Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion: Rethinking Reparations to Chinese North Americans (with Grace Kao)

I’m very excited to be going to Denver to present new research that I’ve done with my friend and colleague, Grace Kao (Claremont School of Theology). We’re delivering a co-authored paper at the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion at the Iliff School of Theology. The keynote speakers include James Evans, Orlando Espín, and Rita Nakashima Brock. Grace and I are sharing the stage on Friday afternoon with Jeffrey Robbins, Kristian Diaz, and Grace Ji-Sun Kim.

Our paper is titled Rethinking Reparations to Chinese North Americans: A Comparative Analysis Between the U.S. and Canadian Case. We’re comparing the (non)apologies that were given to Chinese Americans for the exclusion era by Congress in 2011 and 2012 to the Chinese head tax redress that culminated in the Harper government’s apology with reparations in 2006. We’ll be assessing these apologies in light of the United Nations-backed international standard for reparations as well as the comparative case of Japanese American and Japanese Canadian redress for World War II internment. We’ll also suggest some ways to repair the reparations in light of new redress efforts, especially for African Americans and Canada’s First Nations.

We’re very excited for this conference and the conversations that will unfold from this. At a personal and professional level, I’m thrilled to be working with Grace. Grace served as a discussant for a panel that I organized at the 2012 American Academy of Religion. Her critique of my paper was so incisive that over coffee with her afterward, I asked her to teach me the ways in Christian ethics. It’s really because of her that I know anything about the Niebuhrs, Ramsey, and Rawls, as well as where Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas fit on the map of Christian ethics. The brilliance of this project is that someone that I have long considered my teacher has become my peer. Bringing our projects together – mine on Cantonese Protestants in Vancouver and hers on the ethics of reparations to aggrieved communities – we’ve managed to write a paper that we both like, bridging geography and ethics. Of course, we talk quite a bit in geography about ethics, but to actually work with an ethicist – that’s the next level!

Needless to say, I’m very excited for what will come of this collaboration, and I am looking forward very much to this conference.