A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists.

Annie Lee moderates a panel with African and Asian Americans about the impacts of Birthright Citizenship and the need for Surviving Through Solidarity. Guests include: Lisa Holder, Ming Hsu Chen, Don Tamaki and Michael Harris.

Link to an APEX Episode on Wong Kim Ark from March 20, 2025

Show Transcript

[00:00:00] Opening Music: Apex Express Asian Pacific expression. Community and cultural coverage, music and calendar, new visions and voices, coming to you with an Asian Pacific Islander point of view. It’s time to get on board the Apex Express.

[00:00:40] Miko Lee: Welcome to Apex Express. I’m your host, Miko Lee, and tonight we will listen to a recent event, Birthright Citizenship, Surviving Through Solidarity that took place at Chinese for Affirmative Action. Just yesterday, on April 1st, the Supreme Court heard the case around birthright citizenship. This event that you’re gonna listen to was highlighting Asian and African American solidarity. As you might know, the cases of dread Scott in 1857 and Wong Kim Ark in 1898 are linked as landmark Supreme Court cases that directly defined and redefined American citizenship specifically about race and birthright. While Dred Scott denied citizenship to people of African descent, Wong Kim Ark’s case utilized the subsequent 14th Amendment to solidify birthright citizenship for children born to foreign nationals. I’m just noting that in this conversation, because it was a panel discussion that was live, there was some irregular use of microphones, so sometimes the audio can be a bit spotty. Please bear with us, and if you want to review the transcript, check out our website, kpfa.org, apex Express. And last year we also covered the story of Wong Kim Ark and have included this past show in our show notes. Now let’s listen in to moderator Annie Lee, Lawyers Michael Harris and Don Tamaki, Lisa Holder of Equal Justice Society and Ming Chen of UC Law.

[00:02:20] Annie Lee: Everyone. My name is Annie Lee and I am the managing director of policy at Chinese for Affirmative Action. Welcome to CAA’s office here in San Francisco, Chinatown. And thank you all for being here today for our discussion: Birthright Citizenship Surviving through Solidarity. CAA and Stop AAPI Hate are proud to co-sponsor this event because it matters to us. CAA has been around since 1969 and we are a community based organization that provides direct services to lingual working class Chinese immigrants. And we also try to improve their lives through policy and advocacy. And in 2020, we co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, which is the national leading aggregator of anti-Asian hate incidents. And we know at Stop AAPI Hate that anti-immigrant policies are anti-Asian hate. So why are we here right now? March marks two anniversaries of two Supreme Court cases. One is Dred Scott and the other is Wong Kim Ark. These are two seminal cases in US history. And next week on April 1st, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. So we are here to talk about birthright citizenship because it’s an issue that is near and dear to both the Black and Asian communities.

[00:03:46] Without further ado, I am so thrilled to welcome this panel of amazing folks. Let’s start with Michael Harris. Michael Harris here on my right is a retired attorney. He, for many, many years led the juvenile justice division at the National Center for Youth Law, an incredible litigator and advocates, and I’m so proud that he’s here. He’s also on the Equal Justice Society Board. Next to Michael is Don Tamaki. Don is a lawyer at the firm Minami Tamaki, and you might know him because he was part of the legal team that successfully got reparations for Japanese Americans after decades of fighting that injustice. So thank you Don. Don and Lisa, actually, spend time together on the California Reparations Task Force. And so this is Lisa Holder next to Don. Lisa is the president of the Equal Justice Society, which is based in Oakland, an incredible legal organization that has been in many, many fights, including, they filed an amicus brief in support of birthright citizenship, and that brief discusses why this is an issue for the Black community. And last but not least, we have Professor Ming Chen, who is a law professor at UC Law, and she’s also the faculty director of the RICE Program, which is Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality. So thank you so much to my panel and let’s dive in. So some of you know, but I am a former US history teacher, so I often worry that people don’t adequately understand American history and I fear that people don’t understand reconstruction and the 14th Amendment. So let’s start with the origin of birthright citizenship. What is birthright citizenship and where did it come from and why does its origin matter for understanding what’s happening today? So Ming, I’m gonna start with you because you’re a law professor and then others chime in. Lisa, Michael, Don. ’cause I think you’ll have more to add.

[00:05:45] Ming Chen: Great. Thank you so much Annie, and thank you to CAA for having us all. I’m really excited to be part of this conversation, which I think is going to be really the beginning of a series of conversations over the next few months. So you’re starting in the right place, Annie, in asking us what birthright citizenship is, because that is the heart of what the common lawsuit will be about: who gets to be a citizen in the United States. And that’s actually why I named my organization RICE. I think the emphasis is on the “C” [citizenship], because I do think it is something that brings together immigrant communities, as well as all of the different communities within the United States that have been expanding, over time. Getting to the, legal text I, I think it’s important to remember first that birthright citizenship is bigger than the United States. Worldwide there are at least two ways of becoming a citizen. One is by birthright and the other is by naturalized citizenship. So we’re talking about the birthright half. And the United States is not alone. It’s among countries mostly in the Western hemisphere that have chosen to focus on the “jus soli” version of birthright citizenship, which is “soli” is soil. So it’s birth by touching US soil. And the idea behind that theory was always meant to be an egalitarian one. It’s one that is about the idea that anyone can become a citizen, right? In contrast to the older system that Europe and other countries use, “jus sanguinis,” which is to say that citizenship could only be inherited by blood and heritage. Right? So I think right from the very beginning, it tells us what the text and the history of our 14th amendment citizenship clause intended to accomplish, which was to have an egalitarian spirit, a fresh start, and a continual renewal of what it means to be an American.

