<Begin Segment 14>

BN: How do you think things have changed in the community since redress and the commission hearings?

AM: Well, I think currently they're in a much better place. For example, I think the way so many young people responded to the Rago Auction thing, that was just really a groundswell of people coming together and saying, no, we don't want this sold. We couldn't get that kind of a groundswell for the redress hearings. It was hard work to get the people to come. It was an important thing that happened, and for, certainly for the people who participate, it was important, it helped. But I think the whole culture, the minority cultures, are much more aware and sophisticated and in touch with what we can do, so that's great.

BN: Let's see, we talked about... yes, I'm just about done. Is there any, especially with politics of the last, well, you can go back any number of years, especially in the last couple of years, why do you think it's important that we continue to tell the story about the wartime incarceration and exclusion of Japanese Americans?

AM: It's... especially like it's been validated over and over again that that was a huge mistake on the part of the government. I think it's important to make that to remind the American public today, because there are still people who think it's okay to pick on a racial group or religious group and mistreat them. And I think having this discussion, making it possible for people to explain how they're feeling now, and I think it also helps people who are Muslim, people who come for refuge for countries in the south, that the whole country understand what they're going through, and how un-American it is. I think that's one of the things that's really, distorted people's ideas of what's American. Like objecting to the football players who take a knee, they're speaking up for American values, and they're being put down, it's really bad. I think another thing that's important for us to bring this up, is it's still, for many people, hard to speak up in public. Maybe it's okay to join a march, but if somebody says something to you individually that's racist, we don't necessarily speak up. And what I've realized is that, although I give classes, I write things, I give speeches, that it took me a long time to call on somebody who was being racist.

And I realized that I changed from being at Whittier College, where it's not a religious school now, but it's based on Quaker values of speaking your conscience, civil liberties, abolition, I mean, the Quaker values are very solid. And I worked with people like Robert O'Brien and the woman that I had the social work program with, and other people who might be junior faculty. But if they had these values, they spoke up, and I was so impressed, I finally decided I couldn't be chicken and stop. And my mother used to say, "Oh, they're just ignorant, don't pay any attention to them." That was a really good cover, but I knew it was because I was scared to speak up. So for maybe a half a year, different things came up where I would shake and have my stomach being knotted, and my heart pounding like crazy when I called somebody on what they were doing, but I finally got so I could do that. And my guess would be there are still people who would like to speak up, but who are afraid to and don't know how. I don't know if you've seen the testimony that Akemi did on students that she had at USC, and how hard it was for them to take the racism and how to respond to it. I think we could do more now to help people with that, just even having sessions on if somebody said something like that, what would you do and how could you say it?

BN: Are you still practicing?

AM: No, I'm retired.

BN: Any last thoughts?

AM: No, I guess that was my last thought, doing something to help people speak up.

BN: Thank you very much.

AM: You're welcome.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.