COURAGE

Social Justice: Eric Yamamoto creates a framework for conciliation

Anger and confusion about race has been called America’s number one problem. University of Hawai'i Law School professor Eric Yamamoto thinks so. He’s seen some Americans retaliate against fellow citizens of Arabic heritage in their anger over the September terrorist attack on the United States. He fears that strict national security measures could trample on civil liberties. He knows it’s happened before—to Japanese Americans during World War II.

For 15 months during the early ’80s, Yamamoto volunteered on the legal team attempting to overturn the wartime internment conviction of Fred Korematsu. The team succeeded, and that decision along with a 1987 case swept out the legal foundation of the WWII Supreme Court decision that justified internment as military necessity. As a result, Congress passed the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which called for a presidential apology and reparations for Japanese Americans who had been interned. Yamamoto received the Korematsu Civil Rights Award for his efforts. The lesson: “We must not scapegoat other people. Both U.S. citizens and our courts need to be vigilant about protecting civil liberties while addressing genuine threats to national security.”

Yamamoto addresses that topic in his books, Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese-American Internment and Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America. The latter, named one of the top 10 books on human rights, social justiceand civil rights published in North America, deals with interracial discrimination—one group using social, economic or political structures to subordinate another. The wounds such discrimination inflicts—interracial justice grievances, Yamamoto calls them—are being overlooked in the courts’ fervor to outlaw race consciousness.

“The majority of the justices say that to analyze historical and current racial differences can actually damage the nation’s interest in racial harmony,” he says. “The court is mistaken. We are seeing more, not less, interracial tension across America.” The anger it generates exists in areas like housing, education, business and law. Because the courts turn a blind eye, old wounds remain open.

“Racial discrimination isn’t motivated purely by racial dislike, but more by self-interest and past actions,” Yamamoto explains. “We have to find out what justice grievances lie beneath the surface of the immediate conflict and set about healing the wounds.”

To do that, Yamamoto proposes a four-point framework of racial conciliation—recognition, responsibility, reconstruction and reparations. “It’s not a magic formula. It’s a method and a language for asking questions and moving the process forward. People have to learn how to do this. It’s going to take some disciplined and serious work.” The courts should encourage discussions about racial justice grievances, but the law itself is too narrow, so most of the process must take place outside a legal context, he says.

Surprising words from a lawyer, but Yamamoto didn’t plan to enter law when he majored in humanistic studies in UH’s experimental ’70s New College. The turbulent times—Vietnam war protests, the breakdown of communities, stirrings of the Native Hawaiian movement—and discussions with his father, a UH professor who taught race relations, profoundly influenced the thoughtful young man immersed in Nietzsche and Zen Buddhism. He decided to study law at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall to “shape how communities would be.” After the Korematsu case, Yamamoto joined a Hawai‘i law firm. He also served on the boards of the Legal Aid Society of Hawai‘i and the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation and was counsel to Alu Like and the Women’s Health Center. In 1985, he joined the UH law school faculty. He’s assisted Native Hawaiian Homelands trust beneficiaries, sovereignty activists and the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace. He’s received the UH Presidential Citation for Excellence in Teaching twice and been named Outstanding Professor of Law three times. This spring, he will hold the Haywood Burns Chair for Civil Rights at the City University of New York.

Yamamoto prefers to remain in the background. “Sometimes having less of a profile makes it easier to help people accomplish their goals,” he says. Still, he hopes his framework will get people talking to each other about racial justice. “It can only make our country stronger,” he says.