[00:07:33] Lisa Holder: Just sort of continuing on the path that Ming just opened up for us, birthright citizenship is very much connected to the African American experience. Particularly because the genesis of that right, really was a reversal of the construct and the regime of the enslavement era, right? Everyone’s aware that during that era, descendants of Africa were not considered humans, much less citizens. And the legal cases that were brought where people try to have their citizenship, and their humanity acknowledged, the courts universally said, no, you are not citizens and Black people have no rights that white people need to respect. Right. And so that was the case, law of the land until, after the Civil War, when we had the 13th, 14th, and 15th, amendments were lifted up and embedded into our laws. You also had the Civil Rights Act of 1866 where that body of law was overturned and enshrined into our constitution was a new law that said that freed people are citizens and they do have rights that everyone needs to respect and rights to equality. You know, we know that there have been problems executing that [laughs] but at least enshrined in our laws and enshrined in our constitution that is where the birthright citizenship, constitutional law came from. It came out of that experience. 

[00:09:21] Michael Harris: I just want to add a couple things to that. I mean, it’s very distinguished scholars, they’re hitting it really hard. Two things, universality and so I wanna talk about that first. I got one more coming forward. It’s universal. Birthright citizenship is universal. And what I mean by that is everybody gets to be a citizen who’s born here in the United States. Period. It’s universal, applies to everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white or Asian, none of that matters. That’s really important. The other thing is it’s that this criteria is not something that’s subjective, nobody gets to decide. It’s automatic. If you’re born here, you automatically have citizenship. Those two things being automatic and being universal I think are really important. And this, we’ll talk about this more as we go through the conversation, but those two things are what makes birthright citizenship so powerful and why they keep coming to try and take it down because it’s universal so everybody gets it and it’s automatic. Nobody can take it away. So let’s, we’ll I’ll just leave it there for now, but we’ll come back to that.

[00:10:33] Annie Lee: Don, this one’s for you. So the 14th Amendment passes in 1868. Like Lisa said, it’s to reverse Dred Scott, where the Justice Taney wrote that Black people had no rights, which the white man was bound to respect. And so they had to repudiate that through the 14th amendments, they have universal and automatic birthright citizenship with very, very few exceptions for like diplomats kids. Okay, that’s like so, so narrow. So 14th Amendment passes in 1868, but it takes another 30 years for a Chinese American man named Wong Kim Ark to establish that birthright citizenship actually applied to the children of immigrants. So Don, can you tell us Wong Kim Ark’s story, who was he, what happened to him and why did the federal rural government make him this test case?

[00:11:22] Don Tamaki: Just a couple words about context. I mean, one of the remarkable things about the case is it occurred during especially California’s ultra racist, ultra virulent racist period. It’s a contradiction in that regard. So just taking you back to the origins of where this racial pathology comes from, of course we focus, tend to focus on Asian American history, but actually you have to begin with Black history and indigenous history in the country. So in 1619, the first enslaved people were brought to America. And you know, 12 million people were kidnapped off the west coast of Africa. 2 million died during the middle passage. 400,000 were dropped off in America, and the million other millions ended up in the Caribbean, in the Brazil in Haiti, Jamaica, et cetera. And from there, slavery in America continued for 246 years. Two and a half centuries. Civil war happened in 1865. It concluded, and for another 100 years, Jim Crow exclusion infected America. And San Francisco, by the way, was heavily Jim Crow until the 1960s and into the 1970s. The vestiges of that exclusion and discrimination directly are rooted in the Black American experience.

[00:12:52] Michael Harris: And it’s still present here today. That’s why we have a Chinatown. That’s why we have a Japantown in San Francisco because of what Don just did. 

[00:13:00] Don Tamaki: Redlining and racial covenants. 

[00:13:02] Michael Harris: That’s right. 

