PDF Version[1]
Conquest, it is affirmed, creates historic links. The new time inaugurated by the conquest, which is a colonialist time because occupied by colonialist values, because deriving its raison d’etre from the negation of the national time, will be endowed with an absolute coefficient. The history of the conquest, the historic development of the colonization, and the national spoliation will be substituted for the real-time of the exploited men.
~ Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution[2]
The apology was so appropriate and the payment so justified, however insufficient it was, that the source of my ambivalent reaction was at first difficult to identify. After some introspection, I guiltily discovered that my sentiments were related to a very dark, brooding feeling that I had fought long and hard to conquer– inferiority. A feeling that took first root in the soil of “Why them and not me?” and, once discovered, withered away in the blazing sun of “African Americans cannot expect justice in America.”
~ Vincene Verdun, “If the Shoe Fits, Wear It”[3]
Introduction
The shadow of anti-Blackness haunts an isolated Asian American history. In the early twentieth century due to purchasing unwanted land and advanced farming techniques, Japanese American communities held a growing economic autonomy on the West Coast. Both the state and civil society anxiously viewed this growing independence through “the stereotype of the Oriental of super cunning and sly intent.”[4] White supremacist organizations and the Californian government worked to pass alien land laws to dispossess Japanese Americans, attempting to create an expendable migratory labor force.[5] Simultaneously across the color line was the rise of Black Wall Street in North Tulsa, with a growing economic and political autonomy from white capital. The white response in North Tulsa terrorized, dispossessed, and destroyed Black Wall Street in 1921.[6] In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, dispossessing, relocating, and interning over 125,000 Japanese Americans into deplorable and traumatic conditions. On 10 August, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, assigning $20,000 dollars to survivors of the Japanese American internment. Vincene Verdun’s “Why them and not me?” haunts a progressive teleology that sutures the horrors of Japanese American racialized violence into a moment America has overcome. North Tulsa, as well as many other Black communities, continue their struggle for reparations. Why did Japanese Americans receive reparations, while Black, Indigenous, and other racialized groups have received essentially nothing at the federal level? While we must recognize Verdun’s blazing sun where justice becomes an impossibility, I posit an alternative view of reparations from the perspective of Yuri Kochiyama. Through tactically supplementing reparations to the ongoing struggle against anti-Blackness, Kochiyama demonstrates how we can work through Verdun’s impossibility and create radically new forms of justice beyond the “Why them and not me.”
Crucial to the conceptual underscoring of this paper are Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon’s notions of sociogeny. Fanon defines sociogeny as the insufficiency of previous descriptions of the human: “beside phylogeny and ontogeny stand sociogeny.” He defines phylogeny and ontogeny as the paradigmatic shifts of Darwinian evolution and Freudian psychoanalysis respectively. Fanon integrates these two projects by arguing that the way humans biologically and psychoanalytically experience themselves is simultaneously alongside a socially constructed (colonial) code. Understanding the “epidermalization” of the Black subject cannot be reduced to the biological reductionist theory of Black skin, but rather how a colonial culture has defined the Black subject’s relation with their mind/body. To move toward the sociogenic from the ontogenetic and phylogenetic requires realizing that “society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being.”[7] Wynter summarizes the sociogenic project as a “process taking place hitherto outside our conscious awareness and thereby leading us to be governed by the “imagined ends” or postulates of being, truth, freedom that we lawlikely put and keep in place, without realizing that it is we, and not extra human entities, who prescribe them.”[8] As Enlightenment thinkers would argue, the natural laws governing our behaviors are products of human socialization. For instance, the portrayal of human nature as self-interested, competitive, and brutish are results of a historical Western code, rather than an intrinsic quality to humanity. Wynter reminds us that these governing codes, whether it be religious or the Western secular humanist, are far from our destiny, and humans retain the ability to redefine humanity in a liberatory manner.
