Scapegoats—By George Takei
For Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, actor and activist George Takei reflects on Asian American history.
Despite all its promises of equality and due process under law, America has always had its scapegoats.
The term “scapegoat” comes from the Bible in the Book of Leviticus— which many believe also has some poor things to say about shellfish, tattoos, polyester blends and homosexuality.
Leviticus describes the “escaped goat.”
The scapegoat refers to one of a pair of goats released into the wilderness. The first carries with it all of the community’s sins and impurities while the other is sacrificed.
Some say the “escaped” goat—the one cast out—morphed into the term “scapegoat.”
In modern parlance, a scapegoat is a person or group made to bear the blame for others or suffer in their place. Something goes badly wrong, and society looks for someone to blame.
120,000 scapegoats
I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was a child my entire community became scapegoats. The attack by Imperial Japan upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—a “day that will live in infamy”—made most Americans look upon anyone with a Japanese name or face as the enemy.
We were blamed for the attack, called Fifth Columnists, even suspected of plotting sabotage that had not yet occurred. The government perpetuated prejudice and hatred toward us as official policy.
For example, the California Attorney General at the time, Earl Warren—who went on to become governor and then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—singled us out ruthlessly for his own political gain.
When it was clear that there had been no acts of sabotage on the West Coast, he insinuated publicly that was just further evidence that a big attack by the Japanese in America was imminent.
You can’t win with that kind of perverse logic.
When the government froze our bank accounts, restricted our travel, and put a curfew upon our community, it only reinforced existing public sentiment against us.
It was far easier after that to simply order our evacuation from the West Coast and to move us en masse to barbed wire “relocation centers”—what became America’s ten Japanese American concentration camps.
As a child, I didn’t understand what was happening to us. I didn’t know it back then, but over in Europe a horrifying scapegoating of Jews, as well as Roma people, homosexuals and other already marginalized groups, was leading to the Holocaust.
Lynchings and Exclusions
As a young adult I became more interested in what had led America to lock up 120,000 of us—two-thirds of whom were citizens—without charge or trial for so many years.
I learned the scapegoating of Asians in America was nothing new.
May is AANHPI Heritage Month, so I want to take a moment to zero in on the history that led Asian minorities in the U.S. to come together as a group and demand America fulfill its promise of justice and equality.
Singling out and punishing a group based on their race or national origin was an established part of our laws for decades, long before the internment even happened.
The Chinese American community knows this well.
During the mid-1800s, Chinese immigrants arrived in large numbers due to the Gold Rush in California. But as gold became scarcer, competition for it increased and animosity against the Chinese in America grew.
Chinese workers were blamed for driving wages lower.
Anti-Chinese sentiment exploded in 1871 in Los Angeles, when some 500 people attacked the old Chinatown based on a false rumor that the Chinese were killing Whites indiscriminately.
By the end, 19 Chinese immigrants had been murdered, including 15 who were publicly lynched by the mob.
But even that violence didn’t stem the scapegoating of the Chinese. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew so powerful that Congress ultimately passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all immigration from China, first for a period of ten years and then permanently beginning in 1902.
That bigoted law remained in place until 1943 when it was finally repealed, after China became an ally in World War II.
It took another decade for Chinese and other Asian Americans and Pacific Islander immigrants to gain the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens, and another 13 years after that before we won full suffrage rights with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Model Minority Scapegoats
During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a stereotype about Asian Americans grew, fostered by the State Department who began to tout “Asian American success stories” to push back on the idea that America was racist and to build better relations with its Asian allies.
While eliminating certain restrictive immigration requirements, a law called the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 gave preferential treatment to highly educated, successful immigrants from Asia.
The myth that followed argued Asians were a “model minority” that other minority groups should emulate, when in fact a subsection of them were selectively admitted with a high chance of success.
The myth, which still is repeated today, has two very big problems.
First, it flattens and homogenizes Asians across national origin, socio-economic and educational background. This permits society to overlook the dire poverty of certain Asian groups, including the Hmong and second wave of Vietnamese escaping the wars and conflicts in their home country.
Second, it is used to put other minorities down, based on the false example that if one group of formerly despised racial minorities can make it in America, there’s no excuse for any other.
Remember the parable of the escaped goat carrying away America’s sins?
