<Begin Segment 18>

AI: Well, in fact, I wanted to ask you, when you were newly arrived at Georgetown and the U.S., I was wondering how much knowledge you had of the inequities in the United States, especially racial disparities and --

PJ: Very little.

AI: -- the history of racism, and whether that...

PJ: Yeah. Very, very little. And this is something that I would be too embarrassed really to say just about anywhere, but I think it's fair in the context of this that you have this. But I remember I was a Resident Assistant in my -- which meant I was kind of responsible for my whole floor. And somewhere in my consciousness I had heard something about the KKK. But I had no idea what the KKK was, literally none. And on this sign I put up about people needing to do something, I put something about the KKK on there. As, almost like, as in a police force or something. You know, that "they'll come after you," or something like that. And I remember, thank God somebody -- this must have been my second year in college -- somebody coming to me and saying, "Do you know what the KKK is?" And I said, "No. What is it?" And so I think the same way I was shocked by what people didn't know, I'm sure there were people who were shocked by what I didn't know. 'Cause I knew a lot of -- like I knew about the Japanese internment. I mean, it's interesting, I knew certain pieces of American history, but prejudice and -- I knew about the Civil Rights movement, so I knew about African Americans from the perspective of Martin Luther King and what had been achieved broadly for civil rights. But how do you know about that and not know about the KKK? I'm not sure. So I'm not sure what I was taught or what I absorbed. But I think I was very naive when I first came, and luckily, I became friends with somebody who was just steeped in issues of, particularly black/white racism and history and the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Curt Schmoke, had worked with Curt Schmoke, who was the mayor of Baltimore at the time, African American mayor of Baltimore, very highly renowned, kind of touted in the world of civil rights. And it was really, actually, thanks to Kevin that I, I think learned a lot very quickly about racism in this country, beyond kind of the bigger sort of historical pieces that were, that were there and that I think I got in some context. But you know, we learned more about world history than we did about U.S. history overseas. I mean, we learned little pieces about the U.S., but our history was actually world history. So we learned about the world wars, and we learned about all that kind of stuff, but, and that's the context in which I knew about the Japanese internment, but we didn't necessarily learn about the details of inner U.S. history.

AI: Right, of course not. In my mind, that would make logical sense.

PJ: Yeah.

AI: I did want to ask you a little bit more, if you could say a little bit more about the context in which you learned about the Japanese Americans during World War II, and that must have come in your world history in discussions of World War II?

PJ: Right, exactly. Yeah, that's... and it wasn't, like I said, it wasn't detailed, but we knew, you know, I think we were taught that right after World War II there had been this huge -- the way I remember is that there had been this huge backlash against Japanese Americans who lived, or Japanese, people of Japanese ancestry who lived in America, Japanese Americans. And so I'm pretty sure we were taught about internment camps, though now, of course, I'm trying to remember because we've done so much work, what I know from now and what I knew then. But I'm pretty sure we were taught that people were interned. And I remember that we were taught in the context of America as a democracy, and so that was one of the issues. We had a history, world history teacher named Mrs. Barber, Dorothy Barber, who was British, and she would... most of our time was spent on, on British history. [Laughs] But we did, when we talked about that, I remember she, one of... we had some kind of a question or something on the exam about the principles and the realities of democracy, and the Japanese internment was one of the things that we had studied in that context.

AI: That's so interesting to me, because, of course, as we know, there are so many people here in the United States who grew up going to school here in the United States who never hear about this aspect.

PJ: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think we learned about the major historical pieces in American history. Like I said, we didn't get a lot of the detail, but we did... you know, I certainly knew about the Civil Rights movement, and I knew who Martin Luther King was. And I knew about the Japanese internment. I knew about the pilgrims, I mean, just kind of the big picture things, I think I knew about.

AI: Well, it sounds like you certainly knew a lot more about United States history than many people here know about any other country.

PJ: Or even this country, yeah. No, I think that's probably right. I think I, because of the work I do now, which is so steeped in anti-racism work, it's sometimes shocking to me how, how I feel like I knew so little about racism in this country.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.