May 2013 - Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

May 2013 is Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. In the McKusick Law Library, one of our current displays includes President Obama's Proclamation designating this month as Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, as well as books from our collection related to Asian-American legal history, the Asian and Pacific Islander experience in America, and Native Hawaiian Rights.

Robert Hyung-chan Kim's A Legal History of Asian Americans 1790-1990 is a combination of Kim's other books, Asian Americans and the Supreme Court and Asian Americans and Congress. For an in-depth look at legal history shaped by Asian-Americans, you also may want to read United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 18 S.Ct. 456 (1898) in which the United States Supreme Court held that the Chinese Exclusion Act (a ten-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration) could not exclude ethnic Chinese born in this country from the operation of the "broad and clear words" of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: "All persons born ... in the United States .. are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

Also included the display, The Native Hawaiian Rights Handbook discusses and analyzes the rights that are derived from the "unique status of Native Hawaiians as an aboriginal people and from the political status of the Hawaiian Kingdom prior to the destruction of the Hawaiian Monarchy in 1893."

The controversial book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror, links post-Pearl Harbor events with events following September 11, 2001. In her book, Michelle Malkin addresses both the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast and the internment of enemy aliens, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, during WWII. She indicates that her book is also a defense of the racial profiling measures which were taken during the last few years in the "War on Terror."

More information on the celebration of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month can be found at this Library of Congress website.

(This entry was originally written and posted by Marsha Stacey)