President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders - Western Region Townhall Meeting, July 24, 2000
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Issue Area on Civil Rights: Comments delivered through video teleconferencing
My name is Ivy Lee. I’m a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the California State University, Sacramento, and the President of the Sacramento Asian Americans in Support of Due Process for Wen-ho Lee.
My subject today is civil rights: the government’s violation of the civil rights of a particular man that leads to questions regarding its protection of the civil rights of a whole minority.
First, the particular case of Dr. Wen-ho Lee, a first generation Chinese American scientist who was accused of, without formally being charged with being a spy for China. As you all know he was tried in the media and fired summarily without a hearing at work in the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Subsequently he was jailed, not freed on bail pending trial, all on the federal prosecutor’s assertion of his being a national security risk. Here we see the federal government bringing down its might on a man whose guilt has not been established and whose alleged violations may in fact be lessening by the day. For an elaboration of my last sentence, see the LA Times R. Scheer article of 07-11: "Spy Case Is Evaporating, but Not the Bad Smell".
In this Wen-ho Lee case then, the government. instead of being a guarantor of our civil rights, has turned into a violator of an individual’s civil rights, engaging in his selective prosecution. This leads all Asian Americans to fear how racial profiling is not just the act of a few rogue law enforcement agents, but is woven into the fabric of the government itself.
Only the government can allay my anxiety that I would not look into the mirror one day to see the face of a model minority, and the next day to find a potential spy. Only it can reclaim its moral grounds as the guarantor of the civil rights of a minority by doing the following. On the individual level, apologize to and facilitate the immediate release of Dr. Lee on bail pending trial and establish some oversight mechanism to ensure a fair trial in November. On the collective level, issue an Executive Order establishing a National Advisory Committee on Racial Profiling similar to the Commission on Civil Disorders that produced the seminal Kerner Report in 1968.
