(film reel clattering) - Welcome to today's national weekly EMS Zoom news briefing.

[background music] I'm Julian Do, co-director of Ethnic Media Services and your moderator for today.

Today's briefing focuses on community healing.

The relentless rise in racial and ethnic hate crimes is front page news for ethnic media: Atlanta's mass shooting targeting Asian salons; brutal attacks on Asian Americans in the subways and on the sidewalks of New York; targeted shootings of African Americans at grocery store in Buffalo and a church in Charleston; shootings targeting Jewish worshiper at synagogue and LGBTQ person at Q Club; cultural genocides of Native Americans in boarding school; and countless attacks against Latino at shopping centers and school.

We could go on and on.

So, the question is, how do people and communities find a way to reconcile with horrific acts perpetrated against them, their families, their communities, let alone the ongoing trauma of structural racism and wars of genocide or states-induced terrorism?

Is there a way to heal?

What approaches can we share with each other?

We are grappling with these questions as journalists.

And, today, we are honored to have four speakers sharing their perspective, research, and lived experiences.

All agree on one key opponent: the importance of documenting and validating the traumas endured.

Our speakers include Helen Zia, author and founder of the Vincent Chin Institute; James Taylor, professor of politics and African-American studies at University of San Francisco; and Nestor Fantini, co-editor at HispanicLA, and also adjunct professor of sociology and former political prisoner in Argentina.

We turn to our first speaker, Helen Zia.

Helen, the floor is yours.

- It's an honor to be on this panel and with the other incredible journalists and co-panelists.

And so, as Julian was saying, this is a time of incredible change, tectonic shifts that are going on that unfortunately have involved violence, division, and things that have resurfaced a lot of the triggering that brings back intergenerational traumas.

And so, I'm gonna talk a little bit today about some of the COVID-related hate and violence that's happened.

You know, the thing about these traumas, even if they are incidents that have happened long ago, they continue in-- you know, they're absorbed not only in our psyches, but in our bodies.

Even though for some people it was new; for many others it was triggering.

And, not just Asian Americans, but violent incidents and hate of any kind.

I mean, we have seen how there's a rise in that kind of hate violence and killings that have affected every marginalized community in America.

The intergenerational trauma goes beyond, you know, direct violence as well.

We know that immigrants and refugees and the vast majority of Asians in America have come here either as immigrants or refugees.

And, in many cases, have been fleeing violence.

So, to find that there is the uncertainty of walking out your door and possibly being killed or having grandma and grandpa go for a walk and wondering whether they're going to come home at all, or as well as the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in this society.

All of these have been forms of violence that Asians in America have experienced.

And so, there was nothing new about it.

However, we are in a period of now three years going on, and no end in sight because as long as the rhetoric goes on about China and Chinese people being the existential threat to America, we know that these kind of hate attacks and violence are just going to continue.

And so, I wanna talk a little bit about 1982.

That's 41 years ago, when there was another pandemic of hate that went on.

Except back then, it was against people who looked Japanese.

And, a young man named Vincent Chin was killed, beaten to death by two white auto workers with a baseball bat.

And, it was a time when China wasn't the enemy.

The view was Japan and America should send nuclear bombs back to Japan.

And, that was in the news, in the overall atmosphere every day, a real climate of anti-Asian hate.

And, this young man, Vincent Chin, was out celebrating his bachelor party when the two white auto workers blamed him for the unemployment and the terrible misery that the economic depression in the Midwest was causing everywhere.

And, I was a young journalist then in Detroit and I had been an auto worker as well and I had been unemployed.

So, I saw the misery that people were experiencing.

But, the rhetoric turned the blame to an external enemy.

And, that was Japan.

But, internally, that meant that all Asians in America had a target on their heads.

And, Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat to his head.

And so, what about the healing?

You know, that was traumatic for all Asians in America.

The feeling that we were all possible targets.

And, I got to know Vincent Chin's mother.

I got involved in that to say, what can we do?

Because the judge in that case, sentenced the two killers who had done this terrible hate killing in front of about a hundred other witnesses.

So, there was no question that they had done it.

And, the judge said, in Detroit, in a depression, in a city that was majority Black and still is, that these are not the kind of men you send to jail and sentenced them to probation.

So, these two killers actually never spent a single day in jail.

