 Yeah, history is here to help. We're talking about anti-Asian trends in America with Peter Hoffenberg, our regular contributor on this show, he's a history professor, and Trisha Nakamura. She is a lawyer, law professor, the whole enchilada, speaking from the law school, or so it would appear. So welcome to the show, both of you guys. And I think this is an important discussion to have. Peter, can you conceptually tell us what the scope of the discussion is? All right, I will try and please don't be limited by this. We invited our esteemed guest who has experience, particularly from the legal and political perspective on Asian-American experiences in Hawaii, particularly Japanese-American experiences. And Jay and I thought that this would be an appropriate time, unfortunately, to talk about how there seems to be, and I don't mean that in a dismissive way, but factually and statistically, there certainly seems to be a greater number of verbal and physical attacks on Asian-Americans in a way which may not differentiate among Asian-Americans, right? So somebody might be attacking, somebody they think is Chinese, but our Japanese are Korean. Somebody might be attacking Korean for a particular reason, and in fact, they're attacking Filipino. So we asked our expert to join us over the next half hour to talk particularly about current events, what could be done currently, and then Jay and I has always liked to provide some historical background to give us some sense of how we got where we are. All right, Jay, does that... No, that's good. I think it's very good introduction, and I wonder if that will require you to withdraw your name from consideration at the police commission. Me or our guest? Yes, of course. There is no racial discrimination in Hawaii. We don't know. Yes. Patricia, is there racial discrimination in Hawaii? What do you think? Unfortunately, there is. I think it's something that a lot of folks don't wanna think about. Folks maybe of generations prior to mine like to think of a Hawaii where perhaps they were the benefit of the racial layers or strata that existed in Hawaii at the start from the time that the monarchy was overthrown or even perhaps before that because of economic reasons. You had the overthrow and you had the plantation system and all of these different systems sought to undermine people or deny people equity or access. And I think that continues today. I think with the rise of different movements, things are being uncovered locally. I think the Hawaiian Renaissance definitely exposed folks to the different things that were going on or the true history that happened to the native Hawaiian community and a resurgence of culture. I think when you're looking at the US continent and here locally, the rise of ethnic studies and folks of color, people of color, looking at their own histories as well. And I think those are really powerful ways is that people are talking about or started to talk about the injustices that happened. I think folks in the generation before mine, one of my uncles or my mother's uncle served in World War II, I think he came back. That generation did not talk about their experiences living in Hawaii or abroad during World War II. It was a source of shame. They hid their objects, maybe their things that they had from home or that were given down to them from, in my case, Okinawa. But it was seen as Japanese because, like Peter said, it's not that places were gonna be differentiated. And we didn't learn about those things. It was only till, I think I was, I took an Asian American History course in high school that I realized that the Japanese and Americans, and back then we said, in turn, they were in turn. And now I think people are saying they were incarcerated, right? We were confined to camps, not everyone in Hawaii because I think the economic basis or the economic power that a lot of the numbers, right? The numbers called for it. The Japanese American community here locally consisted of a greater population. So the state and the drive, I think, sorry, and it wasn't a state then, but we couldn't afford to have people sent away in the same way that they could on the West Coast. Well, I have two thoughts to react to all of this. Number one is, and I'm relying on a number of shows we've had lately to deal with this issue. One thing is clear, the United States is unique in the sense that we are the most melting pot of all melting pots. At least for most, save Canada perhaps, but we have a lot of melting pot process going on here. And isn't this phenomenon of racial inequity of people trying to put down the other races, the other characterizations, the other communities, isn't that part of a melting pot? Don't you expect that in a melting pot? How can you have it any other way in a melting pot? Does it surprise us? Should it not surprise us? What do you think? If you're asking me, I don't know that it's necessarily a melting pot. I think people want to think it is. Of course it's not because it's like we're all sort of, all the groups are kind of scraping to get to that American dream that we've really created this myth, that it's attainable, that everyone can attain it, not realizing that if you've been brought here as a slave or if you came here for the hope of that American dream, but other people are relying on you for their economic gain, you can't attain it, right? And this is history of trauma, history of use and abuse, of racism, of classism that really compounds and it adds and it adds and at a certain group or at a certain time, right? It's just one group is gonna become the target and right now we're seeing it on the continent being the Asian