On Reparations

I am a beneficiary of reparations. Here’s why I support reparations for Black Americans.

This month, a Monmouth University poll showed that 76 percent of Americans, and 71 percent of white Americans, believe that racial and ethnic discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States. Just a few years ago, little more than half of white Americans believed that.

-Nikole Hannah-Jones, ”What Is Owed: It Is Time for Reparations”

U.S. public more aware of racial inequality but still rejects reparations: Reuters/Ipsos polling

-headline of a Reuters story by Katanga Johnson

Why write about reparations?

I’m writing today for the people in the gap between those two statistics: the ones who believe that racial and ethnic discrimination is a “big problem,” but are uncertain whether they support reparations for Black Americans. I have come to realize many people I know and admire are in that gap.

As someone whose family received reparations from the U.S. government, I hope to tell you a few things about why that happened and how reparations and redress impacted my own life. I also hope I can dispel some of the uncertainty you may feel about the subject and help illuminate why the question of Black reparations has a clear, straightforward answer to me.

I understand that reparations raise a lot of questions. How can we afford this? Is financial compensation an appropriate way to address such a long, complex, and profound series of harms? How can we address this fairly, when the specific harm done to each individual, family, or lineage may have yielded such different outcomes? The list goes on. There is a sense that reparations could open some kind of Pandora’s Box, initiating a series of events not yet fully understood. The push for reparations asks big questions and there is not a consensus about every answer.

I also know that for many Black Americans, the road to reparations may seem impossibly long and uncertain. To some who feel this way, perhaps the Japanese American story can provide at least a tiny spark of hope. While the struggle for Japanese American reparations took place on a smaller scale and grappled with a less complex series of events, it also seemed wildly improbable and impossibly hard at the start, when people first began organizing around the idea a few decades after WWII. I hope that my family’s story and the stories of thousands of other families like mine — and the knowledge that many of us are invested in fighting for Black reparations, just as many Black activists, scholars, and ordinary people were for us — will give some hope that the long road may not be infinite.

My family’s story

I usually write about software engineering and management. On the list of activities I enjoy, writing about myself and my family ranks somewhere between doing taxes and dental work, and yet here I am; this is important. I’m a fourth generation Japanese American, or yonsei. That means my father is sansei, a third-generation Japanese American. His issei grandparents were the ones who immigrated from Japan to the U.S. in the late 19th century. His family lived in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, where they were hard at work trying to build their own American dream. My grandparents would have already been expecting my dad, their first child, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, plunging the U.S. into World War II. I sometimes imagine the fear and uncertainty my grandparents must have lived with that winter, thinking about bringing a baby into an environment of outright racist hostility while their country was at war on multiple fronts, and it twists my stomach into a knot.

In February of 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the “evacuation” of Japanese Americans from West Coast states. While this word sounds polite and perhaps a bit cautious, what it meant in practice was that they were incarcerated on short notice in slapped-together prison camps in remote parts of the United States. That spring, posters appeared around Japanese American neighborhoods up and down the West Coast, informing Japanese Americans that they would need to leave their homes and be moved to “temporary residence” elsewhere for an unknown duration of time. Over 100,000 Japanese Americans were impacted by this order, and the majority were U.S. Citizens. (Racist laws at the time dictated that Japanese who had immigrated could not become citizens, but their U.S.-born children were.) They often had less than a week to prepare and could bring only what they could carry. My family hurriedly packed a few items, and made whatever arrangements they could in a rush to look out for the rest of their belongings. My great grandparents resorted to just handing their house keys over to a neighbor with a plea to keep an eye on the place, unsure of what else they could do.

For the first months, they were sent to live in “assembly centers,” temporary facilities that were usually not designed to house large numbers of people. Two of the largest, Tanforan and Santa Anita, were horse racing tracks where many of the Japanese Americans were housed in horse stalls. My family went to Santa Anita, where my grandparents would always remember that instead of cleaning out the stalls, they had simply white-washed over the horse poop and dirt that remained stuck to the thin walls. Sanitary facilities were overcrowded and often inadequate. Latrines had been hastily added and many had no doors at all, one more indignity that would be etched forever into family memory. This was where my family was living when my father was born. Family mythology claims that my dad so resisted coming into this environment that he waited ten months to be born instead of nine. Although I know this is more likely an error in the math, I understand why the story persists. They eventually resorted to driving my grandmother around in an ambulance over all the bumps and potholes at the race track facilities to try to induce labor, which did not help. However, as an anecdote, it does help to illustrate the Japanese concept of gaman, which would turn out to be a theme of these years.

