"If San Francisco Wants Reparations, Include Chinese People Whose Ancestors It Viciously Harmed" by Daniel Guss
Long ago, groups of disadvantaged people were harmed by wealthy people, corporations and governments from sundry abuses. In theory, reparations are a wholesale way to compensate modern day disadvantaged groups for those long-ago abuses with cash or other remuneration paid by everyone, ironically including the disadvantaged and future generations, none of whom caused those injustices, but who may have benefitted from them.
That said, today comes the news that San Francisco wants to compensate each Black resident with a one-time $5 million payment and supplemental income to all low-income residents for the next 250 years. (Los Angeles and other major urban centers have insincerely teased this idea in recent years, largely for publicity purposes, though direct government theft of Black-owned land, such as Bruce’s Beach in LA, was recently remedied with a $20 million settlement to the descendants of its earlier owners.)
So hey, go for the reparations, San Francisco Board of Supervisors!
But while you’re at it, don’t you dare forget your long history of maliciously harming others, including but not limited to the ancestors of your Chinese population, who should be equally compensated, as well.
The first checks to Chinese San Franciscans should go to the descendants of Lee Yick, who immigrated to California in 1861. After 22 years running his laundry business named Yick Wo, the Supervisors — the same group endeavoring to pay reparations today — said he could not run the business in a wooden building due to safety concerns.
Fair enough. But safety wasn’t the real issue; it was just an excuse to inhibit the prosperity of Chinese immigrants, including but not limited to Mr. Yick, due to the racism of people already in San Francisco.
One could operate a laundry in a wooden building, but it required a permit… from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
But here was their racist twist: at the time, roughly 95 percent of the 320 laundries in the area operated in wood buildings. Of those, two thirds were owned by Chinese immigrants, almost all of whom applied for a permit.
Only one of the permits granted went to a Chinese owner.
Of the roughly 80 non-Chinese owners who applied for the same permit, 79 were granted.
Justifiably pissed-off, Mr. Yick kept running his laundry, and soon found himself convicted and fined ten dollars for the violation. He bravely refused to pay the fine and was sent to jail. He then sued for a writ of habeas corpus to hold the San Francisco government answerable for his imprisonment.
The case, well-known in legal circles, is Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), and you can read about it here.
Little did Mr. Yick know that he was making American legal history, with his name to be spoken in sophisticated circles more than a century later, as his case was the first one in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that while a law may appear to be fair to everyone on its surface, its application was discriminatory, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
In lay terms, the blatant racism of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was busted cold. It fucked with the wrong person, Mr. Yick, who fought back and won.
Mr. Yick’s struggle was hardly the only instance of American governments’ discrimination against Chinese immigrants. In 1882, it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which sand-bagged the same people for the same reasons, just as discriminatory practices at American colleges and universities do to this day against applicants who are rejected for admission despite overwhelming merit.
As for reparations to the Black population in San Francisco, it is being studied by a panel appointed by its elected officials, so anyone there who opposes it essentially already supported reparations with their vote, or failure to vote, in recent elections.
If San Francisco moves forward with reparations to its Black residents — and perhaps it should — it owes the same payout to every descendent harmed by San Francisco’s discrimination against its 19th century Chinese laundry owners, including but not limited to those of Mr. Yick, and every victim of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and every other misapplied law, to every disadvantaged group.
To exclude them would be discriminatory, and possibly challenged in court.
Good luck with all of that, San Francisco, and everywhere else the subject surfaces.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He is City Editor for Mayor Sam, Featured Contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)