Part 1: Identifying the Mask
James Baldwin once wrote, “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” When it comes to issues of love and sustainability, from the 442nd and Patsy Mink, to Yuri Kochiyama and Richard Aoki, Americans of Nikkei heritage have shown undeniable brilliance and resilience in the face of catastrophic circumstances. At the same time, our Asian and Japanese American community/ies as a whole, have in many ways been manipulated, divided, and exploited throughout our nation’s relatively short history. Understood (or misunderstood, rather) by an overwhelming majority of the nation as, at worst, invisible and at best “model minorities,” today’s young adult Nikkei brothers and sisters are confronted with much ambiguity in identifying our own position in American society.
As our Baachans and Jiichans faced being viewed as perpetually foreign and culturally dysfunctional in American concentration camps, many of us today (myself included) benefit from their reparations money, the status Japan holds in the eyes of a globalized economy, and a shifting racialization of Yonsei babies, many of whom are mixed race (myself included). We’ve donned a plethora of different masks, searching for acceptance within, as well as outside of our Nikkei communities, and I claim that this search is understandable, but not justifiable. If what James Baldwin wrote in his monumental work, “The Fire Next Time” is true, I would argue that today’s coming of age Japanese American is still working to remove our mask/s and humanize ourselves.
In the United States of America, we are subjected to a myriad of false binaries from the time we are very young. Battles between “American vs. Foreign,” “Man vs. Woman,” “Black vs. White,” “Haves vs. Have-nots,” etc. dominate the imaginations of ourselves and most of our fellow citizens (and non-citizens). In a nation built on systems of rule that leave tremendous opportunity gaps with regards to education for those in underfunded and under-resourced public schools; while others are tracked directly into private institutions of higher learning, a process of deification and demonization is necessary to rationalize the irrational.
In WWII, Japanese Americans undoubtedly took the short end of the stick as we were homogenized, otherized, and demonized. However, as Cornel West reminds us, “we must never allow our own suffering to blind us to the suffering of others.” Black, Latin@, Indigenous, etc. Americans, then as well as today, face daunting hardships and discrimination due to internalized and externalized racism (i.e. police brutality, little and/or negative media representation, etc.), and even in the “age of Obama” Black Americans are deemed by “common sense” understandings as “authentically American,” but “culturally dysfunctional.” In the wake of Oscar Grant’s murder by BART Police in Oakland, California, the value of Black life continues to dwindle as the Officer accused will serve a shorter sentence than Michael Vick did for dog-fighting. The causes and effects of these happenings have and continue to push the young people I work with and educate/learn from into varying forms of nihilism and hopelessness.
As I sat around before a showcase featuring Nikkei artists of all ages during the last “Pilgrimage” to the Tule Lake Internment Camp, I overheard a group of my male elders (most of who were camp internees) discussing our current President and his “love for watermelon and fried chicken.” And while their jovial laughter felt heartbreaking to me, I felt a sense of gratitude for currently possessing a glimpse of what I perceive to my own attempts at humanizing, rather than deifying or demonzing them and their experiences. As Nisei and Sansei men in the camps, they undoubtedly faced certain degrees of emasculation due to the ways white hysteria targeted and disempowered them at the time. If these wounds, covered with the masks of a “model minority” status, translated into their feeling “culturally functional” yet “perpetually foreign,” in the nation of their birth, it is no wonder that such animosity and disconnection can and does exist at times between Black and Japanese Americans.
As a Yonsei man born and raised in Richmond, California, whose Sansei father loved and served the West Contra Costa County Unified School District for more than 20 years; whose mother is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker; and whose friends and family contain a wide array of colors and cultures, this disconnect is particularly heartbreaking and infuriating to me. However, I am more than well-aware that hurt people, hurt people. Despite our best intentions, it is my firm belief that we as Japanese Americans still have much healing to do.
To be continued… in Part 2: Removing the Mask
Colin Masashi “Senbei” Ehara is a Yonsei Nikkei/Scottish/German/Iroquois American writer, Hip-Hop/Spoken Word artist, and educator from Richmond, Calif. He received a B.A. in American Studies and Education from UC Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University, and is currently completing a Single-Subject (English) Teaching Credential at the University of San Francisco. He resides in El Cerrito, Calif., with his wife, artist Emalyn Lopez.
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