![]() ![]() “If it wasn’t for the Black civil rights movement, would I be a lawyer? Probably not. Tamaki believes there’s a “growing realization” among other demographics that while slavery ended in 1865, the bias didn’t go away, instead morphing into different forms of discrimination that ultimately kept a target on Black Americans and quickly enveloped other people of color who all benefited from the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s. The University of California, Berkeley, sent Don Tamaki's father's degree to the Northern California racetrack where he was being held, writing "Apt. “Metaphorically, the diploma was the promise of America but the mailing tube encircling and constraining that promise was the reality for Japanese Americans.” ![]() “That address was a horse stall into which the Tamaki family was forced to live for several months before being shipped to Topaz concentration camp in the Utah desert,” he wrote to CNN in an email. The university dutifully sent his degree to “Apt. His father was about to graduate when he and other Japanese Americans were rounded up at gunpoint, he said, and forced to live at Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno, California. Also among his keepsakes is a mailing tube addressed to his father from the University of California, Berkeley. Among an album of family pictures, he has a copy of the $20,000 redress check his mother received. Tamaki’s parents – natives of the San Francisco Bay Area – were also in an internment camp. Here she poses with her parents while incarcerated. “The fact that I got the letter from the president … that was very important.”Īmy Iwasaki Mass was a first grader when her family was forced to live in an internment camp in Wyoming. ![]() “If we didn’t get reparations, if we felt we are still being put down by the government, I think that for me it would be hard to fight,” Mass said while looking at family photos from their time in the concentration camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Mass said she is thankful for her payment, but the apology has the largest meaning for her. Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 gave affected Japanese Americans the $20,000 payment and a formal letter of apology from President Ronald Reagan. “But I do think Japanese Americans as a group do understand what it’s like to be excluded on the basis of race.” “There is no equivalence really between four years in a concentration camp and 400 years of systemic exclusion and discrimination,” Tamaki said. More than 200 multiracial organizations have signed on to show support for California’s reparation proposals, including bar associations, philanthropies, academic organizations, and social services and civil rights groups, said Don Tamaki, a member of the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. Stephanie Elam/CNNĭeep blue, liberal California – and separately the city of San Francisco – has formed panels to examine reparations as a way for these governments to contend with systemic discrimination that historically held Black people down and pushed them out. Amy Iwasaki Mass reads her 1981 testimony in favor of redress for Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II. ![]()
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