Read an Excerpt
EXCERPT FROM THE PREFACE TO THE 2024 EDITION
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I took it as a given that my primary audience would be Japanese and other Asian Americans, and I imagined readers of this book beyond that would be people interested in history and politics but who might not know much about the Japanese American redress campaign in the 1970s and ’80s. I have been surprised, however, that the readers for whom this book seems to have resonated most have been proponents of the Black reparations movement. The conversations I had in 2020 made me reflect on the greater significance of the Japanese American redress campaign and on what the campaign’s achievements have meant to others who have faced injustice. It’s that story I want to tell here.
I began receiving invitations from people who were focused on the philosophical notions of reparations and reconciliation. One group exploring the idea of reparations as redemption wondered if reparations truly could lead the way to remedying injustice. Another was studying the global reparations movement and included not just Americans but also attendees from the Netherlands and Africa. There were also telephone calls and Zoom sessions with individuals who had personal interest in issues of collective guilt and healing. Many who contacted me were primarily curious about our initial strategy of creating a federal commission to examine our wartime treatment. In particular, they wanted to know more about the commission’s public hearings: their impact, their redemptive nature, and whether the hearing process led to some sort of reconciliation. And ultimately, they asked, who are the beneficiaries of such a reconciliation?
The subject of Black reparations invariably came up—not surprising since this was a topic that had gained particular political and social gravitas following the compelling 2014 Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations," by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who describes past and continuing injustices against Black Americans and presents a case for Black reparations. The brutal killing of George Floyd in May 2020 also created a tectonic shift in the consciousness of America, with protests across the country and the Black Lives Matter movement bringing focused attention to the injustices Black Americans face. For a moment, the social momentum in this country seemed to make passage of H.R. 40—the congressional Black reparations bill that had languished in the House of Representatives for more than three decades—a possibility.
The following month, I was sharing the Zoom airwaves with William A. Darity, Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen, authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020), one of the most interesting publications I've read on the subject. On a broadcast hosted by the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, together we explored what Darity and Mullen have put forth as some of the most convincing arguments for Black reparations. Later that same day, I participated in a San Diego Tribune–sponsored panel on Black reparations that included then–California assemblywoman Shirley Weber (now California’s secretary of state), author of A.B. 3121, the legislation that in fall 2020 created California's Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The task force examined California's past as an anti-slave state and, three years later, produced a five-hundred-page indictment of the state’s tolerance of slavery and its lasting legacy of racism against Black Americans. From Durham, North Carolina, to San Diego, California, in a span of two hours: online conference platforms had indeed expanded my world.
From that point onward and with only a few exceptions, Black reparations became the central interest of invitations I received to discuss my book. I eventually reunited with Mullen and Darity for a conversation hosted by the University of Southern California titled "From Japanese American Redress to Black Reparations." And the Asian American Research Center at UC Berkeley hosted "The Politics of Racial Reparations: Japanese American and Black American Intersections," giving me a chance to talk with Charles P. Henry, author of the fascinating book Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations (2007). Regardless of the starting point of those conversations, one could not talk about the Japanese American redress campaign without wondering how it could inform the Black reparations movement as it navigates the obstacles that lie ahead.
In September 2022, I went to Atlanta to speak at the inaugural Reparations Summit of the National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants (NAASD). Titled "Where Do We Go from Here: Imagining Our Future," the conference drew participants from across the United States, all activists in their local areas coming together as members of an organization that was part of the national Black reparations movement. At one point, when I was outside to eat my lunch and take advantage of the beautiful weather, I began talking with one of the participants. She had read my book and was intrigued by the strategies we had employed to overcome both the public’s hostility to our arguments for reparations and our own community's resistance to our campaign. Reading about those strategies' success, she said, gave her a sense of hope.
Until that moment, I had wondered why my book seemed to resonate at all within the Black reparations movement. From my personal experience of twenty years in the civil rights world, I know that Black advocates and leaders are politically far more sophisticated and better connected than we ever were during our fight for redress. I've always felt there was little I could offer as wisdom based on my experience. What, after all, could I tell them about injustice and suffering, or about the anger and hatred they would face simply because theirs was a just cause? The collective experiences of our communities are so vastly different in magnitude, and, by extension, the challenges in the fight for Black reparations are much more complex and difficult. Yet once my book began making its way among those involved in the movement, something about it stayed with them.
I realized as we sat there in the warm Atlanta sun that what I offered, what this book offered, was the story of my life inside the campaign: how I had evolved with it, had been at the heart of it, and had been the compass providing its direction. As Chad Brown of the podcast Politics in Black said to me, I'd been there and I had figured it out. People are interested in this book, I think, because of everything I'd needed to figure out while navigating the many obstacles we faced. Any one of those obstacles could have brought the campaign to an end. I'd made so many strategic calculations, sometimes on a daily basis, and those calculations were never about monetary compensation but about the challenges of directing a national campaign. Once we'd determined the amount of reparations we would demand, the compensation issue became mostly a symbolic objective upon which we built our campaign.
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