Racism against Asian-Americans casts a shadow over Washington’s history
Editor’s note: This story was written by Sam Hallstrom, a junior at Olympia High School who participated in the Thurston Community Media’s Youth Journalism class. The class was led by Olympian journalist Brandon Block and Spokesman-Review journalist Laurel Demkovich, who are both corps members with Report For America.
When June Nakata was 5 years old, her family fled to Washington state after World War II broke out. They were afraid of being sent to an internment camp.
She and her sister got on a train to Spokane, but her father wasn’t so fortunate. He was taken to a Japanese internment camp in Arkansas where he stayed for the duration of the war.
Nakata’s experience with racism and discrimination is not uncommon among Asian-American families. In fact, one of the worst civil rights violations in U.S history occurred here, when citizens of Japanese descent along the western seaboard were imprisoned during World War II.
Asian Americans are still the targets of discrimination, hate and racism. With the coronavirus outbreak tied to China, there has been a stark rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition dedicated to incident reporting, advocating for policy, and supplying communities with prevention and support resources, found that Asian Americans were subject to nearly 3,800 reported hate crimes in the past year, but the number is undoubtedly higher.
“People often don’t know how to respond to these kinds of hate incidents, so they keep it to themselves,” said David Takeuchi, a sociologist and associate dean for faculty excellence at the University of Washington, whose research involves Asian-Americans who’ve been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to an analysis conducted by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, hate crimes have increased by 149% throughout 2020 in 16 of the U.S.’s biggest cities.
Two examples: On April 5, a man in Orange County, California, was charged with a felony hate crime for allegedly throwing rocks at an Asian woman and her 6-year-old son. On July 14, an 89-year-old Asian woman was slapped in the face and set on fire by two men in Brooklyn, New York.
“In many ways, the ‘history’ of Asian American racism is still being written and is still very modern,” Doug Mah, the first Chinese-American mayor of Olympia, who served from 2008-2011, wrote in an email.
That history is something Nakata and her family are all too familiar with.
Nakata, a second-generation Japanese-American whose parents, was too young to fully realize what was happening during World War II.
“It was only later, when I approached my teens, that I realized that at that time we were considered ‘the enemy,’” she wrote in an email. “It was a sore spot to carry.”
With the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the act that drove America to war, Nakata and her family dealt with forced relocation and evacuation. The U.S. government demanded the relocation of Americans with Japanese ancestry away from the West Coast with the intent of detaining Japanese Americans during the duration of the war.
Nakata’s father was one of thousands sent to internment camps, where they were detained or confined, and met with prejudice and restriction.
“It was difficult being apart,” she recalls.
Nakata’s story is just one example of how Asian Americans have been the targets of racism and discrimination many times throughout American history.
Chinese-Americans were blamed for an economic recession in the 19th century that put white laborers out of work. This led to legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese immigration.
“[The] discrimination of Asian Americans in the U.S. is the origin of modern government-sponsored/legalized racism,” Mah wrote in an email.
In 1982, amid a collapse of the American auto manufacturing industry blamed on Japanese auto manufacturers, a 27-year-old Chinese-American engineer named Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two laid-off auto workers who mistook him to be Japanese.
On March 16, 2020, former President Donald Trump rebranded COVID-19 as the China Virus. Many have criticized his use of language as inflammatory, some pointing out its influence on the rise in Asian American hate crimes.
“What we learned is that whenever there is a conflict with a foreign country and Americans residing here come from that country, there is deep racism and animosity aimed at those communities,” said Aarti Kohli, the executive director of Advancing Justice Asian Law Caucus, in an interview with PBS NewsHour.
In April 2020, former Washington Gov. Gary Locke was featured in an attack ad on Joe Biden. Locke was shown standing in front of two Chinese flags, as well as an American one. Joe Biden is shown walking towards him with his head down, portrayed as deferential.
“It is racial stereotyping at its worst,” Locke told The Atlantic after the ad came out. No matter how many generations ago one’s family immigrated, Locke said, Asian Americans are still viewed as foreigners.
“We don’t say that about second- or third-generation Irish Americans or Polish Americans,” he said.
More than a decade after the war, Nakata attended Washington State University, where she met her future husband. After graduation, they moved to Seattle, where she worked as a microbiologist. She has since moved out of state, but looks back fondly on her life in Seattle.
It may be hard for some to reconcile this image of Nakata with her experience as the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants to the United States and a target of racism and hate, but Nakata’s experience is just one example of thousands of other Asian Americans.
During the war, Nakata was too young to understand what was going on around her. However, as an adult, she has felt the weight of being seen as the enemy throughout her life. That burden has been hard to carry, she wrote.
“But I have survived.”