Whether we like to admit it or not, being white, and a man matters in the United States and that’s because early on in the establishment of this country, the rules of naturalization and who could become a citizen (and therefore vote) was codified into law in one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the nascent US congress in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which said that citizenship was restricted to “any alien, being
a free white person” who had been in the US for two years. “Any Alien” was stipulated to exclude Native Americans.

The politics of “exclusion” was always at the heart of this new country, although at the same time and ironically it's leaders preached Justice for All. We can now see that they meant Justice for all aliens...but only if they are men, and only if they are white and for good measure, only if they had been here for two years. These words and stipulations have changed over the decades, like the two years to three or more, or to include aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent in 1870.  But what about Asians and Asian Americans?

I could not have answered that question six years ago. But I can now. What’s most instructive about the Asian American experience today is that it shows how easily hard-won rights can be lost and that the issues of discrimination are not necessarily divided along republican vs. democrat, conservative vs. liberal or even black vs. white.

Below is an excerpt from an essay I was asked to write about this aspect of US history for The Washington Spectator. I hope you find it interesting:

I recently went to Ellis Island on a beautiful spring morning and spent a couple of hours by myself watching the light pour into the Great Hall before the museum opened to the public. I was there to arrange the most recent iteration of an art project I’ve been working on for several years, this one having to do with an historic event that happened at Ellis Island back in 1942 and a related incident in 1998. To be there all these years later, knowing what I know now, was as if someone had firmly screwed in a light bulb that had been left loose, finally illuminating a part of my story and that of an America that I had never known or fully understood.

I was born and bred in the United States and grew up in the 1960s. My immigrant parents, by any standard, had achieved the American dream, with a successful small business in New York City and a middle-class home in the New Jersey suburbs. Like most of our European immigrant neighbors, I felt we were a healthy part of this “melting pot” we called America. My father, out of gratitude for his new country, always drove an American car, a Buick Le Sabre for him and a Dodge Dart for my mother, followed by successive generations of GMs, Chryslers and Fords over the years, despite the fact that many of our neighbors were starting to buy Japanese cars in the ’70s and German ones in the ’80s.

My father taught us to appreciate the diversity and generosity of this country, and I remember the pride and excitement I felt being taken to see the Statue of Liberty as a youngster. As we stood on the windswept deck of the ferry, I imagined my parents as part of the great wave of people who were welcomed into the arms of this beckoning green lady.

What I did not know at the time was that when my father first arrived, he was not allowed to stay in this country. That’s because he was Asian and, in particular, Japanese. I did not know, growing up, that Japanese people had been banned from immigrating to America, a ban that was in place nominally from 1907 and definitively, with the Asian Exclusion Act (which banned all Asians), in 1924, and wouldn’t truly be lifted until 1965...

You can read the rest of the essay The Washington Spectator.

To learn more about the Ellis Island Exhibit in 1998, click here.

I was asked to write an essay about the Asian American experience for The Washington Spectator. Here’s an excerpt. I hope you find it interesting.

Counting Asians
April 16, 2018
By Setsuko Winchester

The Olympics have come to a close, and in their wake I’ve been thinking about a stubborn phenomenon that was illustrated most recently by the flack a New York Times columnist named Bari Weiss received after tweeting: “Immigrants get the job done,” together with a picture of Mirai Nagasu, the U.S. ice skater who won a gold medal. Many asked: What do you mean, immigrant? She’s an American. 

Weiss defended herself by observing that Nagasu’s parents are immigrants. Well, if the standard at the Times is to identify you by your last immigrant relation, then we should take into consideration the immigrant parents and forebears of a lot of our newsmakers, most notably those presently in the White House. We should recognize Trump’s German and Scottish immigrant background, along with that of his Yugoslavian (now Slovenian) immigrant wife and former–Soviet Bloc Czechoslovakian-Scottish-German-immigrant sons and daughter. And how about the Belarusian-Jewish son-in-law, whose family escaped the Holocaust? When you see things the Weiss way (who I’m assuming, by the name, is a German-American immigrant), I think it’s strange that the Times doesn’t question Trump’s “American” bona fides or for that matter his America First policy, with its demands to close the doors on “immigrants,” since his presidency is clearly an example of the rise of the recent immigrant. Rather than hide it, as if it were something to be ashamed of, shouldn’t the White House celebrate how wonderfully open and generous America has been to his immigrant family?
You can read the rest here.