From Santa Anita, they were sent to the Gila River War Relocation Center.
There is some debate today about whether to call facilities like Gila “relocation centers” or “internment camps” (too euphemistic; does not acknowledge that these were prison camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards) or “American concentration camps” (technically accurate, but some feel uncomfortable using the same word as is used for the death camps in Nazi Germany). I typically use “internment camp” since it’s the term I heard growing up, and I use “incarceration” rather than “internment” to talk about the whole experience. Gila was located on the Gila River Indian Reservation, home to Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee-Posh (Maricopa) tribe members, in a portion of the Arizona desert that has been converted to farmland. The U.S. government chose to locate many of the “camps” on reservations, over the nearly universal objections of tribal leadership. Most were in profoundly isolated locations, often in harsh desert climates. The two Arkansas camps, Rohwer and Jerome, were in a swampy area and required a Malaria Control Program.

Beyond the simple inhospitality of the climate, the conditions were unpleasant for other reasons. Families were typically housed in single rooms of long barracks, with thin walls that allowed sand and dirt from outside to blow in. Sanitary facilities were still often limited and lacking in privacy; some had long rows of toilets with no wall or barrier between them. The food was universally disliked (at least before residents took over the cooking) and sometimes spoiled or contaminated. There were few supplies and little to do. My grandfather attempted to plant a small garden near the barracks to supplement the provided food with a few vegetables, but stopped when a guard in a tower pointed a gun at him and threatened his life if he didn’t stop digging.

In this environment, the War Department and War Relocation Authority chose to administer what became known as the “loyalty questionnaire,” a form meant to aid the War Department in recruiting some Japanese Americans into an all-Nisei combat unit and identifying others who might be eligible for relocation outside of the camps at a later date. The form asked about family members, past residence, education levels, language skills, religion, recreational activities, and other affiliations, and was carefully scored to assess the subjects’ “Americanness.” Most controversially, question 27 asked individuals whether they would be willing to serve in the war in combat duty if eligible, and question 28 asked all to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. The vast majority of the people who took the questionnaire were either U.S. citizens or issei who had been in the U.S. for decades. The idea that they needed to “forswear allegiance” to a distant emperor and swear loyalty to the United States seemed absurd and insulting, when there was no evidence they felt any loyalty to the Emperor in the first place. Despite this, the majority of Japanese Americans answered affirmatively to both questions anyway, as they were clearly supposed to do. Most chose to approach the entire experience of the camps with the spirit of gaman, a term with Buddhist origins that describes “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” Some of those who answered yes and yes would go on to serve in Europe as part of the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion, some of the most decorated units in U.S. military history for their size and length of service.

By 1944, some Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the camps if they could find a place to live and work outside the West Coast. While this appeared to be an act of leniency, it was also a move that pushed assimilation: many dispersed to cities in the Midwest and East Coast, and never returned to the Japanese American enclaves of the West. My family initially moved to the Reno area, where my grandfather had an offer to work at the Whittell Estate. By 1946, all the camps had closed and they were allowed to return to California. They moved back to L.A. to try to put back together the pieces of the life the war had taken away from them. Despite being very smart, hard-working people, persistent anti-Japanese sentiments limited the opportunities for my grandparents, and their jobs ranged from gardener and seamstress to factory worker. They raised their three children in a tiny Boyle Heights home, turning an alcove in the front living room into a makeshift bedroom for my dad. Like many Japanese Americans at this time, my grandparents encouraged their children to assimilate as much as possible. My father and his siblings were never taught Japanese, and they were pushed to pursue higher education and traditional career paths to success through the California public universities.