But, the trauma also triggered a great sense of inequality, of injustice.

What was that saying for all the Black Americans who were being sentenced to long prison sentences for even jaywalking, let alone for the Asian American community.

What did this mean?

So, I got to know Vincent Chin's mother and her grief, which has been documented through a documentary called "Who Killed Vincent Chin?

", was intense, you know?

Nothing for victims of violence and killings will bring their loved ones back.

Nothing will bring people who have suffered violence back to when they didn't experience that.

But, what made a difference was a community coming together to acknowledge, to say, to tell the world, "This is something that happens to Asian Americans."

This was a terrible thing that happened to Lily Chin's son, Vincent.

And, to then begin to do something about it.

So, part of my work was documenting that, but also being an active agent for change as well and using my journalistic skills to try to help the community have their voice heard; to have Lily Chin who was willing to speak through her grief and really became like a Mamie Till for the Asian American community to say "this happened to my son "and this should not happen to any other family, any other child."

And so, what happened was that she and the Asian American community were able to channel their grief through action, through trying to make a difference.

And, not just Asian Americans coming together, but reaching out and joining with the Black community-- Black, brown, red, white and coming together and actually saying, "We stand together against hate and inequality and injustice to any community."

And, actually began to link the understanding of what happened to Vincent Chin and all of the trauma that had gone on hundreds of years to Asian Americans and other people, link them together and to say, how by standing together we can actually make change.

And so, a new civil rights movement was born out of that, but also through the ethnic media first, which first publicized this, as well as then the broader media, were able to bring more attention.

And, the thing about acknowledging, recognizing, connecting the dots, showing that this was not just a one-off kind of thing, but linking it to history and showing the context to other communities, as well.

So, that was a healing process.

And, the community got stronger.

It got stronger in very concrete ways.

New organizations, new generations of activists working together against racism, against injustice, against hate.

And, that has been resurrected again today.

I mean, I have to say it never actually went away.

But, in this new pandemic of hate and violence, and naming different communities as the enemy, which by the way, also divides us, keeps us apart, and makes it less possible to actually make change.

And, it's the change that is healing.

Thanks.

- So, Professor Taylor?

The floor is yours.

- I was saying thank you, Sandy and Julian both, for having me here over the last year and a half, along with the California Reparations Committee.

My work in it kind of was connected to something in 2006 that San Francisco did under Gavin Newsom called the Slavery Disclosure Ordinance, SDO.

And, you can look that up online.

It's actually a annual report since 2006 where every corporation in the city has to do a deep dive into their own records and determine any ties to slavery, you know, traditionally, and they could voluntarily put money in a fund here in San Francisco.

And, that's been in place since 2006.

The reaction to our efforts in San Francisco and in California when we announced the $5 million recommendation to the board of supervisors and the mayor was from thousands of people!

Fox News, Larry Elder, Leroy Terrell, they found Black faces to criticize it.

None of these people have ever done any serious studies about reparations.

They don't know about the Japanese internment and Executive Order 9066 under FDR.

You know who's strongly supportive of Black reparations in San Francisco?

The Japanese community is.

They're the number one supporters of Black reparations in San Francisco outside of the Black community, and the Jewish community is supportive.

Those are the two allied groups right now.

And, the Japanese community-- I wrote an article about the treatment of Muslims in California, the police-state reaction to 9/11.

And, one of the things I discovered there was that the Japanese community was the leading community to reach out to Muslims, you know, imams, mosques, because they understood what it meant to be a targeted minority group.

I mean, there was 120,000 Japanese in Hawaii where Pearl Harbor happened and they didn't get interned.

But, the 120,000 here in the West Coast were, from here to Los Angeles.

And, that story, I don't think is still fully understood by most Americans.

And, the fact that under Korematsu, it's still the law of the land.

It could happen again because Korematsu was never turned over, alright?

In the state it was fixed, but not at the federal level.

Korematsu is still law, precedent.

And, (paper shuffling) I think when you talk about, you know, reparations, one of the most important cases is what happened to the Japanese of California and the West Coast.

It becomes-- you know, since the '80s when Reagan and Bush, you know, came along with their $20,000 per family, you know, policy, it actually encouraged the Black reparations movement to continue on.

Because the Black reparations movement-- most people don't understand this.

It was the original movement of Black people.

