The Least Racist People We’ve Ever Interviewed; The Atlantic, January 15, 2018

The Editors, The Atlantic; The Least Racist People We’ve Ever Interviewed

"This question is absurd, and uncomfortable, and of course that’s the point. But it does have me thinking about my time as a reporter on Capitol Hill, and the members of Congress who spoke frequently about how racial injustices informed their public service. Senator Daniel Inouye, who died in 2012, was one of them.

“Can you imagine that when I got here in 1959, the restaurant in the Congress of the United States was segregated?” Inouye once told me. “Can you imagine that a member of the United States House, a chairman of a committee, could not go there? But at that time, no one thought it was a big deal. Well, I thought it was a big deal.”

So Inouye took a fellow representative, who was black, to lunch with him one day. “I literally drag this guy into the dining room, and all the waiters are black. They smiled. They knew what was happening. Because they would have had to throw me out.” They didn’t.

“Well, I’m used to racism,” Inouye told me another time I interviewed him. “I was in an all-Japanese unit... This is in the war. To go to a combat zone and see signs [that say] ‘White Officers Only,’ you want to shoot that sign off. What war are we fighting here?”

— Adrienne LaFrance"