And what's most important is that we build movements for liberation.

It's a constant battle and it's exhausting. The second thing that I think is really crucial here is that we cannot just work in reactionary ways every time there's an incident-a new incident of an attack on Asian Americans, yet another police killing of an unarmed Black person, or attacks against indigenous peoples and their lands and waters-this gets us nowhere. We need to think about how things impact the most vulnerable among us and work out of those best interests. always said and operated by the ethos that my people's liberation is intricately linked to your people's liberation. It's a very problematic model and one that Yuri always resisted. It's like the model minority myth where we work out of self-interest but the gains that one group makes come at the expense of other groups. First of all, who are our own people? Many of us cross multiple groups and at the same time, working only out of self-interest gets us in a trap. RAMTIN ARABLOUEI: In a moment like we're living through right now where it feels like every few months it feels like a new group of people, whether Black Americans or Asian Americans, or for a time it was Muslim or Middle Eastern Americans, or of course Native Americans are targeted, what does her example tell us about the need to see that connectivity between the groups that are being targeted?įUJINO: Yes, I think that there are two crucial lessons: The first one is this need for solidarity that we cannot only look to the interests of our own people. And she was seeing things like water cannons blasting peaceful Black protesters, dogs being sicced on peaceful Black protesters. She was following the news of the Civil Rights Movement unfolding on television and in the newspapers. And then she got involved in a labor struggle at a medical site where they were going to build a new medical building and were doing their typical discrimination in hiring. She got involved in supporting better quality schools for the children of Harlem, now including her own children. On how Kochiyama became involved in activism while living in Harlem:įUJINO: She became an activist and an organizer in her 40s as the mother of six children.

There was barbed wire, there were sentries, they were forced to move to be placed into them. And when people say, well, doesn't that diminish what happened in Nazi Germany? The response has been that those were death camps, but these, that Yuri and Japanese Americans were placed in, were concentration camps. And so what the Japanese American activist community has called upon for decades is that they be called concentration camps. 26, 2004, Yuri Kochiyama, of Oakland, Calif., looks at a memorial erected for the inhabitants of a Japanese-American World War II interment camp in Rohwer, Ark. It was forced, right? It was done through racial profiling and racism against a group who were the descendants of supposedly the enemy and, yet, we know that mass incarceration didn't happen for Germans and Italian Americans. And I wonder if that was intentional and why you decided to use that term?įUJINO: Evacuation refers to moving to safety but that's not what happened. RUND ABDELFATAH: I noticed that you called what are typically referred to as Japanese internment camps, concentration camps.

Yuri kochiyama