[00:13:03] Don Tamaki: Exclusions, redevelopment, and so on. So people think of California as being like a enlightened state. Well, California did enter the union in 1850 before the Civil War. 1849 enslavers came to California and they brought their human property with them. So there were probably at least 1500 enslaved people in California. 1865 Civil War ended, but Democrats in 1868 rose to power saying they would vote against any law that would have any equality between , Black Californians, indigenous people, and Chinese folks. And beginning toward late 1800s, that’s when the bulk of Asian American immigration began. First Chinese American coming during the gold rush, and then Japanese Americans have followed and so on. And so, Jim Crow seeped into all that. Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. California was known as a strong Klan state by the end of the 1800s with strong Ku Klux Klan chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Riverside, San Jose, Anaheim and so on. And so this was a toxic stew that Chinese immigrated into and other groups too. So unsurprisingly, tons of anti-Asian legislation policies, exclusion, follow. So Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who lived and operated a business here. His parents continued to reside and remain in the United States until 1890, and then they departed for China. Probably no doubt because of the inhospitable conditions here. And racial terror was part of that, including the race riots here in Chinatown. And now that I mention it between 1865 to 1935, 352 people were lynched in California. Eight of those were Black Californians, but the rest were indigenous, Chinese, and persons of Mexican descent.

[00:15:18] So that was the environment. Wong Kim Ark continued to live in California into his twenties, reportedly working as a cook in San Francisco. And at the age of 21 he actually made two trips to China. He made a trip to China when he was 17 to visit his parents. Stayed there a year, came back without incident worked, came back here, worked till he was 21, then went back to China to visit his parents at that point. And when he attempted to reenter the United States, he was denied entry and detained with a threat of deportation upon the sole ground that he was not a citizen of the United States. Of course he was born here. So the issue was you know, birthright citizenship was the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment did it apply to Wong Kim Ark. And the interesting thing is about the case is that the court ruled in his favor. All persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. And those words are now, today becomes crucial. And people, I think we on the panel will talk about the implications of that language subject to the jurisdiction thereof. And it established this principle that basically was reaffirmed repeatedly throughout our history for this 100 year plus period. To get to your last question, why did the court do this? I think scholars smarter than me can explain this, but I’ll give you some clues. The court ruled in Wong Kim Ark’s favor despite the virulent context of the era, because that’s what the plain and expansive language of the 14th Amendment says.

[00:17:02] All persons didn’t say formally enslaved, didn’t say Black Americans. It said all persons. That’s what the plain expensive language of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 says: all persons and as Lisa referred to. And the congressional record of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1862, where legislators are debating these issues they clearly understood, and the record shows that if you include this expansive language, it will apply to groups like Chinese and Asians. And so with that understood it was adopted and ratified in 1868, 14th Amendment, and it was reaffirmed in other legislation like the Immigration Act of 1940. They just assumed that if you’re born in this country, you’re an American citizen. It was applied throughout the turbulent history involving my community, Japanese Americans. As you recall, 1942, 125,000 people were rounded up and put in concentration camps and the first generation were ineligible to become citizens. They were given identity cards marking them as enemy aliens. 2000 people died in those camps, but people were born in those camps. And the government, despite the fact that we were at war with Japan, understood that if you’re born in this country. And even if your parents were quote, “enemy aliens,” you’re gonna be classified as American citizens. And maybe lastly, the court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark because the 14th Amendment was trying to repair the harm done by Dred Scott v. Sandford, which was to provide human beings who’ve been here for two and a half centuries, the right to become an American citizen with all the benefits that go with that, like voting for instance. And recognizing that if you don’t have those rights, you don’t have anything, you are you, you’re nothing. And for Japanese Americans, for instance, who are born in those camps, can you imagine if they didn’t have birthright citizenship? They’re not part of Japan. They’re not part of America. Where are they? They’re stateless. They have no home. They have no rights. And so it would create another underclass of people who have no rights for, and for which the 14th Amendment was trying to remedy which was you know, to provide a pathway. And so I guess you could say that’s why, that’s the incongruity of why Wong Kim Ark came out that way. In my opinion.

[00:19:59] Ming Chen: Maybe what I could add to the conversation is not just sort of who is included but who is not included. Because I think that’s actually a much more small and specific group than the current dialogue would have you believe. So in the very language of the 14th Amendment, this idea of subject to the jurisdiction thereof. It refers to three exceptions and only three exceptions. One is for Native Americans, and that is because as of 1924 there wasn’t a need to grant citizenship through the 14th Amendment because there were other provisions to grant citizenship to Native Americans. The second exception is for those who are children of diplomats. And the reason for that is because they have citizenship in their home country and their parents are only on a temporary post to the United States with the understanding that they’re here in the United States in service to their home country. And I think that actually points to the limited meaning of the third exception, which is the one that I have to say, I have a really hard time understanding is part of the debate now. Because I think up until now, you know, this debate renews itself a couple times every year. Every time there’s a new census, every time there’s redistricting on all of the anniversaries, and usually the fight is about subject to the jurisdiction thereof. But the third exception, which has come into the dialogue, is about the language of accepting children of invading armies. And that is one that I have not thought we needed to argue about. It really becomes a touch point as Don mentions this history with internment and the children of a group of enemy aliens. I think that gives it a whole new historical read.