I was cited, I think, in the Washington Post this week, saying that the original Black politics after abolition was reparations, not integration.

Reparations was the focus from the 1880s, the Reconstruction period.

There was a woman named Callie House.

If you look her up on Amazon, there's a book by Mary Frances Perry, I'm sure some of you know who she is; the lawyer, the legal scholar.

She wrote a book called "My Face is Black is True".

It's the story of Callie House, a Black woman in Memphis, who led 300,000 Blacks.

Actually, she joined them.

She didn't lead them.

They were already doing it at the community level.

And then, she and a pastor joined and they become the leaders of this movement, eventually.

And, they sue!

In a case called McAdoo-- I think it's called McAdoo versus Jackson.

I might be wrong.

McAdoo?

I know it's a McAdoo.

I'm a little bit off on the case.

But, there was a reparations case that happened.

It went to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has ruled on reparations and said that the state is sovereign and the state is immune.

So, we're going up against that.

But, what reparations is supposed to be about and where it came from, it goes back to Callie House.

She had a larger following than Martin Luther King.

She sued for seven years as a slave.

She sued the United States Treasury for $56 million in 1899.

She was arrested and incarcerated by the federal government over some bogus mail fraud that they used later to get rid of Marcus Garvey 30 years later.

They used it on Callie House first, and then on Garvey.

People don't know that.

Callie House and Isaiah Dickerson were the two leaders of the movement in Memphis.

And, they used the-- The rationale was because the federal government at the time, after the war, taxed all of the cotton in the South under the Confederacy.

And, it was billions of dollars in today's monies.

And, they were using that money as a retirement fund for the soldiers, for the Union soldiers.

And, Callie House said, "Wait a minute.

We picked the cotton, "not the soldiers who fought the war.

That should be ours."

And so, she sued over the right to that taxed cotton that was Confederate cotton that Black folk picked, that the United States federal government, otherwise, was giving to Union veterans.

California is not about slavery.

There was 300 years of slavery here of the Indian people.

And, people are ignorant about that.

Blacks were enslaved here, as well.

And, even during the-- The biggest issue for Black Californians was the condition of fugitivity, not slavery.

Being a fugitive in California, like in Canada, going to Mexico, the drug war, segregation, schools.

The injury in California is not slavery like it is in Alabama.

It's different; it's more nuanced.

It's more complicated because the Chinese, the Japanese, the Native Indian people all had their own encounters with this same white supremacist reality.

And so, just to wrap it up.

[staticky sounds] We've inspired the world.

There are 14 countries now talking about reparations.

I told you New York, yesterday.

Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Berkeley Unified School district, Berkeley City, Sacramento, all over the world.

Like marijuana and gay marriage, they were unpopular local movement issues from California: Oakland, weed; gay marriage, San Francisco.

They went from those places as unpopular ideas and spread throughout the world.

And, that's what reparations is doing now.

It cannot be stopped.

London Breed can reject it.

Gavin Newsom can reject it in California.

They can't stop what reparations, the movement, that's going to be where people are going, I think over the next 50 years, pushing for this until reparations is fulfilled as a way of healing the broken bones in the Black community.

I'll stop there!

(chuckles) - Thank you so much, Professor Taylor.

I just wanna add one quick point is that the reparations to the Japanese community, Japanese American community, didn't happen without support of the Black community and also the Black political leadership.

Our next speaker is Nestor Fantini, who was a prisoner in Argentina during the Dirty War period from 1974 to '83 under the dictatorship of the military junta.

Nestor, please.

- Thank you, Julian.

Thank you very much for that introduction.

And also, thank you Sandy and all those who are part of this very special meeting.

Before I start, please let me share with you that as co-editor of HispanicLA, along with founder and co-editor, Gabriel Lerner, who happens to be here, as well.

Hello, Gabriel.

We are part of the Stop the Hate campaign that's being spearheaded by the state of California.

Anyway-- so, when we talk about the reconciliation and also restorative justice programs that Julian mentioned, we're not only talking about the rational issues.

We're also dealing with many, many emotions, powerful emotions.

So, let me give you some background information about myself and also about Argentina in the 1970s.

In March 1976, a little background here, the military staged a coup d'état in Argentina.

They arrest the president.

they closed down the Congress; replaced members of the Supreme Court.

And, that was not a "Dirty War."