Years later, papers released by the U.S. government would show that U.S. authorities never found any credible evidence that Japanese Americans were a threat. However, a number of politically active white businessmen on the West Coast who had Japanese American competitors had lobbied for their removal. Many Japanese Americans who were sent to “camp” lost their homes and other property, and many business owners had their businesses or business equipment stolen or taken away. Overall losses have been estimated at $400 million. The L.A.-based Japanese American newspaper, Rafu Shimpo, was able to survive only by hiding their printing equipment and type under floorboards until the staff were able to return from the war to reclaim it (the paper persists to this day; you can subscribe online). If you buy Koda Farms rice from the grocery store, you can sometimes read on their packaging or marketing materials how their family rebuilt their farm piece by piece after it was stripped bare by the people who “looked after it” during the war. My great grandparents were among a lucky minority who were able to return to their own home, where their neighbors had indeed watched out for the place while they were gone. Of the thousands and thousands of Japanese Americans locked away in “camp” during the war, none have ever been found to have conspired to help Japan during the war.

I was born in the 1980’s, and it was around this time that decades of work to address the injustices of WWII by Japanese American civil rights activists, politicians, lobbyists, and allies finally paid off. Here is the shortest possible summary:

• In 1980, Congress appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to review the circumstances surrounding EO 9066 and the harm done to Japanese Americans during World War II;
• The commission held hearings around the country to review evidence and hear heart-wrenching — and at that time, virtually unknown — stories from hundreds of Japanese Americans about their WWII experience;
• The commission ultimately made a formal recommendation of both a fund for financial compensation to those who were incarcerated as well as an official apology;
• And authorization for the redress fund and the apology were passed by Congress as the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and signed into law by the president, ultimately leading to individual compensation of $20,000 to each incarcerated person, distributed to 82,219 recipients between 1990 and 1993.

This number, $20,000, seems at once far too small to be fair compensation for having one’s earliest childhood memories be of prison camp, and yet also large enough that most would think twice about turning it down on principle. (The amount would be worth roughly $70,000 in today’s dollars.) While not every Japanese American who was eligible for the money accepted it, my father did take the check. While the money cannot reverse the harm that was done, I — and most I know in the Japanese American community — see it as a significant, deeply meaningful step toward justice and amends. The regrets I hear most often are not about the size of the check or the exact ends of the redress process, but about its timing: enough decades had passed between WWII and redress that many issei and nisei had already died before seeing its conclusion. The redress movement also made the strategic political choice to focus only on U.S. residents and did not win redress for Japanese Latin Americans who were also unjustly imprisoned by the U.S. during this time.

While my family rarely spoke of internment or redress when I was growing up, I know that money ripples through my life in profound ways. There isn’t a lot of family lore about how we spent the money, but here are some financial circumstances I know about from that time period:

• My parents had moved from their small first house to a larger home for their growing family. The house was a turn-of-the-century craftsman that was a stretch to purchase as well as to maintain, and keeping it required careful management of their money, especially in periods of financial uncertainty.
• When my mother found out that my brother’s first grade public school teacher was disciplining students by hitting them with a ruler — the last straw for this particular school — my parents stretched again to move my brother and me to a high-quality private school.
• Both of my parents had chances to plan and save for retirement during their careers, and their retirement savings have meant that my brother and I can focus primarily on our own futures during our working years rather than on supporting them.

Years later, I can see the impact of those choices on my life. Stability at home is the platform that opportunity outside of home is built on. This stability has helped propel me to an Ivy League education, a successful career, and a fulfilling adult life surrounded by many wonderful communities. The redress money is a part of my story, even if it’s rarely in the foreground.

When I think of the government-sanctioned harm brought to Japanese Americans and compare that to what I know of Black history, I see some of the same themes — but I would be remiss not to mention the difference in magnitude. What Japanese Americans have endured is both horrific and also seems like paper cuts compared to what this country has done to Black Americans, including not just the unrelenting violence of slavery but also the Jim Crow era & segregation, the racist implementation of the New Deal and GI Bill that cut Black folks out of the benefits, redlining, predatory lending targeting Black communities, the school to prison pipeline, racial sentencing differences, police brutality, white flight and systematic neglect of urban areas, environmental racism, lead poisoning. Black Americans have been harmed more and it has persisted for more generations. And while many of the harms brought against Japanese Americans were brought in violation of U.S. law, more often than not, laws have instead been crafted to allow and perpetuate mistreatment of Black Americans. The need for redress and repair could not be more clear.

