San Francisco apologises for racism against Chinese-Americans
- San Francisco becomes the fourth California city to apologise for historical wrongs against residents of Chinese descent
- City approved apology after proposal was submitted by high school student and friends, who researched city’s history of racism
Dennis Casey Wu, a student at Lowell High School in San Francisco, did not know much about his city’s history of racism against Chinese-Americans.
But when he saw nearby Antioch apologise for the 1876 burning of its Chinatown by white residents, he thought: what about San Francisco?
Wu and his friends started researching. They concluded that San Francisco also needed to apologise to Chinese-Americans. They took their proposal to the city’s Board of Supervisors, which unanimously approved the apology on Tuesday.
“I feel that this is the history that people need to learn,” Wu, who is Chinese-American, said at a committee meeting last week. “I know some people are going to say that an official apology is merely performative activism, but personally, I feel the apology would be notable, as it would be an important step in advocating for social justice and equity.”
Long before it became a tourist attraction and one of the biggest ethnic enclaves in the nation, San Francisco’s Chinatown was one of the only places in the city that Chinese-Americans could live, due to exclusionary housing policies.
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US city apologises for destroying Chinatown in 1887 arson attack
For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese-Americans in San Francisco were persecuted by city officials who banned gongs, prohibited the transport of goods with carrying poles known as yeo ho and forced hundreds of Chinese-owned laundries to close.