Executive Director, David Inoue’s Speech at the Make Good Trouble Rally

Washington, D.C. - August 28, 2021

Good afternoon, my name is David Inoue, and I am the executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, just one of several Japanese American organizations including the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress and Tsuru for Solidarity, and individuals, that support the passage of HR40, to establish a commission to study and develop proposals to achieve reparations for African Americans.

I am here today to share the experience of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, men, women, and children, mostly American citizens, who were unjustly imprisoned during World War II. Our government at the time lied and claimed anyone of Japanese descent was a security threat to the war. A Jap is a Jap is what they said. It was the same racism and xenophobia that fueled the Muslim Ban and continues against immigrants seeking asylum at our southern border. The same that has driven anti-Asian hate during this COVID pandemic. 

Every person of Japanese ancestry on the west coast was rounded up and forcibly moved to American concentration camps. They lost their homes, their businesses, and all ties to their communities. The late supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, of all people, once stated that the two worst Supreme Court decisions were Korematsu which upheld Japanese American mass imprisonment, and Dred Scott which upheld slavery.

In the case of Korematsu, the courts overturned that decision, as well as Hirabayashi and Yasui, nearly forty years after the end of the war. A few years later, in 1988, Japanese Americans, with the support of many of the other groups and people here today, achieved what some thought would be impossible, a formal apology from the United States government, passed by Congress, and signed by the President, admitting the mistake of imprisoning Japanese Americans, but also providing redress, monetary reparations of twenty thousand dollars for every surviving incarceree. 

Was it enough? No! But it showed that our country was truly sorry for the pain and suffering that had been inflicted and was willing to make the investment into righting that wrong.

Going back to Justice Scalia’s assessment of the worst court decisions. Now how many of you thought you would hear his name today? We corrected the Dred Scott decision through the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, but our government has yet to offer a genuine apology with reparations in the same way it did for Japanese Americans. 

Just think about why we are here today. Because the right to vote was never fully afforded to the freed slaves and it still remains much too difficult and out of reach for too many Americans.

We are here today because we still need to fight for voting rights. But what about all the other ways that our government has oppressed Black people throughout our history? We need to pass HR1 and HR4, but we also need to pass HR40 to begin down the path towards providing reparations for our country’s long history of voter suppression, economic oppression, schools that remain separate and unequal, unjust mass incarceration, and of course, the original sin of slavery. 

So when you tell your member of Congress why we need HR1 and HR4, also tell them it is past time that we pass HR40 to educate our country about the need for reparations and propose what those reparations should look like. It has been over 30 years since Congress passed redress for Japanese Americans, what are they waiting for to pass HR40? 

For many Japanese Americans, redress brought healing for us as a community, and as individuals. Right now, our country’s racial divisions are in desperate need of healing. An HR40 commission can help bring that healing by illuminating why this divide exists and making the necessary investments to eradicate the disparities. 

We need this because I, as a father, will not have the same conversation with my son that a Black parent must have with their son about the police. But what ARE the conversations I need to have with my children so that they will become more compassionate, and understanding of what their classmates, their friends, might experience because of their different skin color. This is the understanding, the healing we need, and HR 40 will help us get there. We need this as a nation. We need to pass HR40 now.