community, I think driven a lot by the rhetoric that former president Trump started by with the coronavirus calling it the China virus or Kung flu, which created this discourse and this use of language to undermine China and in the common knowledge, anyone who looked Chinese then, which for a lot of folks because of cross-cultural misidentification became anyone who looked Asian. And that happened that storyline gets reproduced on different news channels perhaps or doesn't get contested and then the actions happen, they're not contested or they're not reported or police or law enforcement see things through different lenses. We don't have the laws in place to prevent this. The harm in fact already has occurred. So what do you do about that? And it gets replicated and reproduced in media and in the ways that we talk about things. Let me go back before COVID, before the whole pandemic thing. Let me go back to the campaigns of 2016. There was a very interesting piece in the media about a Vietnamese student in a Midwestern university who was going to class one morning. And at that university in one of the public halls of the university, there was a Trump rally. And all these kids were lining up to get in and they were very excited to hear about Trump in this meeting. And she tried this diminutive, you know, five foot Vietnamese woman was trying to get through, cross through the line to get to her class and they were abusing her and calling her names, which had never happened before. And her roommate was a Holly woman who brought this to the attention of the media and it became a national story. And I suggest to you that Trump was anti-Asian long before COVID, long before his remarks about the origins of COVID and that he somehow gave a license to the Trumpers who were online, you know, trying to go into his rally. What do you think about that? But Peter Sponder, do you want to pick it up for her? Oh, I think you're ready, Peter. Yes, why don't you respond to that? Well, I would say in this case, anti-Asian rhetoric, physical attack, it's connected to a couple of important things coming out of the interaction you described, all right? One is really a long-standing Western infantilization and sexuality of Asia, particularly Asian women, but not just Asian women, also diminutive quote unquote Asian men who are vulnerable, eroticized. I don't think it was ironic or unusual that in Florida, the attack and murders occurred at a place in which Asian women who were mothers and workers were attacked and killed, all right? So part of what you're saying is that whatever Trump did, he was appealing to a very long-standing cultural attack. And he did it before COVID. Right, but please remember Trump also was one of the major advocates of arresting and executing the five young men in Central Park, all of whom were exonerated. So I don't want to diminish the anti-Asian discussion here. Part of the anti-Asian discussion though can be included in the fact that Asians, in this case, particularly Asian women, a black man like George Floyd, an older Jewish rabbi walking across the street in Brooklyn, they are all non-white in the sense of whatever whiteness means. And that is what Trump tapped into. We've talked about this before. So in no way do I want to diminish the anti-Asian, but I look at an incident like that and say, yes, and if it had been a Jewish socialist or an African-American who I suppose if he had been on the basketball team, he would have been elevated as a hero, but that's where the basketball trumped. Bad pun, sorry, trumped his throat. So I would say what it was tapped into, and clearly for our discussion today, right? The only ethnic group that has ever legally been excluded by law for the United States and the Chinese, that should tell us something. There is no other exclusion act, right? So I think we're really talking about a longstanding issue. I want to connect it to your metaphor. And the metaphor often used now is not a melting pot, but a tossed salad. And in the tossed salad, we all try to slide together, but we do each have a different taste and a different size and a different role. And I agree entirely with our guests that the questions of exploitation have gone since whatever date you choose. For me, though, the issue is even if there is exploitation in this tossed salad or melting pot, what this country has not agreed on ever is a decent baseline for human existence. Right, in other words, decent health, decent housing, decent work. Not everybody needs to live in Kahala. So the problem here, I don't necessarily think is equality. The problem is that Asian Americans who succeed or held up as a model minority, Asian Americans who do not quote unquote succeed are thrown into what's essentially under a lumpen proletariat, to quote Groucho Marx, my favorite Marx brother. And in that case, you really have a question of, we're not gonna have equality, right? But is the American dream one in which people all should have a decent standard of living? I know, Trisha, we started out with slavery, was built into the Constitution. And that is very regrettable and it has been a very corrosive element in our otherwise egalitarian society or at least theoretically egalitarian society. We haven't done well. We haven't done well on the African Americans and other various scapegoat groups. It's really extraordinary. And although, Europe has seen the Holocaust, the fact is if you look at Europe today, it's in some ways, you don't have this problem, at least not to the same degree. And it could be that the Trump has had an effect, it could be the Republicans have had an effect, I don't know. But would you