[00:21:48] But one of the reasons that this argument, I guess I should first explain the argument because it may not be obvious to you as it was not obvious to me the first time I heard it, which was about 18 months ago. And so the argument is that the children of invading armies referring mostly to the children of immigrants coming across the US Mexico border should not be considered birthright citizens. So that’s kind of what the public debate, what the insinuation is behind some of the current effort to chip away at Wong Kim Ark through the executive order. There have been many efforts to chip away through legislation. I don’t know how frequently it’s been attempted through constitutional amendment, which is what it would actually require. That’s a very, very high bar that’s almost never met. I think most people haven’t really made a serious, serious effort there. But what I think is kind of stunning to me in the sort of momentum behind the current moment is that Judge Ho who himself is a birthright citizen. Took up this language and this argument about the children of invading armies after previously saying that he agreed with this interpretation that children of undocumented immigrants, children of temporary visas all of these different legal statuses in addition to all of these racial groups, would immediately be citizens. And the argument he tried to make is that it wouldn’t include the group at the border because historically it wouldn’t have included enemy aliens or invading aliens either. And I think that what is so surprising to me is that a) that there is meant to be this historical analog between what would’ve been happening at the time of the Civil War and what is happening now at the US Mexico border. We are not having a civil war. We are not in active military conflict at the US Mexico border. I’ll set aside other US military conflicts and how we wanna use that terminology. But I think that’s really important because I, I feel like it’s almost a trick, you know, to turn what is a media frame that’s meant to be like clickbait, right? The idea that there is an invasion at the border, right. That we’re being flooded with people who don’t belong here. And to try to turn that into a legal argument saying this is actually an invading army and that takes this group outside of the 14th Amendment. 

[00:24:19] Michael Harris: That’s, I was gonna ask you a follow up question because we haven’t been invaded that many times by armies I mean, maybe the War for Independence when the British sent ships over and took over Boston for a while. I could see how if they had kids, I mean, that’s a stretch, that might apply to this. But I think the rhetorical device, they’re touching on where they speak of people who come into the United States without proper documentation as an invading army or an invading whatever. They use that terminology quite often. Is that enough to bootstrap into this exception? 

[00:24:59] Ming Chen: I, not to me, [audience and panel laughter] I think not to serious legal scholars and jurists. I mean, and you know, I’m not trying to be inflammatory by saying that. I think there are a lot of people who are pretty far away from me on a legal and political spectrum who would also say that this argument is pretty unprecedented. To try to say that that would be enough to bootstrap it into the actual text of the constitution or the spirit of Wong Kim Ark. So I think it’s going really, really far. And I think too far, and I hope that if that becomes a line of discussion during the oral argument, that it would be cut off pretty quickly.

[00:25:38] Annie Lee: Well, let me punt it to Lisa then. If it’s pretty clear based on the text, based on the legislative history, based on, just everything in the last 125 years that has said very clearly that birthright citizenship is universal and automatic. Why is Trump doing this? Like, what is being attempted legally, but also politically? And Lisa, you take a stab at this first and then others can chime in. 

[00:26:04] Lisa Holder: Yeah. You know, why is Trump doing this? [audience and panel laughter] There’s many layers, you know? And it, this is a strategic play and you have to sort of think about this in a layered way. Like there’s a long term strategic play. There’s a short term strategic play, there’s a procedural strategic play, but that sort of bootstraps and brings in a much more moral and narrative rhetorical play. Procedural play. The short term strategic play has a lot to do with the midterm elections. Right, right. And also limiting people of color’s ability to pick people who look like them as their representatives. Right. Because all of a sudden you’re not only putting into question people’s citizenship based on birth and turning this into a lineage thing where you have to bring me proof that your parents or their parents were born here or something like that, or were naturalized. So you’re starting to put into question in a practical measure, people’s access to the franchise, people’s access to the voting booth. Right. And you’re also starting to create a chain effect. So people are actually afraid to go to the voting booth. Right. And then you couple that with moving the migration of ICE. Now ICE is in the airports. Guaranteed by November, ICE will be in the voting booth, right? So you create this chilling effect. And then in terms of having representation that looks like you having people of color represent you in the US House of Representatives, your state representative. When you put birthright into question in this way, you’re also gonna be able to challenge people who are running for office, people of color, running for office and say, well, you can’t really run because you need to prove. And that is a rhetorical issue that we have seen being used already with both Harris and Obama, you know, because they were brown, Black people. Their birthright citizenship was, they were manipulating that rhetoric and that narrative.

