Forty-five years ago, survivors and descendants of the WWII Japanese American incarceration, testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) — helping set in motion what would become one of the largest reparations efforts in U.S. history. This year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture marks the 45th anniversary of the 1981 CWRIC hearings and will feature the public launch of Reckoning with Redress — a new cinematic digital history project, along with the lecture “A Debt Owed–Korematsu, Reparations, and the Ever-Recycling Racial Pathology of 1619,” given by Donald Tamaki.

Doors will open for light refreshments at 5:30pm. Program begins at 6:00pm.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.

Donald Tamaki is a Senior Counsel at the San Francisco law firm of Minami Tamaki LLP having received his BA and JD from U.C. Berkeley.

In the 1980’s, Tamaki served on the pro bono legal team that reopened the 1944 Supreme Court case of Fred Korematsu, a notorious precedent that validated forcing 125,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps on the claim they were spies. But almost 40 years later, secret intelligence reports and Justice Department memos surfaced, categorically denying that Japanese Americans were spying, admitting there was no reason for the mass removal, and calling the Army’s claims “intentional falsehoods.” Despite whistle-blower protests from government lawyers urging that they had a duty not to lie to the Court, the Solicitor General stood by the Army’s claims knowing they were fabricated. The evidence was suppressed, and much of it ordered burned. On the basis that a fraud had been committed, Korematsu’s criminal conviction was erased. The ruling boosted the call for reparations to redress this great wrong.

In 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Tamaki to serve on the nine-member California Reparations Task Force (the Task Force) that produced the groundbreaking Final Report comprehensively documenting the cumulative impact of 246 years of enslavement, another 100 years of Jim Crow oppression, and decades more of segregation, and to recommend to the Legislature what California should do to address the resulting compounding and cascading harms.

Tamaki is part of the leadership team of the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth (ARRT), a multi-racial statewide coalition working to promote public awareness of the harms wrought by racial subjugation, and to transform the Task Force’s 115 recommendations into legislation.

His awards include the ABA Spirit of Excellence Award (2020), the National Asian Pacific Bar Association Trailblazer Award (2003), and the State Bar of California Loren Miller Award (1987).

The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. The Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics which enables the Humanities Division to promote a dialogue about ethics and ethics related challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. The endowment was established in honor of Peggy Downes Baskin’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.

This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.