think that we have problems here that we should not have? I mean, that's an interesting way of looking at it. I mean, of course we would have problems if we've never dealt with the fact that our country has well started with coming here and taking over the land that was lived on by indigenous people for a long time. We've never dealt with that really in an equitable way. Then you have slavery, we've never really dealt with that. I think the move for black reparations has been going on for quite a while and it's exciting to see, right? Like, so I belong to an organization, I'm on the board of the Japanese American Citizens League, at least our Honolulu chapter, and our national organization did recently vote to support black reparations, right? Especially coming from the Japanese American's perspective where after the incarceration of World War II, there was an effort for redress and we got redress, right? And is that paycheck to someone who had to sell all their goods and leave their property and get separated from their family? And is that money gonna make up for it? No, but it's symbolic, right? But we haven't done the same thing for the black community, at least those who have their ties to slavery and all of it is included because it's a perception thing again, right? And just to be clear, I think I agree with Peter about giving people basic dignity and the things that we all need to live because I wanna just clarify that. I really think about it as equity, not equality, right? Because who are you equal with, right? But I think we do as a democracy, right? And maybe that American dream is not achievable, but as a democracy, we seek to at least have access to the basic services and goods and just safety. And I think when you think about Trump, I mean, I don't know that so many groups have ever felt fear. Yeah, interesting point. So, okay, right now we have a level of awareness. Maybe it's fomented by Trump's Mishigas. Mishigas is an old Japanese word. And we have a lot of people talking and thinking about it, including right here, people teaching it, all kinds of indicators of awareness in the community. But my question to you and your role as a law professor is how do you get from awareness to actually reaching that equity? How do you get to change the society? Is there a pathway by way of the law to change the way people perceive and act in the community? Or is that, I mean, does talking about it get you there? So my role at the law school is I'm the director of career services. So I would say the law is definitely a pathway there. The law has the power to change things, to remedy harms and also to replicate them. When we think about the different movements that have led to legislation, right? We rely on the Supreme Court, we rely on the separation of powers to hold the legislature when they do or enact or pass terrible laws and it becomes law. We rely on the Supreme Court to be a place that change can happen, right? The court doesn't always get it right, it really doesn't. But I think the power of the law is that we have people or the location to make that change happen, right? I think policy definitely is a way that things can move. For example, I know the JACL was working with council member Fuku Naga on requiring all county employees to be trained or to receive anti-bias training. Is it gonna fix or remedy the abuse of power by law enforcement or their quickness to shoot people who are black or Micronesian? Know that that will happen, but we have a problem. When you have the police altering what appears later in body cam footage that other news outlets and their legal arms need to basically file a claim to get, we have problems, right? And I think talking about it is the first step. I don't know that we can entirely fix it, but I think education, educating people in the law and its power is really important. And I think also like we need the political forces to make sure that we have really strong judges in place to uphold the law and the rule of law. I think that that's something that's really scary when you see what happened in Trump's presidency too. Yeah, okay, I think that's really a good point. Peter, from a historic point of view, we look to you for that. Thank you so much. It took a war and a demolition of Europe to stop the Holocaust and that's what it took. It took major upheaval to stop the Holocaust. And so putting that aside and not having any wish to have major upheaval, how do you do this short of major upheaval? How do you end racial prejudice bias, including implicit bias? How do you do that without a war? Okay, that should take 30 seconds or so and then we should do that. So let's take, we have a little bit of time. So as usual, maybe I'll make some suggestions which could lead to another show. Okay, so I think that with this attempt to reckon with the past, confront what we, I think we could all agree, even if some people liked it, was not fair or equitable, they're gonna be upheavals. There are gonna be people who feel betrayed. There will be people who feel they have lost. So I think one of the things we need to do and I'm not sure that the Holocaust example helps us very much. One of the things we need to do is rethink as a society, how we come to an agreement about what the public interest is. I know that sounds very abstract, but in fact, it's very concrete. French used to call it a daily plebiscite. Each day, newspapers, rubbing elbows, who you work with, what laws you have, what you do in your free time is a constant negotiation. And no society has been successful in negotiating that, that has been a multi-ethnic society. There is no historical precedent for