Here, the manufactured myth of the Asian model minority purported to leave America off the hook for its historic discrimination, not only against Asians themselves but against all minorities.
The Murder of Vincent Chin
Scapegoating switched back to my own community in the 1980s, when Japan was viewed as a rising threat to American predominance in the auto and other industries and “Japan bashing” became a common strategy among politicians.
On June 23, 1982, a Chrysler plant supervisor and his stepson, who was a laid-off autoworker, decided to make an example of Vincent Chin, who was out enjoying his bachelor party the night before his wedding. They beat him with a baseball bat and hurled racial epithets, mistakenly presuming he was Japanese and therefore responsible for their economic woes.
Chin died of his injuries, but there was a grave injury of justice still to come.
The judge who heard the case of the murderers let them off with just a $3,000 fine and probation, reasoning the killers had no prior records, that they “weren't the kind of men you send to jail,” and that you “don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
The killing and the slap on the wrist sentence provoked national outrage and galvanized the Asian American community into political activism.
Arabs and Muslims Blamed for 9/11
The pattern of blaming whole minority communities for the actions of others repeated in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. The first victim of “revenge” was an entrepreneur and franchisee in Mesa, Arizona named Balbir Singh Sodhi.
Sodhi wore a turban because he was of the Sikh faith—but was profiled as an Arab Muslim by his killer. The murderer told friends he was “going to go out and shoot some towel-heads" on the day of the 9/11 attacks.
But this time—in part due to the activism of the Asian American community—justice would not be racially biased. The killer was sentenced to death which was later commuted to life in prison, where he died last year.
Nor would other communities stand by this time to permit the scapegoating of another.
The Japanese American community was among the first to stand in solidarity with Arab Muslims and demand racial profiling not happen this time around as a matter of official policy.
The late Norm Mineta, who was then the Secretary of Transportation, had experienced racial profiling and scapegoating as a young man in a Japanese American internment camp. He declared the government would not racially profile and presume the guilt of Arab Americans at our airports and other transportation hubs.
Not on his watch.
Scapegoating Is Still Happening
I wish I could say that the days of scapegoating Asian Americans for the problems of the United States had ended. But as we saw during the Covid-19 epidemic, unscrupulous politicians used racial biases and tropes to further their own political agendas, at enormous cost to innocent lives.
Ex-President Trump began to call it the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu.” He effectively put a target on everyone in America who looked Chinese.
Anti-Asian hate crimes soared, with horrific public attacks upon innocent and often elderly victims.
The then-President had unleashed hate.
Trump continues his campaign to this day, using racist names to belittle his own former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao—the Chinese American wife of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Become a Part of the Solution
Every member of the public has a part to play to help prevent scapegoating, which when allowed to fester and grow, can lead to violence, deaths and even genocide. It’s not hard to know when a group is being unfairly blamed, but it takes a bit of courage to speak out against it.
Scapegoating only works if politicians believe they will gain more political value from attacking a community than they will suffer political cost.
That is why raising that political cost for the scapegoating of others—whether it’s the Asian American community or other favorite targets today such as the Jewish or the trans community—is essential to defeating the hate before it’s allowed to spread.
Identify scapegoating.
Call it out.
Tell others you won’t stand for it. Say that you stand with the community under attack.
Together we can help stop the hate and turn back the threat before it grows and overwhelms our society once more. As we have learned time and again, silence in the face of such attacks equates to tacit acceptance and ultimately to complicity.
America must learn to solve its problems, legion as they are, without turning and blaming some of the most vulnerable among us.
I believe this is possible—I have seen it work.
But we must all remain vigilant, outspoken, and courageous allies when they come for any one of us.
The real engine behind the scapegoating by so many of the white men and women of America is to divert attention so people won’t get any ideas about targeting them, the white race, hating and blaming them, scapegoating them should the minorities become the majorities. All the signs are here. Book banning. Changing history. Hating and demonizing groups that are not Christian Nationalists, outlandish conspiracy theories are all part of the push to prevent the populace from looking in the direction of white people as the ones most responsible for bringing genocide, wars, and the destruction of the environment of all living beings.
This is the whole thing in a nutshell.
This is disgusting. We have done heinous things to so many people. It is not getting better until everyone votes these people out of office. Until everyone is represented.