Esteemed lawyer Donald Tamaki won reparations for Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. Now he’s working to bring reparations to Black people in California — and perhaps the nation.
Overview:
The first body of its kind, the Californian Reparations Task Force held hearings around the state to determine if the state should compensate descendants of enslaved Californians and what it might look like.
When Donald Tamaki got a call from the Governor’s Office asking him to interview for a position on California’s Reparations Task Force, at first he hesitated.
Tamaki is not Black. He has never identified as Black. And, to his knowledge, he is not a descendant of formerly enslaved African Americans. He is an acclaimed San Francisco-based lawyer whose parents were among 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. He won a landmark Supreme Court case that forced the federal government to pay reparations for internment camp survivors.
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Growing up in Oakland in the late 1960s, Tamaki witnessed the burgeoning Black Consciousness movements, in which Black activists fought for fair housing laws in California and against workplace discrimination against Black people.
The parallels between that movement’s goals and the Japanese American struggle for equality in California — especially WWII-era bigotry that branded them as “un-American” — helped convince Tamaki to join the groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind task force.
“There’s no equivalence between 400 years of oppression and four years in a concentration camp that Japanese Americans went through, but the histories do intersect,” Tamaki says.
“I realized after joining the task force that whatever prejudice that was directed at Asian Americans and Japanese Americans, in particular, was really just a subchapter in a racial pathology that really began long before Asian Americans arrived on these shores.”
California is the first of the 50 U.S. states and territories to launch a reparations task force for Black descendants of enslaved people. Black Californians comprise a little over 5% of the state’s population, with many residents having migrated from the South through the 1970s. The California Reparations Task Force has been charged with studying the feasibility of compensation for descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans.
Its nine-member body of elected officials, professors, and a theologian — all Black, with the exception of Tamaki.
Japanese Americans made up less than 1 percent of the US population from the 1940s to the 1960s, with the majority of them living in California. Their uprooting — from their own homes and communities to makeshift government camps in remote areas of Utah, Wyoming, and Oregon —began right after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
I don’t have the lived experience to be Black, but we do know something about racial profiling.
Donald Tamaki
Even though most of the families were either naturalized or native-born American citizens, the U.S. government didn’t want to take chances that they might sympathize with the Japanese imperial government. So the Roosevelt administration forcibly relocated entire communities, sending them to live in hastily converted fairgrounds, racetracks, and livestock stalls.
“My family owned a four-flat hotel for immigrants right in the center of San Francisco’s Japan Town,” Tamaki says. “By the 1960s, Japan Town was reduced from 44 blocks to four. ”The community was just evicted.”
“I don’t have the lived experience to be Black, but we do know something about racial profiling,” he says. “We do know something about being targeted.”
In the 1980s, Tamaki helped reopen Korematsu v. United States, a case that led to a formal apology from the federal government for harm against the Japanese American political detainees and $20,000 in restitution for living survivors. While Tamaki believes that it’s difficult to determine how vindication looks, careful attention to civil rights issues is critical.
So far, the California Reparations Task Force has held 27 contentious hearings throughout California starting in 2021.
The discussions were based on the International Reparations Framework, which lays out five forms of reparations: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition.
In June 2023, the Task Force released a 1,100-page final report detailing the history of discriminatory practices that harmed generations of Black Californians. The report provides national and regional analyses, and includes a range of recommendations, including things like minimum-wage hikes and proposals to help communities deal with climate change. But it doesn’t explicitly describe what a successful reparations program might look like.
“The report, in and of itself, was a compromise,” Tamaki says. “Sometimes the discussion was hard (and) was probably very hurtful,” Tamaki says. “What we did say is, ‘Legislature, here’s 115 recommendations. Legislate and come up with an approach spanning years. In good economies and bad.”
For Tamaki, however, educating the public about what reparations are — and aren’t — is critical.
“The most common objections to reparations, which, I’m sure you’ve heard them — the litany of ‘It’s too late.’ ‘This is all about slavery’ or ‘It’s too much; the government can’t afford this,’” he says. “Another one is ‘It’s not my fault. I was not an enslaver and discriminating against anybody. Why should I, as a taxpayer, have to pay for this?’” But, he says, it’s a matter of justice for people who have suffered historical wrongs.
“What I realized is that the last two years won’t mean anything unless the next two years and the years to follow mean something.”