[00:28:25] So this is not coming out of the outta left field. It’s iterative and it’s a it’s rhetoric that has been, you know, percolating up for a long time. This is just a culminating moment. The long term strategy is really about white supremacy. We know that, you know, all of the social science shows that in 20 years this, the country will be a majority minority country, right? And people of color will have a huge amount of power in terms of, you know, in terms of the vote, right? Because of that, switch to majority minority and white people will be in the minority. And so, this is about, from a long term perspective, ensuring that certain people maintain their power as an electoral block. Right? So that’s sort of like a long term electoral politics play. And then finally, the procedural issues are what’s outstanding, okay? As Ming mentioned, if you are going to use procedure to overturn a constitutional amendment that is a, an astronomical feat to accomplish, right? Because you need two thirds of all of the representatives in Congress, and then on top of that, you need 75% of the states to ratify that process. So overturning a constitutional amendment is virtually impossible. But what we have here is trying to do the same thing. One person trying to do the same thing using the powers of the executive office. It is unprecedented. It is absurd. It has no legal viability, but it is a political moment where this man sees an opportunity because of the bias that we see in the judicial branch, in the court system. And that is being leveraged for the executive to to do something that is unprecedented and that is actually procedurally impossible, right? For one person by just signing a document all of a sudden disenfranchising 13 million people. That is not the democratic process. It’s quite the opposite.

[00:30:38] Michael Harris: I just wanted to add to that. The Senate and the House of Representatives are both very narrowly controlled by the Republicans, and so it’s really important to Trump to maintain that control. He’ll only be able to continue doing these outrageous things by virtue of getting a rubber stamp from Congress. And so either house going the other way would put a stop sign in front of him and make it much more difficult for him to do all those things. All this money he’s spending he would not be able to do that if Congress was actually active in doing it’s job. Cause under the Constitution, spending is supposed to be controlled by the Congress, not by the Executive. So everything’s upside down, but that’s only working because Congress is allowing him to do that and not trying to stop him. If the Democrats are able to take over the Senate or the House where there’s only a three or four seat margin right now that would make it much, much, much harder for him to pull these things off. And so anything he can do to get an advantage in that way I think is also part of what they’re trying to do and trying to pull off.

[00:31:48] Ming Chen: One other thought, and you know, I’m trying very hard to not be professorly in the sense of using jargon or highfalutin terms, but I’m just curious, has anyone in this room heard the term perpetual foreigner before? A few of you have, I mean, I think it’s really pertinent here. The first time I heard of this idea was when I started to learn from other Asian American law professors when I was still in college. I think that idea was that for certain groups of people, including Asian Americans, it doesn’t matter whether you are actually a citizen by law or how many generations you’ve lived in the United States, right? So I’m a birthright citizen like Wong Kim Ark, but I think the first time I heard about it was, you know, this idea of Asian Americans not being able to be Americans socially in terms of belonging regardless of whether they are themselves, the child of citizens or immigrants and if they’re the sixth generation children, right. I remember taking a Chinatown tour with David and is that where we are about six generations out for a lot of the descendants. So even if you were in the sixth generation that if you look Asian, that you will still be seen as being foreign. And so I think that idea has animated a lot of the work that I do. Like why it is that a lot of the work I do on race centers Asian Americans and then a lot of the work I do on immigrants centers, the naturalization process.

[00:33:16] But I think it’s also important to recognize the breadth of that idea. Again, this idea of trying to blur the line between actuality, like what is real and what sounds like a fancy argument. Right. And I think what Lisa said, you know, her brief reference to the challenges against Barack Obama and Kamala Harris when they were running for a highest offices. You know, I think again, there’s not, it’s not a coincidence. I mean, to me that’s the perpetual foreigner at work again. Because it’s the idea that not only that Black people cannot possibly be the leader of this country, right? Sort of the, the figurehead of this country, but that for Barack Obama, the child of one international student on a lawful, probably f visa at the time, or that for Kamala Harris, the child of two lawful immigrants, that they cannot be birthright citizens that would be eligible for president. So there’s a lot of commonality in that argument. And I think, you know, people forget, I think people assume that if you’re talking about groups who are not Asian right, or who are not Latinx, that we’re not talking about foreignness, we’re only talking about race. And certainly we are talking about race, but we’re not talking about it exclusively.

[00:34:33] Michael Harris: And then in addition to all of that is just the straight up racism of it. And that’s supported by this notion of white supremacy. And what I mean when I say that, Lisa has touched on this already, is that there is a hierarchy of racial groups. And we’re not all created equal. There’s a hierarchy and the top group is, you already know, I don’t have to say it, is the whites [laughter], and then below that are the other people like us who look different. And the reason there’s, they’re able to put these groups out there and get people to buy into that belief system is because we look different. And so this is why the perpetual thing is perpetual it’s because we still look different. And that is a key part of the white supremacy. They still want to buy into this notion that white people are superior. And the only way they can make that work is by saying that people who look different are inferior.

[00:35:34] Annie Lee: I love this discussion because it’s so real. And what you are saying essentially is you’re talking about belonging and you’re talking about power. Like who gets to belong in America? And then that is necessarily connected with who has power in America, who deserves to have power in America. But I know that we all belong in America and that we have power. So I wanna shift this conversation now to what can we do? And so beyond the courts everybody tune in next week. But beyond the courts, what is the role of community organizing, state and local policy advocacy? Public education in defending birthright citizenship and fighting against the attack on birthright citizenship is one sliver of everything that he has done. So many executive orders that came out on day one. So how, how do we, as everyday people fight white supremacy? What can we do when they are redistricting and trying to take away our franchise right before the midterm elections? What do we do when they’re using courts that they’ve already packed with their federal society judges? And so what, what can an average regular person do? And Don I’m gonna go to you first. 