Following the concept of sociogeny, I divide the paper into two parts: the first part conceptualizes how the colonial code defines Japanese American experiences into the “imagined ends” of Western liberalism, and the second analyzes Kochiyama’s praxis toward alternative ways of conceiving reparations beyond progress. The paper begins with an analysis of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Citizens (CWRIC) to interrogate how these organizations sutured the internment experience into a progressive narrative. In addition, I analyze how the JACL adopted anti-Blackness and the Model Minority Myth to attain reparations, maintaining the colonial code that produced internment. Drawing from Kochiyama’s archives and Diane Fujino’s biography, I analyze how she reworked her historical memory of racial violence to an anti-colonial position by studying and struggling with Black and brown communities in New York. To understand Kochiyama’s position of reparations away from the state’s colonial sociogenesis, I analyze how Kochiyama participated in and created communities founded on radical care, and how her praxis and words created an alternative future of cross-racial struggle. Reparations for Kochiyama were far from enclosing Japanese Americans into the state’s logic, but instead became a moment to celebrate and mobilize the Japanese American community to struggle against the imperial logic as a whole. Her work can not only influence an approach to reparations as an aspect of a broader Third World struggle to ascertain material resources but also create new understandings of time and humanity.
Japanese American Reparations and the Model Minority Myth
During the late 1970s and 1980s, Japanese American organizations began to mobilize in their fight to redress the 1942 internment. Due to their accommodationist tactics and connections to politicians, the JACL was the leading group for Japanese American reparations. During the internment camps and after, the JACL promoted “superpatriotism” and “Americanization,” adhering to notions of “racial and economic progress.”[9] The organization also promoted the historical vision of Japanese Americans as a Model Minority, quietly triumphing from racial oppression by remaining dutiful and loyal to the state. To the disagreement of other Japanese American reparations movements, the JACL first wanted to establish a study commission to evaluate the damages and determine modes of redress. To avoid fears of tabling, the JACL advocated and succeeded in creating a commission to tactically educate Congress so the bill could have a higher chance of passing.[10]
With the establishment of the study commission, the state created the CWRIC. The commission’s directives were threefold: “reviewing the facts and circumstances” around internment, “review[ing] directives” for the military, and “recommend[ing] appropriate remedies.”[11] The investigation comprised twenty days of testimony hearings from Japanese American internees and Aleut relocation survivors, as well as over 750 witnesses in various cities. The commission included various political, religious, and juridical figures whom President Jimmy Carter and the Senate appointed. Carter claimed that the study commission was meant “to expose clearly what has happened in that period of war in our nation when many loyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry were embarrassed during a crucial time in our nation’s history.”[12] With newfound documents and hearings, the state released their final report, Personal Justice Denied, which included a summary of the commission’s findings and recommendations for redress.
The JACL distributed a twenty-four page packet to the internees before their testimonies.[13] The testimony guidelines display the accommodationist tactics of the JACL and the discursive reconcilability of redress and the state’s imperialist logic. To provide an example of an ideal testimony, the JACL provided a letter from lawyer Minoru Yasui: “My concern is that our nation, the United States of America, should never again perpetuate such an outrageous violence against any individual in the future and that we restroe(sic) our nation to its rightful place as the leader in the world in defending human rights, dignity, and freedom.”[14] The misspelled copula “restroe” displays the faulty progressive temporality of Japanese American redress with the JACL. The difference embedded in “restroe” reveals how the project of restoring America as the protector of the moral world order is part of the same logic that produced the racialized violence of internment. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that “moral intervention has become a frontline force of imperial intervention” and how America’s site as the moral leader of the world justifies its imperial violence.[15] States, NGOs, and transnational corporations legitimize control over the Global South through a perceived moral supremacy. The narrative of progress plays a crucial role in consolidating legitimacy; Western institutions must reconcile past historical violence to declare themselves arbiters of moral justice. Japanese American reparations allowed the state to reconcile the past, as Leslie T. Hatamiya frames it, “clearing the conscience of the nation.”[16] The JACL and Minoru’s letter fails to address the violent history, such as the Monroe Doctrine, behind America’s role as the benign patriarch “defending” the world. Because there is a lack of structural questioning on the imperialist role of the state, the “clear conscience” provides an ideological carte blanche toward the United State’ moralized militaristic hegemony.
