advocacy, and give the reader an appreciation for the complexity of the political practices involved.

The first and second sections of this Essay discuss the events that transpired on the day Kao was killed, and the role of racial stereotypes in the crime. The third section describes the limitations of current federal hate crime legislation, and advocates for the more inclusive category of "hate violence" that public advocacy groups support. "Hate violence" takes into account the cultural, structural and situational sources of bias motivated behavior. The fourth section compares the role of public advocacy organizations in the highly publicized Vincent Chin case of 1982 and the Kao case. Chin was killed by former autoworkers in Detroit, who blamed the country's recession on the Japanese. This comparison examines the differences in the criminal prosecution of the two cases, as well as the effect of public advocacy organizations in both cases. The next two sections describe the use of discourse in the Kao case, the process by which community mobilization occurred, and the various alliances that formed to advocate for justice in the Kao case. Finally, the conclusion highlights the importance of Asian American community-based activism to the protection and extension of legal and political rights of American society in general.

BOOK REVIEW: Claiming America: Towards A New Understanding Of Assimilation, Pluralism, And Multiculturalism

Review by Harvey Gee +

+ LL.M, The George Washington University School of Law (1999); J.D. St. Mary's University School of Law (1998); B.A. Sonoma State University (1992). Currently a staff attorney for the United States District Court in Reno, Nevada. I would like to thank Margaret Jung and Linda Tam for their editorial assistance.

SUMMARY:

... Three recent books examine the complex relationship between immigration and race: Claiming America: Constructing Chinese-American Identities During the Exclusion Era edited by K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan; Nathan Glazer's We Are All Multiculturalists Now; and Bill Ong Hing's To Be An American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation. ... She argues that the Chinese American experience, for the most part, is similar to the immigration experiences of other Asian immigrants. ... If being an American is defined either by race, nationality, culture, or religion, then the place of Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans in society becomes problematic. ... Thus, the anti-Chinese movement during the nineteenth century and the experiences of second-generation Chinese Americans in attempting to assimilate started a pattern in the perception and treatment of all Asian Americans in this country. ... Second, Glazer neglects to address how affirmative action programs have tended to benefit African Americans and Latinos more than Asian Americans. ... Glazer's discussion of Asian Americans in the education context epitomizes the shortcomings of most analyses of Asian Americans and affirmative action. ... This has led to the virtual elimination of Asian Americans as a minority group in discussions about affirmative action and multiculturalism. ... The tension between African Americans and Asian Americans in the affirmative action context underscores the challenges of coalition building between communities of color. ...

CLAIMING AMERICA: CONSTRUCTING CHINESE-AMERICAN IDENTITIES DURING THE EXCLUSION ERA EDITED BY K. SCOTT WONG AND SUCHENG CHAN. TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1998. PP.217.

WE ARE ALL MULTICULTURALISTS NOW BY NATHAN GLAZER. HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1997.PP. 179.

TO BE AN AMERICAN: CULTURAL PLURALISM AND THE RHETORIC OF ASSIMILATION BY BILL ONG HING. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS 1997. PP. 243.

TEXT:

I. INTRODUCTION

Three recent books examine the complex relationship between immigration and race: Claiming America: Constructing Chinese-American Identities During the Exclusion Era

edited by K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan; Nathan Glazer's We Are All Multiculturalists Now; and Bill Ong Hing's To Be An American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation. These volumes are significant for their in-depth analyses of their subject matter.

First, Claiming America: Constructing Chinese-American Identities During the Exclusion Era shows how and why a proper understanding of Chinese American history is necessary for a broader understanding of the contemporary immigration debate. Second, We are All Multiculturalists Now provides an incisive and provocative analysis of what it calls the failure of assimilation and the increasing importance of multiculturalism in today's diverse society. Third, To Be An American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation moves beyond the rhetoric of the contemporary immigration debate and calls for a new commitment to understanding race relations and multiculturalism.

Three important themes emerge from the books: (1) race historically has been used to exclude Asian Americans from American society; (2) racial identities are created and recreated to accommodate the present economic and political conditions of America; and (3) a racial hierarchy has emerged among whites, blacks, and other non-whites.

This essay consists of five parts. Part II reviews Claiming America: Constructing Chinese-American Identities During the Exclusion Era's exploration of Chinese American history in relation to the contemporary conversation on race and immigration. Part III analyzes the impact and effects of multiculturalism in the educational context as presented in We are All Multiculturalists Now. Part IV looks at how To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation dispels the rhetoric behind assimilation to reveal the truths and misconceptions of the immigration debate. Part V concludes by addressing the overall contribution the books collectively make to the national conversation about immigration.