it. All right, we are really embarking on a new territory. If we agree, I think the three of us certainly do, but not everybody does, that your ethnicity is not a liability to your public participation. All right, so as a historian, I can tell you that in a way, if this were not in the US, the complementary discussion would be ethnicity, or it historically religion, all right? So in that case, the US really is a great experiment. Whether it's democratic or not, I'm not sure, but the idea of having a sustainable, multi-ethnic society. So what does that require? Well, apropos of the courts, it may require what a book a couple of weeks ago came out from a Columbia law professor, it may require us to rethink how we think about rights. I just wanna put this out. I need to spend a lot more time reading about it, but are we moving towards a workable, sustainable society if it's constantly a battle of my rights against your rights? So for example, today the Supreme Court determined that the religious rights of a Catholic group, Trump's again, all right, little T, Trump's the right of a child or parents to have a family. So those are two competing rights. Should we rely on nine people to decide what the public interest is, all right? So my answer to you is there will be a people, and we need to find a way other than a marketplace of ideas, and maybe other than the Supreme Court decide public policy, which is in the community interest, and the ability to do secondly, something we really do not ever do, and that is compromise. The great compromise was not a great compromise, right? The lab slavery to persist. As Amos Alon writes, compromise is an idea, it's an ideal, is a goal. No, I had two questions out of that, or your Tricia. Number one is, aren't we really talking about human decency here? And then if you could convince people without being technical about it, that they should just be nice, be decent. We have a better society. I know that's not concrete at all, but it just seems to me that if you, everybody sort of committing to decency, a lot of these problems go away. And my second question, and you can conflate them as you will, comes out of Peter's comments about the rubbing shoulders, rubbing elbows, negotiating, compromising, seeking a better common good for everyone. That would be nice. And in that regard, don't you think that the press, the media, and indeed, there are a number of new students at the journalism program here at the Department of Communications in UH Manoa who are very excited about doing this. And there was a piece on NPR a week ago about how there's an upsurge in applications to journalism programs around the country, because they want to participate in this very conversation you're talking about. So in a way, maybe I can suggest to you that being in the press, being able to write op-ed pieces and the like is an important part of what we need to do. You agree? Let me start with the human decency point. And I really like what you said, Peter, about this sort of being about the public interest, because I think it's all related, right? The courts sort of make policy and it drives the people to think a certain way and the people's also, right? Like we vote for the president, the president chooses who's on the court and it goes back and forth. And I really want to think that we can all be decent and we can all demand sort of, or just treat people like humanely and respectfully, that's the goal, right? For six years, I was the deputy public defender here. And I relied on people applying the law, but also thinking as they would, like that my client, right? I would always see that my client is a person and they have a family. If it's a young man, they might have, they're a son to someone. They're an uncle, maybe to other people. They have a history, they have a story. They have basic rights that our constitution affords them not to mention that. They just happen to be charged with the crime. And I think, when I think about compromise, Jay, and I would often hear from some judges, like, can't you just compromise? And a lot of civil suits compromise, right? They reach a resolution, it never goes to trial. But when you're dealing with criminal matters, the compromise doesn't look the same because someone would, if you compromise, someone might end up with a criminal record or often does if they plead out. And it doesn't undermine the harm, right? Someone may have been burglarized. Someone may feel that they were aggrieved some way. So the conviction, which harms someone, doesn't necessarily make things move forward. But going to the media aspect, I think that's exciting. I did not realize that there was an upsurge in applications to that program. So that's really exciting to see because we need fair reporting and we need people to expose stories that may not have been covered in the past. So that's kind of one of the great things about think tech, right? It's diversity of programings too. And really giving folks like me time to talk about these issues and Peter to kind of share his knowledge because when I hear Peter saying, this has never happened in history, I'm just like, it just makes my heart break. But then there's this hope, right? Because, thinking about we could maybe be decent one day, I mean, and then I think about like how it's about power and then it makes me kind of go back and forth. So I don't know that I'm answering your question, but I'm hopeful, right? If I wasn't hopeful, I wouldn't, I think have pursued the law or serve on a board interested in looking at civil rights. So there's hope. Well, that goes to one of my basic principles is that I'm sorry I'm saying this