The Real Virus

My Americans

A Lake County judge named John O’Donnell recently published a rambling opinion piece in the Lake County Bar Association newsletter, in which he discussed the ways the “China Virus” affected proceedings in his court.

My parents were toddlers when, along with their families and communities, they were herded into livestock cars by the US Army and into a gulag of concentration camps set up by across the United States by a racist enforcement agency called the War Relocation Authority.

That spasm of racist hysteria didn’t suddenly arise after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was tested, cultivated, then unleashed by people in power on the West Coast for 50 years before WWII. The press, union leaders, policy academics, elected state government officials, military officials, judges – people in power – normalized “yellow peril” stereotypes, passed waves of incrementally racist legislation, declined to prosecute mob violence, and cultivated the cultural and political environment that allowed Americans to justify the imprisonment of other Americans on the basis of white racism.

Racist hysteria is an endemic and institutionalized part of American history, but, now as then, it is corrosive to egalitarian democracy, liberty, free thinking, and the American experiment of self governance.

I know that an opinion piece in the Lake Legal News is not like drafting Executive Order 9066, but when a person with governmental authority, like Judge O’Donnell, adopts the language of racist hysteria, he traduces the state, whether maliciously or foolishly, betraying the principles of the country we lawyers have pledged to uphold and defend. In his position as a judge, his moral laziness jeopardizes the fundamental principle of equality among all people – which is not given by any god, but established by the words used by of the government and authority of the United States.