America must reckon with a history of anti-Asian racism

During today’s heated debates over racial injustice, we often lose sight of the fact that racial discrimination has taken many forms throughout America’s history. Native Americans were the earliest to suffer mistreatment at the hands of our European ancestors, but we have since added other distinguishable groups, including Africans, Hispanics and Asians.

Mistreatment of Asian Americans became apparent to me at an early age when I learned that people of Japanese ancestry had been uprooted from their homes on the West Coast in 1942 and incarcerated in 10 prison camps located in isolated western-state locations. One of those locations was the Minidoka “Relocation” Center, just six miles from my home in Idaho. There was widespread hysteria that these folks were a security risk, despite an authoritative report that they posed no credible threat. It was a raw political move to mollify a frightened population.

No instances of disloyalty to the U.S. ever surfaced among the incarcerated people. In fact, many of the young men volunteered for service in World War II. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-American men, is the most decorated unit in U.S. military history, with 21 Medal of Honor winners. William Nakamura, who enlisted from Minidoka and died in Italy, was one of them.

The Minidoka camp has been designated as a National Historic Site. The 80th anniversary of the camp is being observed on June 13. Little remains of the camp, but former prisoners, their children and human rights supporters will gather to remember this great injustice and commit themselves to preventing anything like it from happening to any future group of fellow Americans, whether from Asia or elsewhere.

Asians began coming to the U.S. in large numbers around 1850 to work in mining and railroad construction. They encountered mistreatment from the very start. When the Central Pacific Railroad could not hire enough white workers to do the dangerous, backbreaking work of blasting through the Sierra Nevada Mountains to build the western stretch of the transcontinental railroad, it recruited Chinese workers to do the job. They were exploited and considered expendable. Between 1,000 and 2,000 died while doing the work.

Chinese miners were often brutalized in the western states but had no recourse under the law. Crimes against them were rarely investigated or prosecuted. A white mob murdered 31 Chinese miners in Idaho’s Hells Canyon in 1887 and was never held to account. White vigilantes killed 28 Chinese mine workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, in 1885, without having to answer for the crime.

On a national level, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to stop entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S.  Congress followed up with a law stopping all immigration of Chinese and Japanese people into the country in 1924. Hostilities with Asian countries since World War II – North Korea, China, Vietnam – have resulted in unfortunate and undeserved blowback against Asian Americans on a periodic basis.

Anti-Asian hate crimes have dramatically increased in recent years, stoked partly by complaints against China on a variety of issues, including trade and the cause of the pandemic. The FBI reported that anti-Asian hate crimes increased 73 percent in 2020 over the previous year. Another study showed a 339 percent increase in 2021.

As a society, we must do a better job of dealing with unacceptable conduct against all racial and ethnic groups. It starts with recognizing that truly deplorable acts have been committed against some of these groups, including Asian Americans. Intensified civics education and greater public awareness of our historical mistreatment of minority groups would go a long way toward identifying the problem. Until injustice is exposed and acknowledged, it can’t properly be addressed.

What we should definitely not do is continue to give credence to the critical race theory (CRT) hysteria being whipped up by vote-seeking politicians. It is merely a red herring dredged up to counter the Black Lives Matter movement. The CRT alarmists have had difficulty identifying what CRT is or where it exists. An intensive search by self-serving politicians in my home state, Idaho, proved fruitless.

The purpose of CRT alarmists is to whitewash America’s dismal record of providing equality and justice for non-whites. Recognizing our faults is not designed to make us feel bad, but to acknowledge our mistakes so we don’t repeat them. Let’s not have any more Minidoka camps or other such affronts to human rights. We have a great country, but it can be much greater if we identify past injustice and work to prevent future wrongs.

We must understand that racism never really dies. Each time enlightened leaders manage to rally our citizens to beat it back, it merely lurks under the surface, awaiting another charismatic demagogue who will fan the flames of hatred to amass political power.

Jim Jones is a Vietnam combat veteran who served eight years as Idaho attorney general (1983-1991) and 12 years as a justice on the Idaho Supreme Court (2005-2017). He is a regular contributor to The Hill.