Peter, it's the lawyers, the lawyers. It's almost Shakespearean. The lawyers are the ones with the sacred trust here. They are trained in the law. They have an obligation to protect and preserve the rule of law. They are critical in the continuation of our democracy. Not all lawyers get that, but that's I think what is a principal point about lawyers in our society. We have time for last remarks. Peter, you go first, but you know, what would you summarize this? Where would you point this discussion? What do you think our viewers should carry away from it? Well, I hope they carry away or at least think about the challenges of diversity in which you respect the groups. Groups have rights and as we negotiate that respect and rights probably and I agree with the notion of compromise in the criminal case, but for the public interest, it can't be that I win everything you lose. It's gonna have to be the social contract that old John Locke talked about. I mean, you'd be willing to give up something not because you're losing, but you're gaining in return. And so my last sentence would be that all of this discussion about, you know, critical race theory that we're gonna talk about and some of the Republicans getting up in arms about 1619, et cetera, we're really talking about the same basic things is whether or not those will be shared and if they're shared, will that mean that people will not feel the trade? And let me just finish the last sentence. We can agree that the US was based upon and will continue to be based upon immigrants. That's not a debatable. Then historians suggest, well, some came free and some did not. That's not a debatable point. The debatable point is that was immigration interacting with systemic racism to make a particular kind of immigration a particular narrative? So you see what I'm trying to say is that the basic American story doesn't have to change. It doesn't. What has to be recognized is the lack of equity and that by thinking about the ideal origin story, right? We don't even have to throw that away but by recognizing that that is literally an ideal story and we have to measure groups' experiences in light of them. So I think my final, I mean, all this silliness about critical race theory which we'll talk about and the Republican Trump statue of American heroes. It's really avoiding the common problems but we're telling the same story over and over again. Okay, that should be enough to promote another show. Yeah, of course we will. It goes on forever and you know that. So Trisha, one thing that comes to my mind is what raised these issues recently in the past year was it not the Trump's remarks about the flu so much as the fact that people reacted to it with violence and all of a sudden you have people of minority groups being physically attacked in the street or killed. So it's personal security and I think we have to achieve that first. You know, it's a longer term project to make equity in the workplace, equity in every which way in our society but with the first order of businesses, no violence please. We're not gonna permit that. You can't do that. It's very black and white and it is a criminal. Anyway, I just had to say that Peter always makes me say things like that. Sorry about that. But you're tapping at one of the longer arcs of this country which is that violence is protected by a sense of liberty or freedom. Maybe I want to talk about original sins or problems. The idea of being able to carry an AR-15 in public as an exercise of freedom is precisely our need to rethink what freedom and rights are in light of public interest and public security. Amen. But you know that's a horse I've beaten several times and thrown out the room. And now it's on that Kawhi. You want to start with things? You can start with guns and violence. Yep. So Risha, hearing all of this and knowing we are almost out of time, can you leave your thoughts and what do you think people ought to be thinking about and considering going forward from this discussion? I mean, Peter's comment makes me think about also the right to speech and how language becomes really important, right? Whether it be discourse with your neighbor and meeting them, especially if they look different than you or have a different experience. Seeing people as people also language or discourse with the past, as you know, Peter has that great knowledge about looking backwards so that we can look forward and make sure that things don't get replicated. And I think it's also about language about now, right? What do we do or how do we respond to things that we hear, right? For example, the rhetoric that presidents, all of them have the power to really impact the way people see things, not to mention our Kawhi police chief who made racist remarks and gestures and was only suspended for five days. So that response to that language, and what does that bring about? What does that allow for? Does that now empower law enforcement to think, okay, well, if I do something that's racist, am I only gonna get suspension of five days? Like, does that make it allowable then? And then I also think, you know, it's about really reconciling what happened before so that the harms don't persist or fester because they won't erupt. And, you know, sometimes terrible things can come of it, but maybe sometimes if you deal with it, right? You can really expose things and really beautiful things can happen. All right. Thank you. Patricia Nakamura, William S. Richardson School of Law, Peter Hoppenberg, the very progenitor of history is here to help helping us as always. Thank you so much, the two of you. Thank you, both of you. All right, well, take care.