Repeating History

There is something, for me, about the stories of the Japanese American Internment that makes me get choked up. Or angry. Or both.

And I feel a similar sense of pain in hearing about stories that have emerged post-9/11 about the Arab and Muslim American community.

The convergence of these two issues, Japanese American Internment and Detention of Arab and Muslim Americans, esp. issues at Guantanamo Bay, converge in our contemporary political discourse, but perhaps one of the most moving examples is in this short film Day of Remembrance, which was produced by Cynthia Gates Fujikawa (who also has an excellent film called Old Man River)

Day of Remembrance is an 8 minute film clip--if you go to the website below and click on film #9, you can watch it:

Day of Remembrance (film #9)

Please, take 10 minutes to look at this clip. It's powerful. I've seen it at least half a dozen times, and I cry every time. And I get angry. And I want to act. What we need is organization and leadership for our actions, a place where we collectively can shout NO to the kinds of injustices happening around the world. Can someone please tell me where that place is...

The Passing of Sekou Sundiata

The morning of July 18, 2007 (just 2 days ago) the poet, artist, activist, intellectual, Sekou Sundiata, died of heart failure. I first met Sekou as part of an inter-disciplinary honors forum my class, "Mixed Race America" was taking part in. 2 other classes, all focused around issues of identity and race, to a large degree, met with him one night as he talked about his latest artistic piece, THE 51st DREAM STATE and led us in a discussion about race and citizenship and our post-9/11 world, sharing a particularly powerful anecdote about heading to the site of the twin towers a few weeks after they fell, and finding himself confronted with his own racial anxieties, prejudices, and fears, as he imagined a man heading towards him as one with Arab features--as someone who could be a terrorist--someone who could hurt him and countless others. But as the man came closer, his Middle-Eastern features morphed into a Latino man hurrying past him, up a flight of stairs, and Sekou realized that he had turned this Latino man into a terrorist -- coloring him with his fear and imagination, because of the state of terror he had internalized.

Sundiata was 58 years old. He will be missed. We need more poets to speak our fears and to adress, directly, our internalized racism and anxieties about the "other." I'm glad I got to meet him and to see him produce THE 51st DREAM STATE.

If you would like to hear a clip of Sundiata, go to this Salon.com site:

Audio clip of Sekou