Twenty years ago, on April 3, 1998, an exhibition opened on Ellis Island which explained the difference between two types of government facilities used in the US during WWII to imprison citizens and non-citizens of the US. It poses the question..what do you do if your government turns against you, not for what you did…but for what you are? And did having US citizenship matter? In the 1940’s, the answer was no. There is a term for that kind of imprisonment...

​One tea bowl = 1,000 individuals

Image 1:  “Ellis Island  - 16 tea bowls”
Over 31,000 individuals were rounded up and put in internment camps run by the DOJ and the INS. These Individuals were mostly foreign nationals.

Those imprisoned in these facilities were arrested with charges and given a hearing. If they were unable to prove their innocence, they were held until deported. These facilities were protected by the Geneva Conventions. This was legal.
​
11,500 German foreign nationals
3,000 Italian foreign nationals
16,500 Japanese foreign nationals (most were released to one of the ten US concentration camps)


Image 2:  “Manzanar, CA - 120 tea bowls”
The US concentration camps were run by the military and administered by the WRA. Anyone with 1/16th Japanese blood in the western half of the western states (where most of them lived) were rounded up (even orphans in orphanages) and imprisoned for the duration of WWII.  No one was ever charged, given a trial or hearing, and the prisons were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. This was not legal.

Concentration camps are historically a very specific kind of incarceration which has been used as a tool of empire. It’s the imprisonment of a concentration of a particular group of people solely for who they are, not for what they did.

FDR helped promote universal human rights and yet removed the rights he said were a basic part of all Americans’ lives from certain citizens, most of whom had been in the US for multiple generations and who had committed no crime.

There is a historic pattern of “removing the other” in America. It continues to happen today.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

A friend just sent this to me. If you read the latest books about the roundup of Japanese Americans, this information is in there, but as we know these kinds of books are not read or reviewed…it seems as a rule.

But even when it’s in a publication like Scientific American, this kind of American history never gets into the "lay-readers’” diet of information that is fed to them by the purveyors of “general interest” news organizations as the NY Times has recently described itself and its readers to me in a correspondence with their Standards Editor about a similar matter.

"Thanks for this additional background. I definitely don't discount or minimize the importance of the topic or the need for historical accuracy. I do find, though, that in many areas there is a gap between the precise legal or historical terms used by experts and the ordinary terms used by laypeople to describe the same things. The best terms for a historian writing a scholarly paper wouldn't necessarily always be the best usage for a general-interest newspaper."

In trying to find this story in the NY Times, I found this from Dec. 2017 under the category “Lesson Plans/US History”: Teaching Japanese-American Internment Using Primary Resources

As we are teaching history:

Lesson one: Headlines matter. It would probably be more accurate to say the US forced roundup and mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

Lesson two: Internment was used not to detain Japanese Americans, but to imprison Germans, Italians and Japanese foreign nationals (and some of their children and spouses). 

Lesson three:  Japanese Americans were not placed in Japanese Internment Camps, but in what we now know were called US concentration camps by FDR and his administration. 

I didn’t know what to expect when we got to the first camp…which was Rohwer, in Arkansas. It had a cemetery and a memorial and a row of kiosks to explain what happened there in what is now row after row of flat agricultural farm land, perhaps cotton? Most everything had been harvested. It was pretty warm and it was December. 
​ 
We just had a rudimentary map and just sheer determination to find all these places. For a city girl who’s lived in NY City, Washington, DC and a year and a half in Tokyo, going to these sites gave me a new insight into my country, what democracy means and what life can be like for folks who don’t live in areas with every amenity available to mankind. Even living in a tiny, sparsely populated rural town in the Berkshire Mountains of MA didn’t prepare me for the sense of isolation at some of these locations, often a vastness which could seem deadly but beautiful at the same time.  

