Asian American Reparations with Grace Yia-Hei Kao
**Events may have been canceled or postponed. Please contact the venue to confirm the event.
Date & Time
Wed, Apr 30 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Address (map)
Humanities and Social Sciences Building, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Venue (website)
McCune Conference Room
The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life will present “Righting Wrong When ‘Sorry’ Isn’t Enough: Constructing an Asian American Theology of Reparations,” with Grace Yia-Hei Kao on April 30, 2025, at 5:00pm at UCSB’s McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020). This event is free and open to the public.
How should federal governments attempt to right, or at least remedy, past wrongs? Is it appropriate for victims of group-based harms or their descendants to press current generations to atone for the sins of their predecessors? Grace Kao will engage these questions by drawing upon the emerging human rights standard for reparations, theological resources from her faith tradition (Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.), and four case-studies of acknowledged wrongdoing against AAPI communities: Chinese Exclusion era discrimination, Japanese American forced evacuation and mass incarceration, denial of full veteran benefits to Filipinos who fought under the U.S. flag during WWII, and the Congressional apologies to Native Hawaiians for the illegal overthrow of their monarchy.
Grace Yia-Hei Kao is Professor of Ethics and the inaugural Sano Chair in Pacific and Asian American Theology at Claremont School of Theology. She is the author or co-editor of four books and serves on the board of two scholarly associations for AAPI religions (PANAAWTM and APARRI).
This event is co-sponsored by the departments of Religious Studies and Asian American Studies at UCSB.
https://www.cappscenter.ucsb.edu/news/event/503
