<Begin Segment 19>

AI: Well, and also, that era of late-'50s and early-'60s. It was what, it was only 1956 that the Brown v. Board of Education case went to, Supreme Court decided for desegregation of the schools.

RS: Uh-huh.

AI: And then, and maybe speaking of that and some of the other things that had gone on in the '50s, the McCarthyism, there was some, quite a bit of anticommunism that was important in the news of the '50s, Korean War... were any of these things in your consciousness at all in your high school years?

RS: They weren't in my consciousness. And I doubt whether they were in too many people's consciousness. They were probably more in the consciousness of the white kids. And it was just like a few years ago when I was teaching at Kansas. I remember having a very serious discussion with one of my students who was white. And he was talking about his artwork being about, being anti-nuclear weapons and so on and so forth. And I was talking to him, making distinctions about how that was different than say, what I was doing and that, the sort of phenomenon on so many of the protestors of nuclear bombs and so on being affluent white kids. And I said, because they have the luxury of being concerned, but I says, "There aren't too many African Americans that really care about the A-Bomb. It's not a part of the reality of their lives. Where they eat and where they can go and so on are the real realities, not whether the world's gonna be destroyed by an atomic bomb," which is a real abstraction to people that are in desperate need.

And so, in some ways, looking backwards, I think that that has a lot to do with the fact that in high school... now there wasn't, despite the fact that all these things were going on, I think that maybe the white kids cared about it a little bit more than the people of color did, that were dealing enough with surviving from day-to-day. Because those kinds of inequities that we were saddled with back then, we pretty much accepted as a fact of life that was never going to change. And certainly, I think, if you were an Asian American, particularly Japanese American, that was almost part of the DNA make-up. Probably that pace was set by the camp experience and the way that our parents dealt with that. And so, seeing how the African Americans, in their revolution, dealt with things was a real eye-opener for my generation. And that's why I think to this day, things are handled quite differently. When Coble makes those stupid remarks, rest assured the Asian community is gonna use every kind of power and influence that they have in Washington, D.C. to make that right. And they wouldn't have done that years ago because they didn't have that power, of course, but that's not the way that they did things. They were gonna set an example. And so in some ways I think the whole "model minority" myth is something that is sort of a backfire. I mean, that's sort of payback for that kind of setting an example and so on.

AI: Just, speaking of "model minority," did that kind of image of "model minority" affect you when you were in high school, or had that kind of -- I'm not sure if that was in play yet.

RS: Well, I think, I think we were setting that standard back then. Because there were clearly scholars in our student body, and most of 'em were Asian American. And it was like I was saying earlier, I mean the John Takizawas and the May Kiharas and all those people, I mean, most of 'em were extremely smart, extremely diligent and set a very, very high standard of behav-, academic behavior. And so, if you weren't like that, if your talents were in other areas or you were not inclined to act, be academically excellent, you sort of felt out of it, outside of the community in some ways. And so, in some ways, for the boys, there were athletics. But if you didn't excel athletically, then where were you in all of this in terms of the real "important things." So it was real easy to slip out of social favor and into sort of this losing trend. I mean, everything was structured that way. You either had it or you didn't in many ways. And there wasn't anybody around there, teachers or likewise to turn some of those other less-talented things into, into an "it's okay" sort of climate.

AI: Because of the time that it was.

RS: Right.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.