High School Student Gets San Francisco to Apologize for History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice

The Board of Supervisors of San Francisco agreed unanimously Tuesday to a resolution apologizing for centuries of prejudice against Chinese Americans, at the urging of a local high school student who organized the apology campaign.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported:

Dennis Casey Wu, a student at Lowell High School in San Francisco, did not know much about his city’s history of racism against Chinese Americans.

But when he saw nearby Antioch apologize for the 1876 burning of its Chinatown by white residents, he thought: What about San Francisco?

…

Long before it became a tourist attraction and one of the biggest ethnic enclaves in the nation, San Francisco’s Chinatown was one of the only places in the city that Chinese Americans could live, due to exclusionary housing policies.

For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese Americans in San Francisco were persecuted by city officials who banned gongs, prohibited the transport of goods with carrying poles known as yeo ho and forced hundreds of Chinese-owned laundries to close.

The resolution was passed on the Lunar New Year, and makes San Francisco the fourth city in California, and in the country, to apologize to Chinese Americans.

San Francisco has a large Chinatown district, and about 30% of the city’s residents are estimated to be Chinese American.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new novel, Joubert Park, tells the story of a Jewish family in South Africa at the dawn of the apartheid era. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, recounts the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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