Those in control of the U.S. national government today openly show disregard for human life they deem inferior. The U.S. president of a 250-year-old country threatened, on a platform that reached most of the world’s 8.3 billion people, that he would exterminate Iran, a West Asian civilization with 93 million people and 2,600 years of history. When the sitting U.S. president, with disproportionate financial and military power, speaks this way, we should all be troubled and outraged. Such statements reflect not only a disregard for all human life in Iran but a worldview in which the value of life is unevenly distributed, reserved for those who qualify by wealth, whiteness, or gender. This, in turn, reflects a broader moral failure: a system in which those who wield immense power operate without accountability.
The views of this U.S. president have many historical precedents. During the mid-19th century, Chinese laborers worked in mines and on railroads across the American West. They were indispensable to the economy, yet routinely subjected to abuse and attack. White miners regularly targeted Chinese camps, often with impunity, reinforcing a social order in which harm against certain communities carried few consequences.
In 1850, during one such attack, a white man named George Hall fired 15 shots into the back of a Chinese man, Ling Sing. Hall was prosecuted, including with the testimony of three Chinese witnesses. A judge initially convicted Hall of murder, suggesting, at least briefly, that there might be some accountability and justice.
However, on appeal, Hall argued the testimony of Chinese witnesses should not have been allowed. In the infamous case People v. Hall, the California Supreme Court agreed, warning that allowing Chinese testimony would open the door to “equal rights of citizenship.” The court imagined a future in which Chinese people might sit “at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls,” calling this not progress, but “an actual and present danger.” It went further still, declaring Chinese people “a race… marked as inferior.”
With that reasoning, the conviction was overturned. Hall walked free. Ling Sing received no justice. This was a deliberate refusal for due process and to hold a white man accountable. The court reshaped the law to ensure that violence against Chinese people would go unpunished.
People of color in the United States have long faced a double bind, forced to survive systems of oppression while simultaneously resisting them in hopes of building something better. That tension has shaped generations, particularly for Asian Americans, whose labor has been essential and whose lives have regularly been treated as disposable or invisible.
In an ongoing anti-harassment case we have previously written about, recent developments echo this history in troubling ways. Despite multiple anti-harassment orders against her, including two 10-year protection orders, the white harasser filed a harassment claim against the victim of her harassment. The Asian American judge, failing to recognize or acknowledge how racism was being weaponized within the legal system, ruled in the harasser’s favor.
During the proceedings, the survivor, who required Mandarin interpretation, tried to tell the judge she was not getting interpretation, “我听不她… 太– 讲– 那个翻译好像半–” (I can’t hear– it’s too– speaking– The interpretation seems half–). However, the court-appointed interpreter cut the survivor short by saying in English, “Yeah, yeah. I- I was interpreting your honor.” The judge took the interpreter at her word. Just like that, the victim’s voice and her protest of the missing interpretation were dismissed. No pause, no verification, no effort to ensure that the victim could meaningfully participate in her own case.
In that instant, accountability disappeared. The right to due process had been diminished to a performative procedure rather than a substantive guarantee.
Over several months of subsequent legal efforts, including requests to include the translated Mandarin of the survivor to illustrate the violation of her due process rights, the words still do not exist on the record for the Court of Appeals.
Rather than accept the two sworn declarations by bilingual declarants made under penalty of perjury, including one by a Washington court-certified reporter, the Superior court (the court that initially ruled in the case) created a new process. The court returned the responsibility to the very interpreter who had failed to interpret the statement in the first place. Asking that same interpreter, who interrupted the survivor and conveyed the opposite meaning of what was being said, to now transcribe and translate the statement creates an obvious conflict of interest. While she did transcribe the audio with Chinese characters/words identical to the impartial court reporter, she chose not to translate the words, instead using the excuse that “the full meaning cannot be determined with certainty.”
If the interpreter misrepresented or did not hear the witness at the original trial, what incentive do they have to correct themselves now? And if a judge failed to recognize a breakdown in interpretation in real time, don’t they benefit by continuing to prevent its acknowledgment now?
These are not abstract concerns. They go to the core of judicial responsibility. When judges are permitted to validate their own assumptions in contravention of third-party facts or hide procedural failures by seeking confirmation from others who have a self-interest in the matter, the system protects itself rather than the people it is meant to serve. The result is not neutrality, but the silent (to the world but not to the victim) reproduction of inequality.
When accountability is mostly self-governing, when harms to the most vulnerable and invisible are dismissed through procedure, we should all be alarmed. As this current-day example illustrates, the system of suppressing witness testimony, in some ways, may be worse than it was in 1850. In People v. Hall, the highest court expressly provided its (racist) reasoning for why it would throw out the witness testimony. In the anti-harassment appeal case, there may never even be an appellate record of the survivor’s words because they have thus far been suppressed at such an early stage. This signals a highly flawed system in which the decision to suppress a witness statement is made invisible, and justice is actively barred.
Even when unjust decisions have been overturned, they are not fully accounted for. Fred Korematsu was criminally convicted and incarcerated for refusing to register for selective service based on his Japanese ancestry. Fred Korematsu’s conviction was not overturned for 9 years, and it took more than seventy years for the Supreme Court to acknowledge that Korematsu v. United States was “gravely wrong.” Even then, the Court stopped short of formally overruling it. The decision has been condemned, but not fully undone, leaving behind a troubling legacy of incomplete accountability, one that reflects how easily constitutional failures can reemerge under conditions of fear and deference.
Accountability cannot be selective. It cannot depend on race, language, or political convenience. It requires judges and folks in positions of authority to question their own authority, to ensure meaningful checks and balances to share power and access for all participants, and a public that refuses to look away when harm is minimized.
The throughline from Ling Sing to Fred Korematsu to today is not just racial violence; it is the repeated absence of accountability for that violence. When a person’s words are erased from the record and when legal systems fail to hold themselves accountable, justice will remain out of reach for those who need it most.
Jamie Cho, Ph.D., is an educator, researcher, and advocate for equity and justice in early childhood education. Joyce Shui, J.D., earned her A.B. is an attorney and community advocate focused on civil rights and equity.
