November 18, 2004
Profile: Karen Narasaki
Karen Narasaki speaking at the first Interethnic Caucus Leadership Forum
By Janna Chan for AsianAvenue.com
Seattle, Washington 1966. An eight-year-old Karen Narasaki accidentally overhears the pained voices of her parents discussing where their family would live next. Seattle was no longer an option. Although her father was a second generation Japanese American, World War II veteran and an engineer at Boeing, the possibility of buying his family a house in Seattle was out of the question due to racial covenants at the time. Fast-forward 38 years and this moment is still one of Karen’s earliest memories. This is the moment she realized that the American dream might always be just that—a dream.
Today, Karen Narasaki is the president and executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC), a non-profit, non-partisan civil rights organization. Even though racial covenants are a now a thing of the past, she continues to fight for Asian American rights and works with NAPALC to advance the rights of all minorities through public policy, education, litigation and advocacy. Boasting a long history of civil rights activism through her work with the Japanese American Citizen’s League, Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition, Karen has always opted for the road less traveled in order to pave a better one of her own.
After not being able to buy a house in Seattle Karen’s parents moved her, her twin brother and two sisters to Renton, a blue collar suburb. Trying to make the best out of their situation, the Narasakis regularly encouraged their children to work harder and to not let society dictate their roles. Karen and her brother eventually enrolled at Renton High School where, according to Karen, there were only 20 Asian Americans in a class of roughly 500 students. Right off the bat Karen got involved with school leadership programs. She became president of her sophomore class and became a finalist for the National Merit Scholarship along with her brother. “My father was very excited,” said Karen over the phone from her Washington D.C. office. “His dream was for one of his kids to attend an Ivy League school and this scholarship signaled a step closer to that. He told me once that he would have proved himself in America if this happened.”
Growing up, Karen’s father was fairly open about talking about race with his children. Both of her parents were sent to internment camps after the Pearl Harbor bombing during WWII yet her father still chose to join the military. He was part of the famous 442 all Japanese American battalion that fought in Europe. The struggles that both her parents endured laid the groundwork for Karen’s self-confidence and ignited a desire to make sure that her parents’ experience in the camps would never happen to anyone else. “I think he [her father] was a little bitter,” says Karen. “He, like many other Japanese Americans, was born here—he was not an immigrant and his mom was born here also. In many ways he still felt very grateful for the opportunities America presented that he felt would not be available in Japan. The message he gave to us growing up was to be a real patriot. That being an American really meant being willing to stand up and try to make America better—make it live up to its ideals.”
After high school, Karen fulfilled her father’s dream of an Ivy League child when she was accepted to Yale. A stellar 4.0 student with an impressive extra curricular résumé, Karen’s road to Yale was still not an easy one. She came from a less-than-desirable public high school and had a guidance counselor that didn’t know the first thing about Ivy League schools. When Karen was finally accepted to Yale it was mainly because of its progressive affirmative action policies. “I think that I am an example of how affirmative action is supposed to work,” says Karen. “The reality is that at a school like Yale there are thousands of students that apply that can do the work. They weren’t just looking at your grades or your test scores, but whether you showed evidence that you were going to be a leader. I felt that because I took full advantage of this opportunity that Yale did the right thing. They weren’t ‘wasting the slot’ because I proved that I could do the work.”
Karen graduated magna cum laude with an economics and political science degree at Yale and went on to attend the UCLA law school. She graduated third in her class and although her college career was superb job offers weren’t exactly flying through her door. She was later told that her applications for summer jobs were overlooked mainly because firms weren’t keen on hiring women or minorities. She eventually landed a coveted position as a corporate attorney at Seattle’s largest law firm, Perkins Coie. Karen spent six years at the firm and proved, without a doubt, her qualifications as an attorney. She remained active while at the firm moonlighting at Asian American and women’s rights groups, and was allowed to do so because she was one of the top billing associates in terms of hours logged.
Literally months away from making partner at her firm, a case she was working on with the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) suddenly made her rethink her career goals. The case, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Antonio, was a class action suit brought upon by the predominantly Filipino and native Alaskan employees who had been discriminated against at an Alaskan cannery. Karen was set to speak at a press conference in support of the employees but was stopped after she found out that one of her clients at Perkins Coie, an Alaskan fish cannery, had taken out an op-ed piece in the local paper in defense of Wards Cove. “I felt that it was getting harder and harder to be a conservative corporate attorney by day and a civil rights activist by night,” says Karen. “I knew that I would have to make a decision about my career, but it was very difficult because that summer I would be up for partner…But in the end, I knew that I needed to make a decision.”
The year was 1986 and Karen said goodbye to her old life, and a hefty salary, to enter the non-profit sector as a tireless advocate for human and civil rights. A nationally recognized expert on affirmative action and immigrant, civil and voting rights Karen has appeared on “The Newshour” with Jim Lehrer, ABC and CBS News, “Hardball” with Chris Mathews and has been quoted in just about every major American newspaper. During the Clinton administration, Karen was invited to the White House on several occasions to advise the president on civil rights issues. Part of her 12-hour-work-days include leading NAPALC and serving on the boards of the Leadership Conference Educational Fund and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Under Karen’s leadership, the 1992 Voting Rights Act extension of the language rights provision was passed which has helped thousands of Asian, Latino and American Indian citizens to register and vote in their native languages. Her latest effort is the Rights Working Group which is a coalition of civil rights, civil liberties, human and immigrant rights advocates working together to address the deterioration of civil and human rights in the aftermath of 9/11.
Karen has come a long way from Renton and even further from the racial biases that once haunted her parents and threatened her goals. Through her leadership and actions, she has pioneered a path for Asian Americans and other minorities to demand a just and equal America. “One of the things I really believe in is, if at the end of the day, NAPALC has achieved equality for Asian Americans but not for Latinos, Jews and other Americans we haven’t done our job,” says Karen. “What I’m interested in is helping people understand that their fates as human beings are linked to each other. If we really want the America we say we want then that’s going to take work and it isn’t about does affirmative action or voting rights directly benefit me. It’s about does it benefit us is the larger picture? Diversity does make a difference.”
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Posted by MissPicklez at November 18, 2004 03:38 PM