Before we get to our agenda, I’m going to do something I’ve never done as the chair of this board. I’m going to use a point of personal privilege to make a few comments about the events that happened in Georgia this week. Because the events were the culmination of the growing violence against members of our communities. I attended an event hosted by CAAL last week about the fear that growing violence has created throughout the communities we are tasked with speaking for. The fear that exists thoroughly depressed me.
I grew up in Roseville, MN, at the time, a very white Twin Cities suburb. There was one other student of color in my kindergarten class, Sally Murakami, also Japanese American. Growing up through the years, all of our classmates assumed Sally and I would become girlfriend/boyfriend and get married. I liked Sally but had no interest as a kid, in marrying her and resented how our classmates assumed the two of us had a mutual connection just because we looked similar and different at the same time. I’m sure Sally felt the same.
The first time I realized I was a different race from my classmates came when Tommy Hanson teased me about my yellow face. I thought he was referring to how earlier, my brother and I were messing around with my sisters’ makeup, and I must have not washed some of it off my face. I didn’t know what Tommy was teasing me about until he kept teasing me and my Mom gave me my first lesson about racism and a common slur against Asians is having yellow skin.
Over the years through my K-12 experience there were a few other slurs directed at me and some painful micro aggressions directed my way but most have fallen out of my memory, whether deeply suppressed or because they didn’t register enough in my mind to remember. I do remember in college working my part time job at Kmart during a time when the American auto industry was struggling given the growing popularity of Japanese cars when a middle age white woman walked by holding up a package of men’s underwear and said to me, “American made.” Her choosing to use underwear to demonstrate her point made me chuckle, but the hatred in the tone of her voice pierced me to my soul. This was probably the most defining moment of my understanding the extent of how hatred is embedded in racism. There is no separation between the two, they are intricately intertwined in an insidious way.
