<Begin Segment 36>

LH: So since you were involved in that program from the beginning, what do you see as far as the progress that has been made in the school district? What effect or what impact has your program had on the Seattle school district?

MN: Oh, gee. That's so hard to say. Testimonials people will tell me how much the atmosphere in the school have changed. It's surprising to me. One time when I was a principal of the first school I was at, this woman came and said, "What you need in this school is a program like Rainbow." She said Rainbow this and Rainbow that. I thought she was flattering me and then in the middle of her conversation, she turned around and said, "Do you know anything about Rainbow?" [Laughs] And I said, wow. It was even more flattering that she didn't know that I was even connected with Rainbow. [Laughs] I went to D.C. once and this lady said, "Oh, you're from the Seattle area?" She says, "Do you know anything about the Rainbow program because I use it all the time." And I said, "Oh wow, isn't this nice." I look back and I think of some of the things that we did that was considered so radical, that we first said red, yellow, black, white, brown, and the Rainbow, in fact, just the name Rainbow was offensive to some people. Apparently there was a group of girls, Rainbow girls, and they kind of were a little bit more elitist kind of group so they said we should not use the word rainbow. It's elitism and other people said we should not say red, yellow, black, brown people. We're all human beings kind of thing, and it was a lot of flack. We said that multicultural is for everybody, not just for people of color. It's for all kids, all kids, and people didn't think that was true. They were saying white kids don't need multicultural and which is really funny, 'cause I just went to the workshop yesterday and the title of the workshop is "Diversity means all of us" or something like that and I am thinking isn't that nice. We were fighting to say it was for all of us back in those days and now the whole conference is entitled "Diversity means all of us." [Laughs]

LH: That's great.

MN: So I think that in a long ways, in a lot of ways, we've come a long ways in that diversity multicultural was learning origami, learning how to eat people's food, learning how to use chopsticks. It was pretty much on that level and we did that. But instead of just teaching kids how to use chopsticks, which was not an essential event, we tried to tie it with if you learn to use chopsticks, learn to respect that this is another legitimate way to eat. There are a lot of legitimate ways to eat. You eat with your hands, that's a legitimate way to eat. Some people are very clever with eating with their hands. They know how to do it better than we do 'cause we don't have any experience so we try to bring in more than just eating chopsticks. So I think that the fact that -- and we tried to make sure that it's not an ethnic studies approach. We were studying the minorities, we were studying what they do, and put them under a microscope. Always, always when we put them under a microscope, we stereotype them even more. So whenever we take something, we try to put it in the context of everybody. We teach the daruma-san and how it had the spirit to always get up, but the idea of the spirit being important is universal. We tried to always kind of tie it in that way, and I think that we were kind of ahead of our times. I think that we were. We did break some new ground and it's really pleasing to me now that people are looking at diversity and not doing ethnic studies approach. People are kind of raising their eyebrows. At one point it was all ethnic studies. That's really what people thought multicultural was, just studying people's heroes and holidays and foods and dance. And as we do that, we will learn to love each other. And we are saying we don't have time to learn to love each other, we just need to learn how to get along with each other [Laughs] and learn to understand where we're coming from, learn to reach out, learn how, the skills of trying to reach out to other people in the community, care enough to try to do it.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.