<Begin Segment 9>

RW: And then we had other kinds of things, like even as this is going, Tom Bradley's mayor, and when Tom Bradley becomes mayor, you're answering the phones at the office, and more than half the calls are death threats. And you're going, "What?"

TI: So explain, so you were working in Bradley's office?

RW: Yeah. Because Jeff Matsui was kind of his adopted son, and Jeff protected a lot of folks in there. I really didn't join into the office, but I'm around it. And when we had the first Asian Pacific Heritage Week, he asked me, "Would you do the dinner, put that together?" And the lesson in the dinner was just like all these different Asian groups, because I pulled in people from the Thai community, Cambodian, pulled them all in. And we would meet in the mayor's conference room, and just the location of the conference room, different department heads and deputy mayors would walk through, poke their head in, and you introduce them and they exchange cards. It really explained to me, like, once these guys had a sense that they belonged inside, and they had an inside phone number, their behavior was different. Because there's inside behavior and outside behavior, and we've always been outsiders. And if you're outsiders, you throw stones to get attention. When you're an insider, you give up some things and you play... and it's not like one is better than the other, but it's just that both exist. And sometimes, like it's true in redress, there's an inside part and there's an outside part. And there's a stupid argument that one is more important than the other and it's not true.

TI: Well, during this time, did you start forming strategies in terms of how you can marry the two, the inside/outside approach so that they worked together? Because oftentimes they're just pitted against each other, right? It's hard.

RW: I think it's hard, and I don't know that there was all that conscious of a strategy, just kind of a learning. And for people... and it exists in my work now, like when I work with groups, because I do a lot of protest events, and saying, "Okay, this is outside, but if you get inside, what do you want to do?" Or, "You've got some of your folks inside, how can you work with them without killing them, or do you want to kill them?" There's a lot of questions you can raise, but I think the work of a community organizer is really complex, and revolves a lot of different things to understand those different dynamics, and help bridge them. And without being... I think it's really useful not to initially be judgmental, to just kind of look at, this is what is, and how this works, and then you just kind of take into forcefield, this works for me, this doesn't work for me. And the more you apply that, I think when you get the fifty-one percent, you eventually win over the long run. But there's so much working against us, because we don't have control of it, or there's a lack of understanding of how it works inside. And I think for people who have been -- like redress had so much of that, that it was just... 'cause I'm an outsider.

TI: Yeah, that's what becomes clear in this interview, you're an outsider, and I think you think of yourself as an outsider, but now you're an insider.

RW: Right. And then there's a responsibility that comes with that, that says, to help both sides not throw away the baby with the bathwater. Because if you look back at some of the figures involved with redress, a lot of them are really obnoxious.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.