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BS: And, Sarah, from my research, it's pretty clear you have a passion for activism and are a social justice advocate, from leading mixed race identity workshops, to lobbying for social change, what has inspired you to continue pushing for social justice? Have you been involved in any social movements, such as BLM or Stop Asian Hate, that have made headlines in recent months? And what advice would you give to any aspiring young advocates?

SB: I think, honestly, the thing that really inspires me the most is the community. It's the people that I get to meet along the way, and the way that we support each other. Yeah, like, I would say that some of the people I've met through JACL, specifically or through the work that we've done in the broader community, I'm incredibly close with in a lot of different respects. Yeah, like, number one, always, always going to be the community. And... sorry, I'm looking at your questions. As far as things that we've done recently, I'm just going to talk about Bill a lot, I think, because Bill and I have worked really closely together over the last few years. But at the beginning of the pandemic, so gosh, when was this, like February of 2020. This was like before the pandemic had hit Washington or the United States even. And, you know, it was still mostly in Asia, and folks were scared, right? People were getting scared because it was spreading and spreading. And there was all this rhetoric going around that like, oh, it's Asians, it's Asian communities, they're dirty, they're unclean, they're spreading this pandemic. And so even before it hit the United States, we noticed that the Chinatown/International District here in Seattle, was taking a really hard hit because people weren't going down there because they were freaked out. Which is, like, so problematic. [Laughs] And already, like, those small businesses are so dependent on foot traffic, and people going and buying from them. And so, when that stopped happening, a lot of them were having a really hard time financially, and some folks were having to close, or were in danger of closing. And, you know, working full time and being in school, I was like, I can't go down there every single day myself to spend money, but what I can do is tell other people about the places that I love going to and why and to support these small businesses. And so I just started posting on my Facebook page being like, "Hey, I really love Honey Court, these are their hours, they're still open, go get these dishes from them." And Bill was like, "Hey, this is a good idea. What if we started a Facebook group and people could post about their favorite places, and why they love the ID? So we can just kind of like, share about that, and hopefully, like, send more people down there to support these small businesses?" And so, Bill and I and another friend of ours started this Facebook group. And it was, we, again, didn't know what we're doing, didn't know what we're getting into. And in the first day, we had 1000 people that wanted to join this group. And we gained 1000 people every day for, like, a couple of weeks. And eventually, like over a month and change, the group grew to like 20,000 people. And it was absolutely wild. And you know, what started out as this really small project to talk about the places we loved and why, it suddenly grew into something much, much larger than that. I think a lot of what I attribute to that is kind of a right place, right time situation. Because it was the beginning of the pandemic, no one, no one knew what the hell was going on, right, we were being told to stay in our homes, don't gather together. And from an activism standpoint, usually what we do is we gather together, we go to demonstrations, or we'd go to a restaurant together. And so not being able to do that, I think people were really at a huge loss, they didn't know what they could do. And so this really gave them a platform and an opportunity to do something that was very impactful for our community that a lot of people were very passionate about.

And so, like I said, it grew very, very quickly. And we received international recognition, like Bill and I have done interviews with different newscasters from, I think one was from Germany, and from around the United States, because, again, it just grew so quickly, and people were really looking for a way to contribute. And then in... gosh, we started that in like, late February, early March of 2020. And then by, I think it was July of 2020, the project had just gotten way too out of hand. And it kind of stopped being a platform for activism and a place for people to come together, and was becoming more a place where people wanted to argue about identity politics, essentially, and was not really a healthy place for people to be contributing anymore. And in addition to that, I personally was dealing with a lot of stuff because of it, so I had some people threatening me. And yeah, it was just not... it was becoming unsafe for a lot of reasons, so we ended up shutting it down.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.