<Begin Segment 44>

MC: So, one thing that you alluded to earlier was the senator from North Carolina's recent remarks, I guess it was just this past week, regarding the, his view that the internment was good for the Japanese Americans who were interned because it protected them. And he, apparently he's the Chair of the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security.

DM: That's frightening.

MC: It is. So, one theme, I guess, after twenty years, is the more things change, the more they stay the same. And I was wondering whether you had any thoughts about the relationship of the work that you did then to what's going on now, post-9/11.

DM: You know, I'm kind of coming to a new realization. I mean, redress was a great victory but it clearly was not a total victory. The cases we did was a great victory but it was clearly not a total victory. And as much as you can educate people, you cannot transform everyone and there will still be people who harbor racist beliefs in this country, ignorant beliefs, despite what the evidence is, despite what the facts are. And so, what I believe is that education is important but it's not the only thing. If you don't have political power, if you don't have the power to punish a Congressman Coble for what he says, if you don't have power to punish a Senator Trent Lott, if you don't have power to make a Shaquille O'Neal feel a little uneasy, all the education in the world is not gonna help you. That's not to say you shouldn't do education, 'cause both, if you don't have the alternative education, all the political power in the world won't help you either. But I think those are the two things that I think are most important and what I've gained from doing this case and working on redress and being involved in both political and educational campaigns, is that they're both really, really important.

MC: So one thing, disturbing that's happened since 9/11 is that some people in the administration seem to be suggesting that Korematsu is good precedent still, for the notion that certain group-based classifications do not rise to the level of any sort of constitutional violation at least in times of crisis. And, so do you have any comments or thoughts on that?

DM: Yeah, I think the notion that Korematsu is good precedent has to be resisted at every turn. I don't believe Korematsu is good precedent because it's based on a foundation of fraud. If you, any law professor or any lawyer will tell you that the law emanates from the facts that are before the court. Well, the facts before the Court were false in the Supreme Court. So for the Bush administration to trot out Korematsu, dress it up in new clothes and pretend it's good law is absolute hypocrisy. I don't believe Korematsu is a good precedent for the idea that you can take racial minorities at any time without due process, without a trial, without attorneys, and put 'em in camps for an indefinite period of time, that, anybody who believes that in this country in general -- no, I should say that differently. That's a completely discredited notion. If you look at all the commentary about these cases and how poorly they were written and how much politicized they were, I feel that you're not gonna find a lot of people saying these are credible cases for that particular precedent. They're credible cases for the notion that the Court really should give strict scrutiny to racial classifications when they're used against a particular group. No question that was a good idea even though the Court failed to apply that in those cases, of the Korematsu and Hirabayashi case. So my feeling is that precedential value is based a large part on not just the logic of the case, it's the on the coherent application of the particular law to the facts and there's moral components to precedent... is, are some of the early slavery cases, Dred Scott. Is that good precedent?

MC: Well, that's interesting because Justice Goldberg's letter that was written actually to dissuade the team from pursuing the coram nobis litigation stated that his view was that Korematsu was a thoroughly discredited decision which ranked along with Dred Scott as one of the most reviled opinions of the Supreme Court.

DM: [Laughs] Yeah.

MC: And so, at least he thought, as a former sitting justice of the Supreme Court that it really should not be given any weight whatsoever.

DM: Right.

MC: And yet, what we're hearing right now is government attorneys making the argument that it was, it still is good precedent.

DM: Yeah, I think that has to be challenged. I think Goldberg might have said that for another reason to say, and part of his argument was, don't mess with these cases, guys or folks because it's already, this is already a dead deal. Korematsu and Hirabayashi are dead but no, they weren't. They're like Friday the 13th, Freddy comes back again. These cases come back again all the time even though their, their logic is flawed, even though they're hypocritical cases, even though they've been discredited, even though they rest on a foundation of fraud, and that's why education will only take us so far. Because I could make this argument and I can argue with anybody about how discredited they are, but unless we have enough political power to stop the Bush administration from using these cases and enforcing them in real life by interning people, then all the education in the world we have will not do anything.

<End Segment 44> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.