New Black history holiday good for Washington. But don’t slight this minority group
Establishing Juneteenth as an official holiday was a commendable move by the Washington Legislature to memorialize a pivotal date in Black history. Too many Washingtonians don’t know the significance of June 19, 1865, the date that American slavery truly ended, nearly three years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Juneteenth is when news of freedom finally reached the last enslaved Blacks in Texas. A bill making it our 11th state legal holiday is sure to win the governor’s signature, having passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support.
There’s just one problem: A less complicated, less expensive historical recognition for another minority group stalled in the Senate before a cut-off deadline last month. It simply seeks to establish January as Chinese American History Month and encourages (not requires) public schools to observe it in some way.
The bill’s derailment was puzzling since it passed a Senate committee unanimously. Asian American proponents felt slighted at a time when they’re already feeling vulnerable and misunderstood, reeling from a national wave of violence. In Tacoma, police arrested a teenager this month, the result of a hate crime investigation after a couple was attacked while walking in broad daylight.
Now Senate Bill 5264 is making a miraculous return in the last two weeks of the session, proving again that nothing ever really dies in Olympia.
Senate leaders extended the cut-off so that Chinese-American History Month can come to a floor vote before the end of this week. A spokesman for Senate Democrats told us the bill “sort of got lost in the shuffle” early in a session dominated by multiple emergencies including COVID-19.
Resurgent violence against Asian Americans is what’s causing the bill to get a second look now. “I count myself in the group that has not been awake to that problem, but I’m not asleep anymore,” Senate Majority Leader Marko Liias said in a mea culpa after the original deadline passed.
Legislators should see this proposal through, like they did with Juneteenth.
Chinese Americans have been indispensable to our state’s heritage, culture and economic success. Their backbreaking labor brought the transcontinental railroad to Tacoma in the late 1800s. They gave us America’s first Chinese American governor, Gary Locke, who served two terms (1997-2005). In between and since, they’ve excelled in medicine, science and other fields of endeavor.
But repression and expulsion are also part of their experience here. The most abominable episode took place on Nov. 3-4, 1885, when a national anti-immigration frenzy propelled a Tacoma mob to round up about 200 Chinese laborers, march them out of town and burn down their community.
The memory of that shameful chapter is preserved at Chinese Reconciliation Park on Commencement Bay. It should be included in school lessons, too.
Linda Yang, head of Washington Asians for Equality, told us she sees a link between the history knowledge gap and poor treatment of Asian Americans. “If you aren’t taught about their contributions and also the hardships, you may think it’s OK to treat them badly,” said Yang, a Chinese American resident of Bellevue.
Exposure to history is also a pathway to understanding contemporary China and its strong ties to Washington, says Stephen Ling of Puyallup, an author, former professor and former Bethel School District teacher. He says Washington students shouldn’t just learn the history of his grandparents’ homeland; they should also learn the language.
“Once all roads led to Rome,” Ling told us, “but now, ironically, many roads from the four corners of the world are not converging on Europe, Africa, North and South America, but on mainland China.”
Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction distributes many diversity resources but has no specific social studies standards for minority groups other than native tribes. Tacoma Public Schools officials say they’re collecting Chinese-American materials as part of an update to their social studies curriculum.
To be clear, Juneteenth is a well deserved historical honor, also worthy of classroom instruction. The sponsor of the holiday legislation is Rep. Melanie Morgan, D-Parkland, and we were struck by her statement after her bill passed the Senate last week. Morgan called it a “down payment towards racial reconciliation and healing.”
The same is true for SB 5264, a symbolic gesture of respect for Washington’s largest Asian American community that shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle.
News Tribune editorials reflect the views of our Editorial Board and are written by opinion editor Matt Misterek. Other board members are: Stephanie Pedersen, News Tribune president and editor; Matt Driscoll, local columnist; and Jim Walton, community representative. The Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom and does not influence the work of news reporting and editing staffs. For questions about the board or our editorials, email matt.misterek@thenewstribune.com
This story was originally published April 14, 2021 at 1:00 PM.