[00:36:47] Don Tamaki: Let me say something in a very far less intellectual way than my colleagues here. This is a very old playbook. The playbook of demagoguery is very old. He said the old is humanity. And there are three elements to that playbook. One, appeal to prejudice, however, that is, race, skin, color, religion, whatever. Secondly, fear monger and scapegoat. And thirdly trafficking, conspiracy theories, fake news, false information, erasure of history. That’s how you control the culture. And it worked in 1619. It worked in 1882. It worked in Germany in 1933. And it works today, you know, 2016, 2020. You know, when Chinese were blamed as spreaders of the Chinese virus. Asian Americans, when Mexicans were characterized as drug dealers and rapists when Jews and immigrants were portrayed as replacing good white people. This dehumanizing [of] people where one more Black man killed during an encounter with law enforcement barely evokes a shrug because it is so normal. It is so normal, folks, and so it works. And so, you have the candidate Trump running for office and say to a national audience that, to the people of Springfield, Ohio, that Haitian immigrants are eating your dogs and cats and getting away with it. Or the images of the Obamas transposed on cartoon apes. And this is really Jim Crow stuff. This is Antebellum stuff. And it’s a recycling of the same playbook. And so the first part of organizing is being aware of what’s going on. This is not a new thing. Okay, it’s just a racial pathology that churns in one form or another, and it has an origin. It predates us. And so I, I think part of that is educating ourselves how everything is interconnected.

[00:38:58] And since we’re talking about Black Asian solidarity, I’ll just say a couple things. I mean, the civil rights movement had three triumphs that we all should remember. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of ’65 began the dismantling of Jim Crow, which I, as I said, was a hundred year phenomenon following the end of the Civil War and the Immigration of Act of 1965. The third act. It ended as, you know, racist quotas. It prioritized family ties and skills and it greatly increased Asian immigration. As a result, the majority of AAPIs today are post 1965 Americans whose very presence here was made possible by the Black Civil Rights Movement. How many of us know that, you know? I mean, everybody focuses not everybody, but people tend to focus on their own peculiar predicament as if it’s unique to our own situation. And in fact, it’s all, quite connected. So I think part of this organizing process is realizing, you know, it’s Martin Luther King, the oft quoted statement where he says we may have come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now. And especially in connection with what’s happening and, and you’re seeing it in different parts of the country where sure, immigrants are being targeted in Minneapolis, but then you have thousands of Minneapolitans that, you know, ordinary people, business folks, teachers, laborers, protesting in Sub-Zero weather against what, what happened? And, and yeah. You know what, can we do protest work? I hope everybody’s out there on March 28th, you know, this Saturday on the No Kings March. 

[00:40:51] Michael Harris: Not just protesting, running them out of town. 

[00:40:55] Don Tamaki: Well, [audience and panel laughter] Gregory Bovino, Gregory Bovino, who was the leading charge? Gone. Kristi Noem. Gone. 

[00:41:03] Michael Harris: Yes, right. 

[00:41:05] Don Tamaki: 2000 ICE agents in Minneapolis reduced to much smaller numbers. That’s right. Their plans then launching Ohio trashed. You know, so that’s why you, so boycotts, boycotts work. Ask Elon Musk. Ask Target. Local elections, Michael mentioned the midterm elections. It is if we don’t, if Democrats don’t get back the House, the country’s cooked. So, I mean, everybody should be involved one way or the other in that. Raising money, you know, we are part of a, a fundraising group called CAPA21, and there are other groups out there, but those are, those things are crucial to funnel money toward swing elections and critical races. The education part I think is essential. If you consider the velocity change in terms of the civil rights movement, Japanese American redress and reparations was a 20 year movement. And it was full of education of the public. Civil rights movement, same thing. The philosophy of change on marriage equality or LGBTQ rights and all those things happened because they became normal. They were, they started out as ideas that people thought were preposterous. You know, that’ll never change. 

[00:42:26] Michael Harris: Right. 

[00:42:26] Don Tamaki: And Jim Crow will never end. And San Francisco can segregate Asian Americans within Japantown and Chinatown. It, it will never change. But that idea of change, which were thought preposterous happens. But it requires civic engagement. So just examples.

[00:42:46] Michael Harris: I want to amplify two things that Don said. One is there will be a march this Saturday a No Kings March, and it’s really, really important for people to show up for that march. ‘Cause the one thing that’s devastating to a government is to have its people out there visible on the streets saying what the government is doing is wrong. Because you can spin certain things, you can lie about certain things, but bodies in the streets you can’t lie about. It’s there and it’s real. So that’s one thing that’s really important, really. But I would encourage all of you if you can, if you are able, please join us and come out on Saturday. The other thing I want to add to the Don’s excellent list is there’s a few groups in the Bay Area and in San Francisco that does postcards. And their strategy is they identify particular jurisdictions where it’s a very close race and it’ll be pivotal if a Democrat can win over a Republican, say in a House or maybe even like the Texas Senator race. That one’s probably gonna be very close too. And they send postcards to people encouraging them to vote. Don’t sit it out. And those extra votes can be the difference between winning and losing. And that might flip the House might flip the Senate. So those are some other additional items. 