While I know some will look at my story and say, “What did the redress money have to do with it? You and your family worked hard and got there on your own,” I think they’re missing the larger forces at play. Sure, I’ve worked hard and made good choices in my life. But I think of the line from the TV show, Little Fires Everywhere, when Kerry Washington’s character, Mia, is lectured by the wealthy, white Elena (played by Reese Witherspoon) about her choices, and she spits back, “You didn’t make good choices. You had good choices.” The redress money helped my family buy more of what this country has historically denied to Black Americans: good choices.

In recent years, I’ve spent some time working to support HR-40, the Black reparations bill, and I appreciate that the bill supports both studying the current and historical issues facing Black Americans as well as exploring potential remedies. I see both aspects of the bill as a moral necessity. And, while monetary compensation to individual Black Americans may not be what HR-40 or any other national effort at reparations for Black Americans would ultimately recommend, my own family’s experiences lead me to voice my strong support for the direct payment approach. From slavery to Jim Crow to today’s confluence of crises disproportionately affecting Black communities (mass incarceration, police violence, unequal access to care, lack of safe municipal tap water, etc.) I am daunted by the magnitude of what it would take to make things right. And yet, my family’s story reminds me, it is much better to have the country start somewhere and do something, than to wait for perfect justice and do nothing. I listen to my pragmatic ancestors and ask what an attainable but significant step toward justice for Black Americans might look like, even if it doesn’t fully right the wrongs done — and it looks like the same opportunity my family received: the choice to invest in education, homeownership, retirement savings, or whatever else they know will most benefit themselves and their families, and, through the additional choices that money provides, to be a little more free.

FAQ

Q: Who should get reparations? What if a Black person moved here from Africa or the Caribbean, or otherwise can’t prove that their ancestors were enslaved in the U.S.?

This is a complicated question, and as an Asian American interested in reparations, it’s not my job to have the answer but to follow and support the lead of Black scholars, activists, and organizers and Black-led organizations grappling with the issue. However, it’s important to acknowledge that the generational harm inflicted on Black Americans persisted in the U.S. well after slavery, and all Black Americans are touched by anti-Blackness in the U.S., whether they’ve immigrated recently from Africa or can trace their lineage back to slaves on American plantations before the Civil War.

Q: Why direct payments? Why not a scholarship fund or something?

Again, I endeavor to follow Black leaders on this question and will try to support whatever form of repair seems to have the most support. If Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sandy Darity, A. Kirsten Mullen and other Black scholars and leaders weren’t writing about financial reparations, I would not be either. But if I were to make the argument myself, I’d boil it down to: choices. As Kerry Washington’s Mia Warren puts it in Little Fires Everywhere, rather than not choosing to make good choices with their money, too often Black Americans haven’t had good choices to make. Money is a straightforward, American way to restore what has been taken: the ability to choose to invest in education, homeownership, retirement savings, or whatever else a person knows will benefit themselves and their family. Those kinds of choices are in many ways the essence of the American dream.

When I look closely at the opposition to individual payments, I see at least some of it rooted in racist notions that Black Americans cannot be trusted to manage their money in their own best interest — a victim-blaming interpretation of the Black wealth gap that fails to consider the many structural and often government-sponsored barriers that have stood in the way of Black wealth attainment. (If you’re interested in more on this topic, I learned so much from Dorothy Brown’s The Whiteness of Wealth.)

Q: Not all Black Americans experience the same outcomes; some are doing very well. Why should Oprah, LeBron James, or Beyoncé receive a reparations check? What if we can identify (non-Black) others with greater need?

Reparations are not charity. They are part of a making right of wrongs. If I slap you across the face while you’re scratching off a scratcher lottery ticket, I’m no less obligated to apologize if you happen to be holding a winning ticket than if you have a losing one. Looking at my own experiences, I’ll also say that I consider my dad to be very successful! And yet I look at what was done to him and still see the fingerprints of his WWII experience all over his life. For successful Black Americans today, they’ve lived a different story but the theme is the same. They are successful in spite of the deck being stacked against them, not because the government handed them a lucky card. You can be doing very well and still be the victim of a wrong that should be addressed.

Q: I don’t think money is enough to repair the harm done to Black Americans.

I agree, but I do think it is very possible in this capitalist country for an appropriately sized amount of money to be meaningful. I sympathize with the feeling that it would be a struggle to do enough to repair the harm done, but I do not find that to be a compelling reason to do nothing. I also appreciate that Japanese American redress had other components, including a commission and hearings to better understand the harm done, as well as an official apology.