The journey also tells a different story of America and Americans (white, native American, Latino and black, rural and remote) than what I was used to, a story which seems more relevant today than when it happened 75 years ago. Back then we didn’t know or didn’t want to know. Today, to do the same would be to return to those days...of looking the other way. On a brighter note, the journey of looking for these places will also take you near some spectacular geological landscapes like the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Yellowstone or Crater Lake, depending on how you’d like to connect the dots.  

At almost all of these sites, people have taken care to rebuild, resurrect or preserve a part of the history there. A few have amazingly well put together interpretive centers while others are in the process. To let them disappear would be a shame because it means we will lose an essential part of this country's story, the struggle to become an American, which is central to understanding who we are as a nation.

Although the deadline for the Call to Action has passed, I thought I’d share this with you.

JANM is joining Japanese American organizations across the nation in an important call to action to help support continued funding for the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program. Please consider lending your support by contacting your elected representatives.

Call to Action
Tell Your Representative to Support JACS
Support the continuation of funding for the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program (JACS) by contacting your representative!
JACS funding is vital to the preservation of the legacy of incarceration endured by Japanese Americans during World War II. This funding is used across the nation in many capacities, such as art, education, and recording of oral histories.
Rep. Doris Matsui is leading a Dear Colleague letter that expresses support for continued JACS funding. We are asking for your help by contacting your representatives and asking them to sign on to Rep. Matsui’s letter. This will show that you, as their constituents, care about this funding. The deadline for the letter is March 16th, so act fast!
Also, if you or your family has any connection to a specific incarceration camps, please consider contacting the Representative of that camp’s location. Below is a list of each camp and the Representative of that area.
Please use the samples below to get in touch and show your support!
 
Camps by District and Representative
Jerome and Rohwer—Rick Crawford AR-1, French HIll AR-2, Steve Womack AR-3
Granada Amanche—Ken Buck CO-4
Topaz—Chris Stewart UT-2
Gila River—Krysten Sinema, AZ-9
Poston—Martha McSally, AZ-2
Tule Lake—Doug LaMalfa CA-1
Manzanar—Paul Cook CA-8
Minidoka—Mike Simpson ID-2
Kooskia Work Camp—Labrador ID-2
Heart Mountain—Liz Cheney
 
Sample Email
Dear … : 
I am writing you today to ask for your support of the Japanese American Confinement (JACS) Program.
JACS was passed in 2009 with bipartisan support and has funded many important programs. 
Preserving Japanese American history is important to me because … 
I have personally benefited from JACS through … (list program and its importance to you). 
I am asking you to sign on to Rep. Matsui’s letter to the appropriations committee in support of JACS. Any questions can be directed to Andrew Heineman of Rep. Matsui’s office at Andrew.Heineman@mail.house.gov. 
If you are unable to sign onto the letter, I ask that you consider including JACS funding in your individual appropriations requests. 
Thank you for your time, 
 
Additional Reasons to Highlight

• Relatively small sum. Continued funding would be the small amount of $3 million. $21 million has already been used, leaving $17 million left from the original passage.
• JACS funding is instrumental in finding individuals who were incarcerated during WWII and documenting their stories. Any disruption to the JACS funding would impact the capacity of organizations/individuals to document or record these experiences.
• The program serves not only Japanese Americans, but because of the outreach of the National Parks Service, all Americans are able to learn from the programs created and learn from the history of Japanese Americans. 

 
Sample Phone Script
Hi, my name is … and I am a constituent. I am asking Rep. … to support continued funding for the Japanese American Confinement Program. This program is important in educating the public about Japanese American incarceration and preserving this chapter in America’s history. I personally support JACS because … I ask Rep. … to sign onto Representative Matsui’s Dear Colleague letter or to submit an individual request for the continued funding of it. Thank you for your time. 

In a previous blog, I speculated why the Asian American experience is seldom included in discussions about race and the history of discrimination in America. This despite a long history of anti-Asian legislation that’s been passed, starting when the first Asians migrated to the US in the mid 1800’s. (By 1941, there were more than 800 pieces of legislation, federal, state and local, specifically targeting Asian people). I suspected this lack of discussion was because instead of it being illegal (as it was to discriminate against black people or discriminate against religion), discrimination against Asians was de jure...in other words it was perfectly legal.