That was a pure state terrorism.

So, let me pause for a second and tell you about July 5th, 1976.

And, of course, there were many July 5th in that year.

I was in the political prison of Córdoba that was under the jurisdiction of General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, one of the most cruel generals during this experience.

When armed soldiers came into the prison, into the area of the prison where we were held and into the cells.

And, they came making noises, yelling, and they took us to the yard, to the prison's yard, about 50 of us who were taken to the prison yard.

And, we were there.

It was in the middle of the winter.

It was very cold.

Those Argentinian winters are quite cold.

And, at some point, that's when a fellow political prisoner, Raul Bauducco.

We used to call him Paco, Paco Bauducco.

He was a young journalist student.

He fell to the ground.

He fell to the ground and then a non-commissioned officer came and actually started to order him to get up.

The name of this non-commissioned officer as we found out much later is Miguel Ángel Pérez.

And, when Bauducco couldn't get up because he practically fainted, then Pérez walked towards the center of the yard where the officer who was in charge of the office, [Zoom audio glitch] Lieutenant Mones-Ruiz, actually they talked to him and gave him an order.

So, Pérez walked back to where Paco was, pointed the gun to his head and shot him.

Yes, shot him in front of all of us.

Again, we were between 40 and 50 political prisoners there.

And, he shot him.

And, of course, Paco died almost immediately.

And then, Pablo Balustra, and then Hugo Vaca Narvaja, and Florencio Diaz, and the list continues of all those who were killed in the political prison of Córdoba UP1 under the jurisdiction of General Menéndez in 1976.

31 political prisoners.

I was on the trial in 2010, July 2010, when President Videla, former President Videla, General Menéndez, and 28 more military officer who were, in many instances, 26 of them were found guilty of crimes against humanity.

Don't get me wrong.

Don't get me wrong!

I strongly support reconciliation.

"I strongly support reconciliation."

Let me emphasize that.

And also, restorative justice programs because they are a humane alternative to a very dysfunctional criminal justice system, especially the one we have here in the U.S. With more than 2 million people in prison with institutional racism, that leads to about 60% of the prisoners being from members of a minority groups, African Americans, Latinos, with a recidivism rate of about 77%.

How could we not support restorative justice programs that are a true alternative to punishment, to revenge?

However, and let me also emphasize that, "however", one-size-fits-all programs and initiatives, in my personal opinion, do not work.

Reconciliation in Mandela's South Africa with Reconciliation Commission may have been a relatively successful alternative.

No doubts.

At least in creating political stability in that country.

But, in Argentina, we're talking of different historical circumstances.

And, if we go to Larry Siegel, a criminologist that talks about restorative justice programs, there are three prerequisites for this restorative process and reconciliation to succeed.

And, one that's fundamental is that the offender needs to acknowledge the harm that he or she have caused.

And, another one is that the offender should actually provide material restitution and symbolic reparation.

In Argentina, in every single trial, in every single trial that took place since 1985, the offenders refused to acknowledge their guilt.

They refused to provide information about the whereabouts of the 30,000 disappeared and the whereabouts of the 500 babies that were appropriated.

There's no acknowledgement.

There's no shame.

There is no apology.

Martha Minow, and she's a brilliant human rights scholar who teaches at Harvard, talking about the reconciliation, she focuses on two dimensions.

One being the state; the other one, the individual.

And the state, of course, as the embodiment of rational society, has responsibility to address the harm caused to society.

Crimes against humanity cannot, cannot and should not go unpunished.

However, when it comes to the individual, it becomes a different story.

[background music] And, to finish, for many in Argentina, for key institutions including the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, there could be no reconciliation, no forgiveness, until the military acknowledge their crimes.

And also, until they disclose the whereabouts of the 30,000 disappeared and the 500 babies that only about 132, I believe, have been recovered.

Thank you.

- Well, thank you all of the speakers.

Thank you Helen, Professor Taylor, and Nestor.

Judging from the amount of information and the emotion and the passions from speakers, [background music] this is truly is a topic that we should continue.

And, I think we just barely scratching the surface.

And, it's so unfortunate that we lost that right and we have a voice from the Native American community.

And, thank you all the media colleagues and everyone who joined this call today and this meeting is over.

And, wish everybody a great, a happy weekend.

Thank you.

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