- Supervisor Matt Haney, who filed the resolution, said: “Law after law passed in this building targeting Chinese immigrants. When we don’t confront it, that’s when we see it being used and continued.”
- During the meeting, the board of supervisors acknowledged the racism that Asian Americans endured for over 150 years.
- The resolution, which will be put up for a vote later this year, was prepared by three local students, according to the SF Chronicle.
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- Min and friends, Dennis Casey Wu of Lowell High School and George Tilton-Low of Stanford University, did some research and were shocked to discover how the city treated the Chinese American community in the past.
- Race-specific laws such as the “foreign miners’ tax” mainly targeted Chinese workers who had arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush in the 1850s.
- In the decades that followed, individuals of Chinese descent would face restrictions from getting government jobs, opening and operating certain businesses, using work equipment and more.
- Min’s group also found that many of the racist laws enforced across the country that targeted Asians were patterned from the very laws crafted by San Francisco’s own board of supervisors.
- “It just comes to show that history is not so far, it’s not so distant, and history tends to repeat itself,” Min said. “And, what better way to try to mend the future but by correcting the mistakes of the past?”