Most of these laws have been slowly contested and either vacated or overturned. Here’s one that still is on the books in a state in the United States and it’s not on the west coast.

https://densho.org/last-alien-land-law/#comment-9155

Hope you find it interesting!

​​Ever since February 19th and the 75th Anniversary of FDR’s signing of EO 9066, a host of unexpectedly fortunate things have happened to my tea bowls and the images that tell their story, including being featured at the FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park earlier this year (until the end of December) and being selected for a juried sculpture show at The Mount in Lenox, MA, this summer. As that chapter closes, another one has begun.   

This fall has been particularly extraordinary because of a collaboration with Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (aka MCLA) in North Adams, MA. In early spring, the head of MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center, Michelle Daly, contacted me to say that she and members of the faculty were interested in bringing the Freedom From Fear/Yellow Bowl Project to campus.

The first phase was to bring the project to MCLA’s Gallery 51 (located a block away from MassMOCA), for a show that opened at the end of September and where it will be on exhibit until the 19th of November, 2017.

This was followed by two extraordinary days on campus in October, where I was given the opportunity to talk to different classes about the FfF/YBP in the context of various disciplines and perspectives: what happens to civil liberties during war for a “US Government and Public Policy” class; the challenges of getting one's message out for an “Arts Management” class; the role of community engagement and the power of art for a “Culture, Power and Protest” class; the importance of historical context and empathy for a “War, Science and Society” class; how experience in journalism shaped my project for a “Writing for Arts and Culture” class; and, last but not least, talking about the Asian-American experience in a “Conversations on Race” class. 

Even though I came to teach, I learned a lot from the questions and the exchanges that ensued. One in particular I’d like to share: 
  
After one of the history classes, a student came up to me to say there is a song she couldn’t stop listening to and asked me if I had ever heard of it…it was called “Kenji” by the group Fort Minor. She could tell no light bulb was going off as she looked at my blank expression. She prompted me some more…the lead singer is one of the founders of the group Linkin Park? Now a small glow of recognition appeared on my face. I had heard of Linkin Park, but I have to admit I knew nothing about them other than the fact that they were a rock band.   

I now know (from Wikipedia) that they have been called the best-selling band of the 21st century, one of the world’s best-selling music artists overall and a two-time Grammy winner with an international fan base.    

What I didn’t know that I learned from the student was that one of the founders of the band and lead vocalists is a Japanese-American guy named Mike Shinoda. Fort Minor is one of his side projects, for which he wrote a song called “Kenji”, which is about his family’s experience of being forcibly sent to one of the US concentration camps during WWII. He uses real out-takes from interviews with his father and his aunt which give an unexpected documentary feel to what is a rap song.   

Who knew?!

​Here is a link to the song.

Finally, in November, I got to see some of the results of an assignment that Dale Fink, a professor of education at MCLA and an expert on children’s literature, gave his students. He called it “An Image of my Own Resilience.”

The challenge, inspired by the FfF/YBP, was to create a conceptual work of art in order to tell the story of resilience in the face of a personal setback, hardship, difficult situation or challenge the student had to get through at some point in his or her childhood or adolescence (or even recently).  He instructed the students to find or create an object or memento that said something about themselves, identify a place that would bring out the meaning of the difficulty, pose the object and document it with a photograph. He told them to submit one to three photos and a caption that was as short as 25 words or as long as two paragraphs. 

An alternative was to focus on the challenges faced by an entire group of people (by ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) rather than on a personal history. 

I was surprised at the unexpected power of the students' work. The pain in some and the ultimate acceptance and ensuing catharsis in others was palpable.

I found the experience not unlike appreciating a good haiku. The structure is simple and straightforward, but the impact of the truth it revealed lingered long past the experience of seeing the images .  

I am hoping to share some with you, but I will refrain until I get these artists’ permission. 

Perhaps in the near future…