In memoriam: Ron Takaki (1939-2009)

Last week, we lost Ron Takaki. According to the Los Angeles Times, he committed suicide after struggling with multiple sclerosis for over 20 years.

Takaki defined my first semester at Berkeley. He seemed to guest speak in every class I had. He would tell jokes about his time as a surfer in Hawaii and his seemingly accidental road to academia. And every time, he would ask about epistemology, "how we know that we know what we know".

Still, the best speech I heard him give was at a rally on Sproul in support of undocumented immigrants. He was largely unscripted, and gave a picture of undocumented immigration that made it everyone's struggle. He was more lively and passionate than I had seen him in the classroom.

One of my friends calls Takaki his 'intellectual grandfather' because he read Strangers From a Different Shore in the seventh grade. Reading about the American immigration story from an Asian American perspective changed the way he thought about history.

He was the father of radical multiculturalism. One that didn't just recognize difference in the face of colorblindness, but an anti-racist multiculturalism that recognized the injustices of the past and applied that history to the injustices of the present.

Rest in power, Ron Takaki.

Out of the Office

I'm off to spend a glorious 5 days without internet access.

Until then, I'd just like to say that I'm a firm believer in the power of positive reinforcement and personal affirmation. Getting birthday cards where people write a real message, having someone tell me that they appreciate something I've done makes me feel really good. Saying nice things to people makes me feel good, too. Someone must have done a study of some kind on this.

See you next week.

What is Ethnic Studies Anyway?

Most colleges don't have an ethnic studies department, so its a fair question. Its a question we tried to address in this year's graduation speech. I'm putting up part that I wrote:

"In Ethnic Studies we read this book Borderlands by this woman Gloria Anzaldua. She says the US would rather she not be Chicana, that her community would rather she not be indigenous, and no one seemed to want her to be a woman, especially not a queer woman, but she continued to write those between spaces, in the borderlands.

And I realized that being mixed is somewhere. I exist in and between spaces of Asian and white. I’m not half of anything. This is Ethnic Studies, to find wisdom from a woman like and not like me. She gave me words to feelings I knew and did not know I had. And now, like her, I proclaim: don’t give me your tenets and laws. Don’t give me your luke warms gods. What I want is an accounting from all three cultures. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar, and my own feminist architecture.

We declare that our personal lives are political, and when we know this, our lives make sense. We are undocumented immigrants, and the children of immigrants and doctors. We have been told we are too loud, too belligerent, too bold, too queer, too academic, not academic enough, too white to be in Ethnic Studies, so black we must be athletes. I proclaim our lives political and our lives are in our hands."

Missionary

I had a great conversation last night, about missions.

For most people in Ethnic Studies, missionary is a dirty word. Not because of the position (that's hardly a dirty one), but because Christian missionaries were so complicit in colonization around the world. Like anthropologists, Christian missionaries have a bad reputation. Many people who think about colonization cannot imagine a missionary who did not cause more harm than they did good. According to the master narrative, missionaries either do not follow their Christian ideals, or are too naive to see the damage they do.

This brings me to last night. My Christian fellowship still sends out missionaries. A lot of churches do. Last summer, my Christian fellowship sent me out as a missionary. And in my defense, I like to think that my summer did not add to the violence of colonization.

What I did was live with a team of 5 college students, in a men's drug and alcohol rehab program. We lived and ate with the men, went to chapel and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and generally helped with the program in any way we could. For me, this meant I spent most of my time washing feet in the free medical clinic they ran, and tutoring in the academic center, and generally hanging out with men in the program. One or two nights a week we would get together with other people doing mission work in the same city to watch movies and talk about what the Bible/God says about poverty, racism, environmental stewardship, etc.

When I describe what I did and call it an internship, people seem to think its pretty cool. When I describe it as a mission, non-Christians seem surprised. Some Christians, too.

No conclusions here. But I think that Ethnic Studies and Christianity both include learning how to love other people, so they should be closer than most people think they are.

Balancing Act

Time always runs out before I accomplish all the things I want to.

I believe that there is a season for all things, so we don't need to do everything at once, or feel guilty about not doing something for a while. So, when its time to study, I study. And when its time to attend a different event everyday of the week, I do that.

So much easier in theory than in practice! And here at the end of the school year, we cannot ignore the choices we made, because they determine where we end up. Some of us are wishing we had done more reading over the course of the semester. Some of us are wishing we had paid more attention to our friends, or wishing we had put a little more into organizing that open mic/town hall/protest because things might have turned out differently if we had.

Is it possible to find balance? As student organizers can we really be students and organizers and friends without having one of those roles suffer? And which do we let suffer? We all make different choices.

All I know is I'M TIRED.

Memory and Evil

Tvetan Todorov came to campus this week, to discuss whether memory was a remedy for evil. After all, George Santayana told the world that if we don't learn our history, we are destined to repeat it.

What brings peace? And what brings justice? I've been told to forgive and forget. Other people claim to forgive but not forget.

When it comes to history the question of forgiving and forgetting seems to presuppose that all the people involved have an equal amount of power. To continue the cliches, however, it is the winners who write history.

Do not confuse forgetting with erasure.

When I learned about World War II in American history, I learned about the Holocaust. I learned that the Germans killed lots and lots of Jews and we must never forget, or else it will happen again. But what about the things that I did not learn from my American history class? Did they forget to teach me that the Nazis modeled many of their tactics after the US eugenics movement? Did they forget to teach me that the US turned away a boat of Jewish children because the US didn't want them either? Did they forget to tell me that the concentration camps also held queer people, political resistors, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other "undesirable people"?

And what about Asia? Did my high school history teachers forget to teach me that it was a world wide war? That millions of people died when Japan invaded China and that the Japanese tortured people to death in Nanjing? Did they forget to tell me the Korean women were kidnapped and raped by soldiers everyday as part of army morale? Did they forget to tell me exactly what the aftermath of an atomic bomb looks like? The flesh that melts and the health problems that persist.

No. Someone erased these histories. I could not forgive or forget because some one did not want me to know. Perhaps we must also ask when history is complicit with evil.

The things my history teachers did not tell me abound.