I was going to post about this image and text. I really wanted to.
It’s truly an amazing photo (by freelance photographer Johnny Nguyen), with commentary by Devonte’s mom, who noted that the officer, Bret Barnum, had “asked Devonte why he was crying. [Devonte’s] response about his concerns regarding the level of police brutality toward young black kids was met with an unexpected and seemingly authentic (to Devonte), ‘Yes. (sigh) I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ The officer then asked if he could have one of his hugs.” (Devonte had been holding a sign saying “Free Hugs.”)
I was planning to write that sometimes it is meaningful to apologize for actions one isn’t personally responsible for. Barnum works in Portland, not Ferguson. I wanted to talk about the way “I’m sorry” can matter, even though we’ve previously said on the site that you can’t apologize for someone else’s prejudice. (See our Barilla pasta post about the American subsidiary limply trying to apologize for the Italian company chairman’s homophobia.) I was all set to make a joke about last week’s Oregonian headline, “Portland Police Arrest 35 in Black Friday Vegan Strip Club Riot,” which is so Portlandia I cannot even, pointing out that obviously Portland cops have a different experience of civic unrest than Ferguson cops, and Not All Cops and yadda yadda. But then it turned out that Barnum was one of 31 Portland cops who “liked” a Facebook photo showing a Portland Police Department badge wrapped in an “I am Darren Wilson” bracelet, so I won’t be posting about virality and symbolism and apologies on behalf of someone else. Because I forgot for a second, in my own desperate need for a feel-good story, that knee-jerk reacting to imagery — positive and negative — is not generally productive. And not what we do best here at SorryWatch.
But I’ll use the Darren Wilson and Eric Garner non-indictments and protests as a jumping-off point to talk about history. These days a lot of people are looking to the Federal government in the hope of addressing current miscarriages of justice. I don’t know that these quests will be successful. I don’t know if there will be Justice Department investigations.
It was always clear to Black Americans that racism is systemic. A lot of white Americans (ME) thought they understood this fact, but as it turns out, being shocked is a sign of privilege. And I started thinking about a spectacular children’s book I just read called Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain by Russell Friedman (a prolific children’s non-fiction writer and author of a Newbery-Medal-winning biography of Abraham Lincoln). Angel Island was “the Ellis Island of the West,” where almost all of the 20th century Asian immigrants to America first arrived. I think of myself as a clueful, educated person, and lived in San Francisco in the ’90s, and I’ve been hiking and picnicking on Angel Island, I had NO CLUE of the horridness that went on there.
The book opens with a newly-minted Park Ranger patrolling the island in 1970, after it was closed to the public, finding a falling-down wooden shack absolutely COVERED with Chinese graffiti (and also a smidge of Japanese, Korean, Russian, Punjabi, Spanish, German and English). The building turned out to have been a detention center where dejected detainees — mostly Chinese — wrote poems and stories all over the walls.
The book is filled with snippets of these poems with translations — some are very beautiful and all are very sad.
The ranger, the son of immigrants himself, risked his job to save the building from the Parks department’s desire to wreck it. He knew it was important history. He reached out to academics, and gradually Asian-American activists began working to educate people on the history of Angel Island immigration and the way immigrants were treated.
Nearly forty years later, the building was landmarked and a museum of immigration opened on the island. And in 2012, the book says, the Federal Government officially apologized for its treatment of Chinese-Americans.
Alas, this isn’t strictly true. The government issued a formal statement of regret, which as we have discussed in these pages, is not the same thing as an apology. The government has expressed regret for treating other groups of people horridly: As CNN enumerates, it has expressed regret to African-Americans for slavery, to Japanese-Americans for internment camps, to Native Americans for mistreatment, and to Hawaiians for overthrowing their monarchy.
It is inspiring that the first Chinese-American in Congress, Judy Chu, was instrumental in getting the US Government to acknowledge wrongdoing. (The official statement enumerates a very long list of sins committed against Chinese immigrants, then states “That the House of Representatives regrets the passage of legislation that adversely affected people of Chinese origin in the United States because of their ethnicity,” but concludes with a disclaimer saying HEY THIS DOESN’T MEAN YOU GET TO SUE US, which kind of dilutes its power just a wee bissel.)
But: It’s good that the government expressed regret — even if a full apology would be better — and talked about the horrid way it treated Chinese immigrants and citizens. It is good that at my advanced age, I could be educated by a children’s book (a CHILDREN’S BOOK!) about history that occurred 6.1 miles from my former backyard. I do believe that we’re never too old to learn. But whether we’re able to change our attitudes moving forward is an open question. Despite the Federal government regretting slavery, life is still unequal for Black people in America. Redress is still an open question.
And that said: Attitudes do change, incrementally.
I feel pretty hopeless about justice right now. Justice would be better than an apology which would be better than regret. But I also don’t want to negate the fact that change can happen and tolerance and understanding can grow. Maybe enough people like me are still being taught about other people’s lives that there’s reason to hope.
