The Righting of Racism in America

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota

Recently in a very historic case, a Nikkei from Hawai'i, named Bruce Yamashita won a case against the Officer Commission School of the U.S. Marine Corps. After a five-year struggle to expose the discrimination and racism surrounding his dismissal along with a simultaneous gathering of support groups throughout the Nikkei, Asian Pacific Islander, and even cross-cultural communities, he, and in a sense, we, the Nikkei community, have won a significant victory in exposing some of the racism that had been institutionalized in many aspects of our society.

I recently attended a discussion he gave on campus in the faculty center, at the site of the Xicana/o studies protest last spring. There I heard as he recounted the tale of his treatment by the commanding officers, who treated him with a full range of discriminatory statements, and acts, from the calling of him by names of Japanese products (i.e.. "Hey, Private Honda, Toshiba, Toyota, Sony, etc.) to overt statements of prejudice (as when the officer in charge said basically "Hey Yamashita, we kicked your ass in World War II"- kind of an ironic statement if you'll note the "your" where Yamashita becomes associated as a Japanese instead of as an American, and especially notable since Yamashita's relatives had been in the 100th/442nd on the side of the US). Officers forced him to wear a dirty uniform to a review board, and other instances occurred that only served to discredit his skills. At the end of the officer candidate school, some 4 out of the 5 people of color in his class were called before his commanding officer and dismissed, citing a "lack of leadership qualities."

So he fought back, and in his fight, he fought a battle that would involve a long and drawn out legal struggle that, for the next 5 years, sapped his resources and drained him at times both psychologically and financially. His foes had become the military administration, and his greatest obstacle involved the admittal of racism within the officer training school, within the military establishment, and, in a sense, within the entire governmental system in America. He had a long way to go.

Listening to him tell his tale, I couldn't help but be moved by the enormity of his struggle, and the size of the problem he confronted put me on the verge of tears. The kind of long struggle he became involved with reopened memories in my mind, of incidents in my childhood when kids would ride by and shout derogatory statements at me, of racism that I experienced growing up, and even of an incident that happened to me last year at UCLA, when two college youths in a car drove by and yelled "Hey, Nip!" before I could respond and counterattack. I also remembered about a racist incident that happened in the UCLA Freshman Summer Program some two years ago, where students burned and scrawled derogatory comments on the door of some Vietnamese students in the program, and of the incident earlier this year, where a Japanese Graduate student received a hate letter through inter-campus mail, that had been sent from the UCLA Medical Center. To hear Yamashita's story was to come to terms with the subtle racism that has affected and continues to affect our community, here at UCLA and especially when you step outside of the comfortable environments we've created for ourselves.

America is a large place, as anyone who has traveled extensively will tell you, and the racism that pervades through the rest of the country can and still does affect us, as the Vincent Chin murder exemplifies, or as the recent Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Sacramento Chapter fire-bombing reveals to us. People like Bruce Yamashita have revealed the way for us, and demonstrated, by example, the path we need to take in order to correct the wrongs that afflict our community. We must go forward in our struggles, but in order to do so, we must realize our past and where our community is at. Only by recognizing the barriers we still have to overcome will we be able to press forward to assume our rightful position and place in this land we call America.

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