New Race Advisory Board Member Believes ‘Multi’ Should Preface ‘Racial’ In Any Discussion

Angela Oh’s summer has been full of surprises.

First, she was picked by President Clinton to sit on his race advisory board, charged with leading the national discussion on racial reconciliation.

And now, she is suddenly viewed as the board’s resident radical.

“It certainly has surprised me,” Oh, 41, said during a recent telephone interview about her emerging reputation, “I guess because I come from Los Angeles where there’s nothing revolutionary or radical about my views.”

Oh is a trial lawyer in Los Angeles, the city that heralds America’s multiracial and multicultural future in which whites will no longer be a majority.

The second-generation Korean-American stirred the usually placid pot of presidential commission’s at the very first meeting of Clinton’s fledgling race panel last month.

She did so by publicly suggesting that the board, in examining the status of race relations in America, move beyond the “black-white paradigm” to include the experiences of other minorities.

In the weeks since, her suggestion has been widely interpreted as an argument that Clinton’s advisers should not waste time looking at the conflict between whites and blacks dating to slavery.

“Angela Oh has got it wrong,” columnist DeWayne Wickham, who is black, asserted last month in USA Today. “(She) says the panel should not spend a lot of time exploring the roots of the problems between blacks and whites.”

Added William Powers recently in The New Republic magazine, “The sole Asian American on the board (is) arguing that the black-white dilemma is no longer at the heart of our race problem.”

To such interpretations, Oh replied: “That is exactly what I did not intend to express. I feel very strongly that there is a fundamental chasm, or struggle, around race relations that is black and white.”

Even so, if the black-white conflict is intractable, as many suggest, “perhaps we should shed new light on it” by adding the voices of other minorities, Oh suggested.

For example, “I don’t believe that all white people are evil,” she said. “But so much of the rhetoric and discourse falls into that, which is not only false but at some level morally dishonest.”

She also suggested that some of the criticism directed at her reflects an attitude she finds troubling - “that I represent a sector of the population that has not yet paid sufficient dues to sit at the table.”

Slavery was “the absolute worst mar on our history as a nation,” Oh said. But in terms of human suffering, “there was no less suffering” among the Chinese immigrants who built America’s transcontinental railroad, the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II or Asian immigrants who have been virtually enslaved by textile manufacturers, she added.

“If you say we haven’t suffered enough to be here, which I think is untrue, then we start down the path of whose pain is more real,” she said. “And that’s not what we’re here to do.”

Oh has experienced discrimination firsthand. The first time - the most vivid time - as a 7-year-old on vacation in California with her parents and two sisters.

They had stopped at a lake to watch three white men getting their boat on a trailer.

“I remember the three men came over to my father and started doing the ‘ching, chong, Chinaman’ bit in front of us. They said stuff like: ‘What are you looking at? Why don’t you take your little slant-eyed kids and get out of here?’ I couldn’t believe this was happening. It was really nasty stuff.”

Her father drove the family away in silence. He never spoke of it again - “ever,” she said.

As a law student at the University of California at Davis in the early 1980s, Oh organized Davis Asians for Racial Equality after several incidents of violence directed at Asian-American students.

Now, in addition to practicing law, she runs a nonprofit mentoring program for young Korean-American women professionals. She also speaks frequently about multiculturalism and feminism at universities. In her spare time, of which she has little, she plays the piano and guitar and writes.

Oh also is active in the Democratic Party, though not as a fund-raiser. She donated $500 to Clinton’s re-election campaign last year.

She still doesn’t understand how she came to Clinton’s attention for service on his race advisory panel.

Oh came to national attention, however, in the wake of the 1992 riots that followed the savage police beating of black motorist Rodney King. As president-elect of the Korean American Bar Association of Southern California, she was invited to appear on ABC’s “Nightline” and stood her ground against host Ted Koppel.

“I made it clear to him that he was not going to tell me this was happening in my city because Koreans and blacks don’t get along,” said Oh, who also served as special counsel to the Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles crisis. “That’s not what happened. What happened was the huge public distrust in law enforcement under (then-Police Chief) Daryl Gates,” she said.

The “Nightline” appearance made her a local celebrity, but was a mixed blessing. “I was getting calls from everyone saying, ‘Angela Oh, you make sure things get fixed’,” she said. “Well, I can’t do that.”

What has followed, however, has been the awakening of Korean Americans not only as a community but as a political force in Los Angeles.

Yet Oh herself denies any political objectives as a member of Clinton’s race board.

“I don’t have a constituency that I’m answerable to,” she said. “I really have the ability to speak from my experience and from my heart.”

In her view, most of the racial tensions in America are rooted in economics. In areas where there are few economic assets, people are naturally envious and suspicious of each other, she said.

But “the only vehicle that is realistically available to us to overcome these suspicions is education,” Oh insisted. “That’s how we at least start to bridge the chasm.”