[00:44:11] Ming Chen: I think at a much more basic level, it’s just like telling, telling your story, telling the story of America. Because, you know, when we talk about all these rhetorical tricks, I mean, I think what it means is that that narrative is gaining a lot of power. And so I think you have to reclaim the narrative, right? You have to tell the counter story which happens to be the real story of what’s happening. This is something that I actually haven’t talked about this publicly, but my daughter she’s like on the brink of being 13, not yet a teenager. It made me really sad that she came back from her well-funded, pretty liberal public school about a month ago crying because she said that in her Mandarin Chinese class, there was a child who was saying that Asian people eat dogs. And then writing swastikas on the chalkboard and singing Nazi songs making fun of the women in the room, I guess they’re girls in the room saying that they’re all lesbian without knowing anything about them. And it just made me really profoundly sad because I’d like to think that a lot of ignorant narrative is because people don’t know better, right? I mean, as an educator, I hope that education will simply solve it. And it made me really sad to hear that again. You know, I’m, I’m on the brink of Berkeley. I basically live in Berkeley, right? So one of the most densely populated PhD overeducated people in America. And to be three generations in and to still have this story being told in the classrooms was really distressing to me. And even more distressing that it isn’t just the like Chinese people that eat dogs as being a stereotype from those who are not educated, but it’s something she might have heard on TV from the highest offices in the land, right? Something she might’ve heard the vice president say, for example. And so I just think it’s so important and doesn’t take education, doesn’t take a law degree, right? To be able to tell that story. And so I was really, really proud that my daughter you know, did file a complaint with the principal that she came home and told us about it. And you know, her two parents who are civil rights and immigration lawyers, [laughter] but also that she’s been like talking to her classmates right, about the fact that that’s not true. That’s not right. She’s been comforting the other kids in the classroom who don’t share the same background that she does. And I feel like that kind of work is just as important. 

[00:46:45] Michael Harris: I want to add something to that. We have to take note of the fact that a lot of these types of comments really vile, racist things and not just about Asians, it’s also some of the things about Black people, young people are saying. Part of it is because it’s very easy to say things like that online because you can do it anonymously and not have to, you know, stand up and back up your comments, so to speak. And another part of it is our culture. We gotta be real about this. When I was growing up, I’m sure you were told this too, as the country became more educated and got more exposed to people of color and more people got higher education, all this crazy stereotypical racist stuff would go away because people would know better. That’s what they told me the whole time I was growing up and now we know that’s not true [audience laughter] because the reverse is happening. It’s growing because some people are making money by putting stuff like that online and selling t-shirts and hats and stuff like that. Or starting, you know, whatever they start. There’s this guy, Alex Jones, who made millions of dollars doing that kind of stuff. So some people are making money off of it. Other people are just buying into that ideological tip and are using that to gain power and influence and clicks. So we just have to be aware that this is a current going on in our society right now. And it’s happening and it’s growing and we, we need to be aware of it and start thinking about ways how we can put it to rest. Cause it’s, it’s happening. 

[00:48:30] Annie Lee: Thank you so much. I do wanna give our audience some time to ask any questions that you all might have. So if you have a burning question to ask our illustrious panel now is your opportunity.

[00:48:45] Audience member: I was wondering how does this with, with the rhetoric of, of Washington pushing for IDs for voting how will that impact on people’s presence at the voting booths and validating their ability to vote?

[00:49:04] Michael Harris: I think what you’re referring to is the Safeguard [SAVE America] Act is now in Congress, and if it’s passed and signed by the president, then it’ll become law. And what it will require is anyone who wants to vote will have to have a photo ID. And even if you registered, you have to prove you’re a citizen. So those two steps are, I think, designed to suppress the vote of people of color. I mean, I think it’s very straightforward. This has been what Republicans have been trying to do for ever since the case that Don just mentioned passed and they were able to start doing this stuff. And I agree. It goes back to the notion that in 20 years, America’s going to be a majority minority country. There’s gonna be more people of color than white people. And I think that I’m just gonna come out and say that freaks them out. It really freaks ’em out. I think a lot of them have lived their whole lifetime where only white people were in charge, running stuff, and they can envision a future not too far off where that might not be the case anymore. And that’s scary. It shouldn’t be. I mean, we’re all the same. It’s all gonna be, you know, and there’s Black Republicans and Black Democrats and there’s Asian Republican. I don’t know why they’re so freaked out about it, but but they are freaked out about it. And a lot of this is to suppress the vote so that they can continue to stay in power and will not have to give up the power that they would lose otherwise.