Q: Don’t you worry about backlash? People will be pissed if we do this.

There will certainly be widespread implications and second-order effects, and they are worth thinking through. I’ll point out that Black Americans have already lived through a lot of cultural backlash for perceived gains, large and small, real and imagined. For just one example, consider all the late 20th Century American rhetoric demonizing “welfare queens” (usually implied to be Black although not always explicitly named as Black). Welfare programs specifically target only the least-well-off people in our society — most of whom work, despite the stereotype, and the majority of whom are not Black — and you can still see anti-Black backlash resulting from these programs, including in later policy decisions that reduced support or added draconian requirements, sometimes without evidence of their efficacy. The size of the backlash does not necessarily seem to correlate with the size and impact of support offered to a particular community.

Q: There are 40 million Black people in the United States. Can we afford this?

It’s true that there are many more Black Americans in the U.S. than formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans. But to quote Nikole Hannah-Jones, “This country can be remarkably generous.” The example Hannah-Jones cites is money allocated annually by the U.S. Congress to support Holocaust survivors, but one need only look at our trillion-dollar-a-year defense spending or our $2.3 trillion covid stimulus to remember that our government allocates vast sums of money for all sorts of purposes. If there is not “enough” money for this, it is not because we cannot conceive of a way to fund it, but because we have chosen to prioritize other things. (The covid stimulus is roughly the order of magnitude that would be required for an individual payment to Black Americans on par with what was paid to incarcerated Japanese Americans.)

Q: You seem like a nice person. This is charitable. (Alt: You’re a social justice warrior who just craves the approval of Black people.)

That’s not really where this comes from. The problem is, as non-Black, non-Indigenous Americans, we have all profited from this unjust system, even if we have faced great hardships of our own. America is literally built on the unpaid and underpaid labor of Black people. We are all complicit. As someone invested in the project of America — what it could be, if not always what it is — this complicity makes me a little worse. While I’m a mixed-race person and am not (at least not fully) white, I still think of something the poet and writer Ocean Vuong said: “White privilege wilts the wielder.” As an American invested in justice, I have a moral and spiritual need to see this harm repaired.

I’m in. What’s next?

If you’re new to the subject of reparations for African Americans, here are some excellent and popular reading options:

• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• What Is Owed: It Is Time for Reparations by Nikole Hannah-Jones

To find out more about where to help out, I would encourage following along with a major coalition like N’COBRA, as strategies may shift when the political landscape changes. For example, a Democratic majority in Congress might mean a push to get HR-40 to the House floor for a vote, but a more divided Congress might mean shifting focus to a possible executive order.

Relevant organizations:

• National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) is the Black-led coalition I see the Japanese American community organizing with. They have a mailing list; see the footer of the website.
• Human Rights Watch runs campaigns related to reparations.
• Some religious organizations, including the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and The Union for Reform Judaism, have supported different efforts for reparations. If you are active in a church or other religious group, you may be able to connect through an organization for your faith or denomination.
• Color of Change has a very active mailing list and sometimes runs campaigns related to reparations.

For Japanese Americans:

• The National Nikkei Reparations Coalition (NNRC) is a newly-formed coalition of 76+ Japanese American organizations that are organizing in support of Black reparations. If you lead a Japanese American/Nikkei group that would be interested, your group can join.
• Nikkei Progressives is an L.A.-based grassroots organization that has been leading in this area. If you are in the L.A. area, sign up for their mailing list and become a member.
• Tsuru for Solidarity is a national organization that supports Black reparations as one of their current campaigns.
• JACL national supports Black reparations, as do many of the chapters.

Acknowledgements

While I don’t consider myself an expert on the topic of reparations (for any group), nonetheless, my perspective has been profoundly enriched by the reading I have done on the topic. These sources, among others, have been particularly valuable in my education:

• Densho is the best resource online for Japanese American history, with vast digital archives, teaching materials, and an online encyclopedia.
• The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in L.A. is an important physical hub for Japanese American history and culture, and it puts on many excellent shows every year in addition to its permanent history exhibit about WWII. It is across the street from the Go For Broke National Education Center, which teaches about the experiences of WWII Japanese American veterans.
• John Tateishi’s book Redress chronicles his experiences in the JA redress movement.
• From Here to Equality by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen is an excellent longer-form exploration of the need for and possibilities of Black reparations.