Reflections on Solidarity

Reflections on Solidarity Kathy Masaoka (bio) After the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the explosion of righteous anger by Black communities across the country, many of us wanted to express our solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The COVID-19 pandemic was raging and conventional protest was neither safe nor simple to organize. When some of the older activists in Nikkei Progressives suggested an action in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, the younger activists asked, “What is the purpose?” We were caught off guard when they questioned whether it felt “performative.” We were used to responding to issues and crises with public action to express support and educate others. To understand the basis for these different responses, I looked back on solidarity in the ’60s and ’70s and during the campaign for Japanese American redress. The comments in this piece are not based on scholarly study but rather are intended as a personal reflection on my experiences as a student in the ’60s and as a Los Angeles–based Japanese American community activist for the past 50 years. I have also invited some of the same younger activists in Nikkei Progressives to contribute their thoughts on how and what solidarity looks like today. The power of the slogan “Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow Power” that we chanted on college campuses during the fight for ethnic studies in the ’60s energized us as we developed Serve the People programs in Little Tokyo in the ’70s. Many Asian Americans, along with other young people across the country, were thrust into the growing movement against the war in Vietnam as an entry point to grassroots organizing. As Asian Americans, we saw not only the imperialist motives of the war but also its racist nature, and continued the protest from the campus to the community. We joined the Chicano Moratorium marches in East LA, met with Vietnamese students who were guiding the anti-war efforts in the United States, and formed Asian American contingents to march down [End Page 125] Wilshire Boulevard. Our outlook was shaped by third world countries and peoples overturning colonial powers and creating new social systems. Rooted in the Japanese American community, we saw our struggle as part of the fight to end national oppression everywhere. When the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee asked people in 1973 to come to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to break the media blackout of the occupation, about a dozen people went to join the people’s march while a large support group stayed in LA to get the news out to the public. Activists in community programs were fortunate to be part of delegations to the People’s Republic of China to see and learn firsthand what socialism looked like and to bring back lessons for our work here. These are just a couple of examples of our work and approach at the time, which show how natural it was for us to respond to calls for support from people of color here and abroad. These same people, who organized Serve the People programs and fought redevelopment in their Little Tokyos and Japantowns, helped form the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR) in several cities in 1980. NCRR’s Principles of Unity reflected this history of solidarity and were guides to actions during the grassroots campaign. We fought for monetary payments, an apology, and a community fund, but also emphasized the importance of overturning the legal basis for our community’s incarceration and of “supporting others who are suffering from the unjust actions of the United States government.”1 Throughout our work, we learned by listening to our elders during pilgrimages at Manzanar and Tule Lake and from the testifiers at the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings in 1981. We learned that many of the concentration camps were on Indigenous lands and that the War Relocation Authority was staffed by many who had run the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So it was not a surprise that the government viewed us as people needing to be removed and out of sight just like the Native Americans. In 1986 we heard that the Hopi and Navajo

Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Redress · Slogan · Sociology · Solidarity · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy