Please, Stephen Chapman, cease using Japanese-Americans and their vaunted success story as a lesson for blacks on how to overcome anti-black racism
(July 11 column, ”Clarence Thomas and two formulas for black progress”). As a Japanese-American who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1949 and found both the housing and job markets circumscribed against me until the civil rights movements of the 1950s and `60s began to attack racial barriers for all people of color, I disagree with your notion that I somehow earned my way into acceptance.
My bachelor`s degree convinced neither prospective employers nor landlords of my suitability for work or housing. I worked for a decade as a parts inventory clerk and lived in apartment buildings owned by Japanese-Americans. I supported the civil rights movement and marched in Jackson, Miss., and Milwaukee. It took the law, two exceptional employers and an improved racial climate to enable me to earn a reasonable income so I could save enough to buy a two-flat.
Blacks, unfortunately, continue to suffer harsher oppression than other people of color. Jobs and housing continue to be circum-scribed for them by various devices, the latest being the fake issue of quotas. We Japanese-Americans had to endure but a generation or so of discrim-ination, i.e., all-white quotas. For blacks, it was centuries of slavery and brute oppression.
I do not know what it will take to redress this evil. But I do know that we Japanese-Americans owe much of our ”success” to the courage and vision of the civil rights movement.
