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BS: And something else I was wondering about is I've talked with some of the other interviewees on this project about the concept of solidarity. And it's interesting to see everyone's different thoughts on it, and how their own identities influenced their views. And recently, you were a moderator of the webinar series, Uprooting Anti-Blackness in the Japanese American Community. So, I wanted to ask, what are your insights on solidarity?

KK: Well, I'm just really so happy that I was able to -- at that kind of historical juncture -- make a contribution to the JACL work which really... when this project came about, it was, came about in the middle of the racial reckoning of 2020, the really big outpouring of sentiment in this country that occurred after the murder of George Floyd and other members of the Black community. And some of us -- and I just really recently had gotten active with the JACL -- and some of the members of JACL both the Sansei, and some of the Yonsei and Gosei members, saying, "What can we do? What can we do where we get to take some responsibility as all of this is going on?" And so long and short of it, there are a number of Yonsei and Gosei folks, one of them, I'll just mention one, although there are a number. Gabrielle Gainor Nomura, who was one of the people that we interviewed, was one of the ones who spoke to the conscience and said that, "We really need to do something, and to do our part, that we need to do something that brings our community in support of what's going on in the Black community." So that was the genesis of the idea of the series, Uprooting Anti-Blackness in the Japanese American Community. It was one of those things that kind of happened at the right time because of the fact that I just come off of working in Seattle Public Schools and supporting the Ethnic Studies Initiative to bring ethnic studies curriculum to Seattle students. But one of the reasons why I had some passion about that was because of the fact that my undergrad degree is in ethnic studies. So, in other words, that was part of my undergrad education, and looking at the multiple histories of the peoples of color in this country, and how they came to be and their history.

So it wasn't difficult for me, because back in the '70s, if you were an ethnic studies student, you were also politically active and the group that I was with at Western, and some of the folks at UW were active in various causes, and supported Native Americans, the Black liberation struggle, and struggles in the Latinx community, like the farmworkers. But primarily causes in the Asian community here in Seattle. One of the biggest causes -- and this was interesting, the Asian American movement in Seattle started in 1970, I think, when a group of Asian activists -- they were a little older than me -- began to protest the lack of representation in the Seattle College, what's now Seattle College, it was Seattle Community College at that time. There were demonstrations and there were arrests involved. And just as an aside, not only did that inspire me, but I remember sitting at the dinner table and it was clear that these were just part of the kind of '70s protesters that were just very prevalent at that time. And I remember my mom very distinctly, she, at the dinner table, began to talk about this. And she began crying because she was so upset at the fact that these demonstrators were arrested. In other words, she was just so supportive, even though she was a Nisei and not one of these young radicals, that these activists, people like Al Sugiyama and his brother, would actually stick out their neck and actually do this. And she had so much respect for that, and the fact that they were arrested was something that really impacted her a lot.

So fast forward... oh, I forgot to mention that some of the other struggles that you'll read about in Seattle's history is the fact that when they placed the Kingdome, which is a forerunner of Lumen Field, right next to the International District, there began to be wholesale evictions of old Filipino, former farm workers and cannery workers as well as Chinese families. And it was in preparation to gentrify the place, and that got the Asian American community quite actively protesting, and I was a part of that, as well. So fast forward to 2020. Kind of having that knowledge, I was glad that I was able to contribute to helping to put together that series, which turned out to be, I think in many ways, impactful. It managed to attract, because the one advantage of Zoom was the fact that we were able to get people to attend as far south as California, the East Coast, we even had somebody from Japan who attended our sessions. Somehow, she had gotten wind of it. So anyway, it sort of came together. I'm glad I became active at JACL, just at that time, and I was glad that I had some background to make that contribution. So that's a story of how that happened, and we're continuing to find ways, or try to find ways to make that contribution, because we think that if you want to talk about JACL today, that's one of the things that I think we need to do is to make that ongoing contribution to civil rights.

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