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BN: And then were you still doing your own art at this point?

LH: Some, but not really. I was really an art historian by that time. I was studying with Peter Meller, who was another really amazing, amazing scholar and professor. But he wasn't really powerful politically. [Noise in background] I don't know what that was. But he wasn't powerful politically in the faculty, so I struggled a little bit. So then I just, well, actually, the story was that I applied for the PhD program and everybody assumed that I would be in the PhD program. But the head of the committee was a nemesis of mine because I had gotten to the university and in two months I had ditched him as my major advisor and moved to Peter Meller. But Peter Meller never attended the faculty meetings. [Laughs] Basically, that's the story. So Dr. scheduled the meeting after everybody had left the campus and then he barred me from... he banned me from the PhD program. And I went to ask him, I said, "What do I need to get into your PhD program?" And he said, "You need to publish." I said, okay. Which is crazy, then you never published before your PhD program, practically. But that's the way it goes. There was a lot of prejudice in the program, I mean, all kinds of things, like I taught Italian when was at UCSB. And my program would not give me, (...) not count Italian as my language. I had an M.A. in Italian from Middlebury, it took them two years to give me accreditation for that language, and by that time, I'd taken Latin and German. Those are the kinds of things that happened, right? And I'd tell my students, it's like, you just have to be twice as good, at least, you just have to jump a higher bar than all these other people because that's the way it goes, that's the way it worked. It's not an equal system.

BN: You think it's still that way now?

LH: Yeah, I do. I mean, we're making some gains. We're making some gains, but you know, as David Goldberg said, we live in a racist state. It's always been racist, it's just that it was not part of our, it's not incorporated as part of our history. When revisionist history came along, there were some changes, and now there are all parts of that, are bare and open for people to see and understand, but it's not necessarily part of our ideology or what we think Americans are. So we still have that leap to (equality), we still are forever foreign. So I can be born and raised in the United States, third generation Japanese American, I'm still not accepted as an American, I'm seen mostly as a Japanese American and very much of a foreigner in a lot of ways. They still have people that way with my work. I had people, when I was teaching at UNCC, saying, "You speak English so well." It was definitely there.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.