Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Screening of the film Reparations by Jon Osaki, followed by a panel featuring Jovan Scott Lewis and Don Tamaki, both members of the state of California's Reparations Task Force, the first state-level reparations commission in the country.
Moderated by Lok Siu, Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by: Asian American Research Center
Co-sponsored by: African and African American Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Asian American Law Journal, Institute of Governmental Studies, Othering & Belonging Institute
The U.S. is as segregated today as it was in the 1940’s. The historic exclusion of African Americans from equal education, employment, the benefits of the New Deal, federally insured home loans, and other opportunities that created America’s middle class has resulted in Black households having nine times less in wealth than White households. It has produced huge disparities that persist in housing, houselessness, healthcare, education, policing, and criminal justice, among others.
California is the first and thus far the only state to examine the compounding consequences of this multi-generational harm and to consider how to address them. In 2020, the state of California established the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans The work of the Task Force is informed by and builds on the successful organizing for redress for Japanese American incarceration.
Task Force members Jovan Scott Lewis (Associate Professor of Geography, UC Berkeley) and Donald K. Tamaki (Senior Counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP) will discuss the connections between Asian American and Black American communities, histories, and resistance, and suggest how people can get involved in this growing reparations movement.
Click here to read an article in the Guardian quoting Don Tamaki and analyzing the parallels between these movements, "Think reparations are impossible? The story of Japanese Americans proves otherwise" (Sept 4, 2023).
Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press)He studies Black people's lived experience of racial capitalism and underdevelopment. His research, both in Jamaica and Tulsa, OK, has been centrally concerned with the question of reparations as a means of understanding the historical constitution, but also the future, of Blackness as a lived experience and political project. Through analyses of injury, violence, repair, debt, and a critique of community, his work advances radical and productive reparative frameworks. He is currently working on his third book project that serves as an explicit examination of these themes.
Donald K. Tamaki is a Senior Counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP. Prior to January 1, 2021, he was the firm’s Managing Partner. He is the recipient of the ABA Spirit of Excellence Award (2020), the National Asian Pacific Bar Association Trailblazer Award (2003), and the State Bar of California Loren Miller Award (1987). He received his B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley