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TI: So talk about also the book Asian Americans and Asian America. Or, first, Asian Americans, because this is something you did with Harry? So 1987 you have Asian Americans: The Emerging Minorities.

RD: Oh, yes. There's another book, it's very complicated, called Asian America that's about Chinese and Japanese in the United States. This is a series, our first book that Harry and I wrote together. We wrote three different books together. Well, I wasn't an author of the third, I was an editor. The first was a book that we put together about racism in California, and Prentice Hall renamed it on their own and told us about it. "We'll call it American Racism." "What do you mean? We're not talking about America, we're talking about California here." He said, "Listen. California's in America, and we want to sell a lot of books, and this is the way to sell a lot of books." And they were absolutely right. This book sold a large number of copies, very profitable. There was one course...

TI: In Alaska you mentioned.

RD: At a junior college in Anchorage, Alaska, where it was the required book for several years for a course that included, all students had to take. And Prentice Hall didn't know that that course would be, but they knew that a book called Racism in California could only get adoptions in California, and a book called American Racism, at which time there weren't any books that were called American Racism. That wasn't something that was talked about very much. So they were smart. It was intellectually dishonest, but commercially very profitable. So this was another book for Prentice Hall, eventually that book became out of date, and this book -- and it went through several editions, three different editions, I think we had to keep updating it -- but this was about all Asian Americans. This was really about Asian Americans, and there were individual chapters on law, and then on each of the major ethnic groups, and it kept expanding as people came into the country in very, very large numbers, and very few of the postwar immigrants, of course, were from Japan, and Japanese Americans went from being the most numerous Asian American minority to be something like the seventh or eighth largest. And most of the others had more than a million, and the most numerous were Chinese, Asian Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans. All of these groups had more than a million people.

TI: And also Filipinos.

RD: Yes, how could I forget Filipinos? And Filipinos, who, unlike the others, had been in California and were treated, Filipinos were treated in our first book, the American Racism book. There was a section about them. That was unique; it was the first book that ever talked about that. And those were very profitable books as well.

TI: And this is the Asian Americans series?

RD: Yes. The other book was, since I mentioned it, was the book that Harry, Mitch Maki, and a women whose name is... you've got the list. Achieving the Impossible Dream, it's a history of redress.

TI: Here it is. Megan Berthold.

RD: Berthold.

TI: Yes, so Mitch Maki, Harry Kitano and Megan Berthold. Now why did you name your books so similarly? Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities, and then a year later Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seems like there would be confusion between the two.

RD: They're very, very different books. That was a large book published by a university press, it had a distinct subtitle which was used with it. Gary Okihiro, for instance, thought it was a terrible title. He didn't like the title at all. But I used it, and I justified it because for the period that that book covers, the communities were led and looked to the country of origin as a source of support and influence. And as Frank Miyamoto said years and years ago about the community -- he was talking about Seattle but it was everywhere -- if there was a Japanese consulate, the Japanese consul was the most prominent person of any Japanese American gathering. So this is to reflect that particular period. We'd never use that today. And they were, in many sense, many leaders were still trying to create a community model on their perception of what had been and what was taking place in Asia.

TI: And so what was Professor Okihiro's criticism of the title?

RD: He thought it was awful.

TI: Why?

RD: You know, you don't go around asking why.

TI: So I'll need to interview Gary, I guess, and ask him.

RD: No, I assume he still thinks so. I think he thinks it denigrates, and it wasn't a denial when you read it, that Japanese Americans were Americans. I've never denied that, Chinese Americans were Americans. But they have a very different place in American life than other immigrant groups, particularly they and nobody else, except those other minor Asian groups, at least minor in number, they and nobody else were "aliens ineligible for citizenship." That was a category that only they fit in, and something that the McCarran-Walter Act ended.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.