[00:50:35] Lisa Holder: Yeah, I mean, it’s always been about limiting the franchise, right? And since the time that it expanded beyond white males with property, there’s been a battle to keep it as limited as possible. You know? And when you think about what happened after the Civil War, after the 13th, 14th, and particularly the 15th Amendment were passed and African Americans were allowed to vote, you had a 100 year backlash. Where 10,000 African Americans were murdered and lynched. Most of those were people who were trying to mobilize their communities to enter into the franchise and exercise the right to vote. That’s the retrenchment that we’re seeing being reiterated right now. Right. And we know that during that period, there were all kinds of hoops that, for instance, Black people had to jump through because of those Black Codes where you had to, for instance, prove that you can read this particular statement. Right. Or, you know, just like all kinds of random hoops that you had to jump through. And so when we see these barriers, these gatekeepers, like, oh, you have to have an ID. If this birthright citizenship goes through, no, no, no you can’t bring in your birth certificate. You know, we need some proof of your parent, of your lineage. Right. And it’s really is combined with that narrative and that rhetorical aspect, that Ming was articulating because although in fact we are America. America looks like us, Americans look like us. The alternative narrative where white predominance is the point is always going to be pushed where no, no, no, we are different. We are not normal and we are not America. And so that’s, that’s the narrative piece that all of this leads to. And that’s why this story of storytelling that Ming talked about is so important. And also it is so important to just constantly push back to resist, to vote. To run for office when you look like an American.

[00:52:45] Audience member: My question is, if the executive order passes, what can we do to resist? Because one of the things is it will also disenfranchise women because it’s about proving your identity that matches your birth certificate. Right. And there are really so many people that will not have their names to match their identities. And so what can people do to, to, to counter if that should happen?

[00:53:11] Don Tamaki: The legislative answer? Well, there’ll be court challenges, no doubt 

[00:53:15] Audience member: but, but before, let’s say the midterm election.

[00:53:18] Michael Harris: Call your representative, fax ’em, email ’em, get your friends to do that, because it’s pending in Congress right now.

[00:53:25] Don Tamaki: But elections have consequences is the point. And it people who says, well my vote doesn’t count, doesn’t matter. Everybody, both parties the same. Elections have consequences. I, I guess the only other thing to remember, I keep, you know, repeating this, the solidarity and connectedness bears repeating because the story keeps recycling. It’s very recycled story about voter suppression. You know, the Civil War ended in 1865, 12 years of reconstruction. Lincoln is assassinated shortly after during the beginning of reconstruction and thereafter, you know, a deal was struck in the contested election of 1876. Federal troops are withdrawn from the south and then the voter suppression comes in literacy tests, poll taxes.

[00:54:19] Annie Lee: Mm-hmm. Grandfather clauses.

[00:54:21] Don Tamaki: Yeah. I mean in Virginia. During reconstruction 140,000 formerly enslaved people registered to vote after the collapse of reconstruction it was reduced to 21,000. California had you know, poll taxes. Other states had literacy tests and whatever, and it’s now repeating because folks don’t like the results of an election. The answer is not to, you know, broaden your net and appeal to upfront (?) policy. The answer is to suppress voting, stop people from voting. And so again, it’s a matter of awareness I think we have to realize the game plan. And it makes it so important about who is voted into the dials and levers of the controls that run the country. So that’s critical. 

[00:55:13] Ming Chen: I can jump onto that. go vote. But I think it’s also, you know, it’s early enough to say, get your documents in order. Right? Go and be ready to vote in a way that won’t draw question, right? So you don’t have to wait for the lawsuit. And I will say for that, as someone who spends most of my days working with 20 something year olds who move all over the country, a lot of it is about sort of get your ducks in order, right? So if you don’t have a driver’s license with the current address that matches your name, you can fix that now. So many people who don’t have a normal ID because they never learn how to drive, right? So make sure you go get that document. You mentioned marriage, Anna, and I remember I moved to New York at the same time that I got married and trying to get my name on the document when I was it, you know, it’s like this endless loop, right? Because you’re getting a new ID because of your address. If you don’t have that, you can’t get your social security card, if you don’t have that you can’t validate the marriage certificate, right? There’s just this endless loop. And you have to get all of that in order, right? So I think maybe there needs to be two parts to our voter mobilization this year, right? It’s get yourself ready, sort of like arm up and then vote so that your vote will actually end up counting. 

[00:56:33] Miko Lee: Please check out our website, kpfa.org/program/apexexpress to find out more about our show and our guests tonight. We thank all of you listeners out there. Keep resisting, keep organizing, keep creating, and sharing your visions with the world because your voices are important. Apex Express is produced by Ayame Keane-Lee, Anuj Vaidya, Cheryl Truong, Isabel Li, Jalena Keane-Lee, Miko Lee, Miata Tan, Preti Mangala-Shekar and Swati Rayasam. Tonight’s show was produced by me Miko Lee, and edited by Ayame Keane-Lee. Have a great night.

The post APEX Express – 4.2.26 – Surviving Through Solidarity. appeared first on KPFA.