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AT: I guess sort of on a different topic, I saw that you recently moderated a panel with multiracial artists. And I was kind of wondering what inspired this panel? And like, what were the things that you talked about? And, I guess, who was the panel for? Like was it for just conversation to have or were people... were there people there that were kind of listening in and interested in the topics that you're talking about?

GG: Yeah. So the panel was part of Seattle JACL's Mixed Race series which we had originally, we were planning a mixed race conference for right when the initial Covid shutdowns happened. And then kind of waited six months and saw that we were not going to be doing any sort of in-person anything because this pandemic thing is going to be much longer than we anticipated. So we converted all of that programming in 2020 online. And then we still had some money left over from that, from the grants and stuff that we got. So we did another round of workshops this year. And so the mixed race artists panel was part of that. I would say, in terms of where that came from, I think that we just learned from the census that Japanese Americans are the most multiracial Asian group out of any Asian group in the United States. We know that our Japanese American community is increasingly multiracial. And so this series was really kind of born -- and also I think we have a lot of hapa, or mixed race identifying Asians just in general in Seattle and the West Coast and it's just, it's a thing. And so this was really kind of born out of wanting to serve that community more and serve those families. I'm also involved with a group called Families of Color Seattle, which is serves all kind of, all BIPOC families. And then also, I think that there was a really interesting link between that mixed race series and the anti-Blackness series that that I was doing with Kyle, just, it was really all coinciding at an interesting time because we were also really trying to -- as much as we could with this mixed race series -- center the experiences of Black and indigenous and Nikkei who were not necessarily mixed with white and really center those experiences as much as possible. So that's just kind of like some context for that series.

And yeah, the mixed artists series, as I said, it was kind of just born of that. We did a mixed artists series in 2020 as well, and it just, it went really well. And so I thought we should continue it. That first round we did have other types of mixed folks -- there was like a Black person and indigenous person, also an Asian American. This year, it was all, it was all mixed Asian women. But I think it was, I think it was really interesting. It was, we had a photographer, a writer, a painter, and then I moderated. And, yeah, and there were Chinese, Japanese, and I'm Filipina. And I think it's just, it was very, thematically, it was very similar to some of the things I've been talking about here. These women really showing how they tell their own stories and kind of reclaim their own experiences, not only as Asian American, but also as people who kind of exist in this liminal space and kind of in between both worlds. And I think it was a very, yeah, I think it was powerful. I think that one thing I was really trying to get across in the panel is that we all, as people of color and as mixed race people, really have something to learn from artists and storytellers because we all have our own stories to tell and can learn how to kind of better own that story whether you're doing that in some artistic medium or not. So that's really kind of what I was trying to get across. I think in, we also have, because we've done this mixed series, we also have a lot of like, parents of mixed kids, like white parents of mixed Asian kids contacting us because they want resources, and just other family members of mixed kids contacting us. So I was also hoping that this could be a resource for them to see like, this is what your kid can be like when they grow up, but also for them to encourage them to seek out role models because, as we know, it is so detrimental when we're not reflected in the art or media or books that we consume. So I think it's really important to center where that's happening that we are reflected.

AT: Yeah, yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2021 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.