<Begin Segment 11>

MC: Just to take you back a little further --

DM: Sure.

MC: -- into the past, you decided to major in political science when you were in college. Did you have an idea at that time that you were interested in going to law school and becoming a lawyer?

DM: Not in the least.

MC: Really?

DM: That I was aware of. I'm sure that somehow my father planted the seeds in that I was predetermined to go there anyways, but I didn't think so. I was interested in social psychology. What happened to me in 1965, Watts blew up and exploded in a paroxysm of rioting, burning, looting, African Americans were burning down their own neighborhoods. It, everybody was confused. Why are they doing this? Nobody understood that we have a major race problem in this country that nobody is addressing and the frustrations of that summer day finally boiled over into mass rioting and this huge conflagration. Watching from the freeway I thought all of L.A. was on fire. But it pushed me to think, well, "I need to learn more about this." Because I always had an interest in kind of racial justice. My father was actually, and my mother both were fairly progressive about racial justice. You shouldn't treat people differently. We deserve the same rights. And even though they weren't, they didn't pound away at it, whenever instances came up they would, they could kind of obliquely comment on it. And it always reflected the sense that everybody should be equal. So we developed that, I'm sure, partly from them.

MC: You mentioned earlier being influenced by the Civil Rights movement, which was happening around that time, the mid-'60s.

DM: Uh-huh, right.

MC: Did you have the sense of your own identity as being Asian American at that point?

DM: Not really. Not in 19-, not the mid-'60s. I think, looking backwards, the images that I remember seeing that kind of molded me in some ways, in a subconscious way. I remember clearly watching -- and this is an example of how my parents looked at this -- watching dogs and water hoses turned on the demonstrators, the African American demonstrators in the South. You know, dogs ripping men's shirt off while they were running away. I was stunned and appalled. And my mom commented on something, she goes, "That's wrong." She said something like that. And I thought, "God, you know, this is awful. All they're doing is trying to peacefully march or sit-in or something." But I didn't connect that up until much later. But you know, it had such an impact 'cause I can remember visually just seeing on them little tiny TVs that we had at the time. But in the mid-'60s it was, everything was a black/white issue, like it is today almost. We've moved forward, we have. But in those days when Watts blew up it truly was a black/white issue, or black and others issue. But it led me to start reading more and trying to learn about African Americans. And just coincidently I started taking a social psychology course. And so I started reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X. You could read whatever you wanted. I read Richard Wright's books, I read Manchild in the Promised Land, the Invisible Man, all the -- some of the black early classics.

MC: Those are all powerful books, too.

DM: Boy, they were. And so I just -- but it never, I never quite connected it up then consciously. But, you know, it all feeds into some hard drive back there that you can recall at some point it links up. At the same time my friend, I had a really good friend, he's still one of my best friends, who was, he was a Japanese American guy and he used to... we hung out together and he goes, "Let's go down to Watts. Let's see what's going on down there." So we went down there and they had sessions, special sessions that you could sit in. And we saw the anger of these African Americans and they were, they were so ticked off. And I was thinking, "What can make these people so mad?" And the way they explained it, it just seemed, it was scary. But when you get away from it and you get to process that and then you put it into, with the information you're getting from reading these books, you're starting to get a picture now of how racism distorts and can really degrade and change somebody.

So my first consciousness was the racial consciousness. I started getting that because, I remember I asked out a white woman in USC who was really nice to me, really nice and we used to hang out, we'd get coffee. And she was in a sorority. And I said, "Would you like to go see a movie Saturday?" She goes, and she just stiffened. And I saw a face that I've seen a number of times before but it was a horror of going out with... you know, you could be friends with somebody but once you cross that, that sex barrier of going out that was totally undesirable. And the first thing I thought was, "Damn, this is like the South." You know? [Laughs] And in high school we dated all races, but then I realized that at SC -- and then I started to understand what SC was like at that time and that was a microcosm of the whole country, run by white male, rich white male and white persons that belonged to these cliques, segregated cliques. And that time, of course, they were fraternities and sororities, with very, fairly structured class definition and that people of color were really at the bottom. SC was like that. And so it taught me a lot having gone through that social psychology class. So I thought maybe I'll go into social psychology. I loved political science. I loved dealing with political theory. It was very fascinating to me. But then my dad kind of convinced me to do something more practical. He said, "You don't have to practice law but you'll gain a set of skills that you can use in other areas and protect yourself."

MC: So were you thinking maybe of doing graduate work like a Ph.D. work?

DM: Yeah. I thought I was gonna do a Ph.D. in social psychology. That was the other option. Then I thought, I thought about it and I thought, "Yeah, he's right. I should probably do something practical." And that's how I went to law school. But I had no idea. I didn't know what lawyers did. I never met a lawyer by the time I went to law school.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.