<Begin Segment 19>

BN: Another article I wanted to ask you about was in the last issue. It was this big, kind of... you had an article called "People Were All Human," which seemed...

DA: I did? [Laughs]

BN: Do you not remember? Okay. If you don't, that's fine. But no, it seemed to, it made the point that... kind of a call for tolerance and understanding within the Asian American movement, which seemed to suggest that there was disagreement. Do you remember that at all?

DA: A little bit. And well, there were a lot of different organizations back in those days, and so some more militant than others. And I thought, for me, the militancy I never could get past. I never was into that. And I think that was part of it, too, and why are we fighting amongst ourselves? We are overall a marginalized group of people, so why should we fight? Let's try and listen to each other and learn from each other and try and do things together, try and find common ground. And I thought there was enough there to do that. But I look around today, in certain ways, the human element, how we all try and get along with each other, that hasn't really changed much. Just wondering if that's just a curse that we're born with as a human race.

BN: Yeah, probably. [Laughs]

DA: Yeah, it's sad in a way that we can't really seem to get along. Just because their skin is a different color or their religion is different or whatever, you know? It's crazy how people will try and separate themselves and make themselves want to be better than somebody else or something, they're willing to kill over it. And that's... I never could understand that. To this day, I still can't, and it's just kind of sad that way.

BN: Now, another thing I wanted to ask about was that there were obviously both men and women on the staff, and was there a sense of, I mean, how gendered was it? I mean, was there a fairly equal treatment of... or were women kind of doing more of the typing, or do you know what I mean? How conscious were you of that, falling into traditional roles versus bucking that?

DA: I think there was a fair amount of consciousness around that. I mean, there were women that made us make sure we were conscious of that. But I think as time went on, in the beginning, there was a lot of people coming in and out of those doors, especially the first couple years. And then maybe the fourth and fifth years, it really started coming down to a core group of maybe about fifteen of us, and I think the large majority were men. Yeah, I was kind of looking at some of those staff boxes over the years, and it was quite a lot of people some months. But as it got towards the end, there was just some core guys, I think.

BN: The other thing I wanted to ask you was that, looking at it today, it's interesting that there really seems to be this conscious effort to adopt kind of this third-world perspective where you've got articles on the American Indian movement and on African American movement and all of these things, and just asking if there was, how conscious an effort was there to kind of build this solidarity amongst other communities of color, and how successful do you think that you were in that effort?

DA: Well, there was definitely a conscious effort to include other struggles of other communities, there's no question about that. How successful we are? I would not know. It's hard to tell how to judge something like that.

BN: Did you ever collaborate with other organizations or publications from other communities of color?

DA: Not that I can recall, though I think there could have been cooperation or collaboration with other writers. But in terms of other organizations, not so much. We could have been maybe a mouthpiece or a way for, like the Van Troi Brigade, you know, back in those days. We wrote some articles about them, certainly we wrote about some of the things that were happening in Chinatown, of course, Little Tokyo, NCRR. Wait, was it started by then?

BN: Well, their predecessor, and I think the Little Tokyo...

DA: Oh, right. LTPRO, Little Tokyo Progressives. So, yeah. Mike would know again more about that.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.