The JACL relied on historical arguments separating racialized violence against Japanese Americans and Black Americans to assuage the committee on questions of Japanese American reparations creating a precedent:
As John Tateishi, former chair of JACL’s National Redress Committee, replied, although slavery was much worse than the Japanese Americans’ situation, the slave trade was run as free enterprise, not under government sponsorship, even though it was sanctioned under the Constitution… The internment of Japanese Americans is the only case in the history of the United States in which the U.S. government took a group of citizens and imprisoned them en masse without just cause.[17]
Taiteshi’s distinction between “sanctioning” and “sponsoring” foreclosed Afro-Asian connections and joint historical justice. Historically the emergence of Japanese American calls for reparations partially came from the 1960s anti-colonial struggles led by Chicanos, Black Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.[18] Reparations provided the possibility to historically investigate the fundamental roots of Asian American violence, and its connection to Black and Indigenous struggles. However, Taiteshi relied on a technical distinction to refuse the connection between Japanese American experiences of dispossession to Black experiences of the middle passage, Fugitive Slave Act, redlining, and mass incarceration. The measures against precedent made it into the Civil Liberties Act of 1988[19] in the final clause: “Provides that nothing in this Act shall be construed as: (1) recognition of any claim of Mexico or any other country or any Indian tribe (except as provided in this Act) to any territory or other property of the United States.”[20] The narrative that the JACL and state constructed to organize the historical referent of reparations was an active process of undermining the connection of internment to other racialized struggles.
In the CWRIC’s Personal Justice Denied, a central reason behind internment was the “unjustified stigma that marked the excluded.”[21] However, Victor Bascara’s work on the Civil Liberties Act analyzes how the Model Minority narrative oppressed Japanese Americans and African Americans by marking the included. The Model Minority narrative props up certain minority groups against one another, erasing the structural context behind the racial subordination. Bascara describes how neoconservatives found the Model Minority narrative helpful for gutting welfare and other social programs; through “perverted statistics,” Japanese Americans’ median household incomes and poverty rates were touted by neoconservatives to show racial justice did not need structural change.[22] President George Bush’s support for Japanese American reparations relied on a notion of individual rights: “A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories; neither can they fully convey our Nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals.”[23] Saidiya Hartman critiques the notion of individual rights by contextualizing it within Black history and argues against emancipation as American progress: “The mantle of individuality effectively conscripted the freed as indebted and dutiful workers and incited forms of coercion, discipline, and regulation that profoundly complicated the meaning of freedom.”[24] By not questioning the ontological and material conditions of the racial logic, the state’s granting of individual rights did not offer enslaved Black people newfound freedom but a transformed regime of violence. Bascara describes how Bush’s “upholding the rights of individuals” aligns with Black exploitation: “But, in what was often repeated in the discourse of the Civil Liberties Act…The descendants are presumed to be tabula rasa on a playing field leveled through the protection of equal rights made possible through the Fourteenth Amendment and the Brown decision.”[25] The figuration of tabula rasa, or homo oeconomicus, erases how the “level playing field” is marked by racial difference, and instead burdens the individual to overcome this difference rather than challenge it structurally. Through the subjectivation of the empty rational subject, reparations do not entail a rethinking of the sociogenic colonial code which led to internment’s racial logic but a reinforcement of its (anti-Black) transformations.
Jitsuo Morikawa was a Japanese American Baptist pastor, community leader, and former internee. In his CWRIC testimony to determine redress, he speaks on the temporality of the camp and the hearings:
The Commission appears to be an act of moral concern on the part of the United States to discern if injustice was done to 120,000 civilians in their relocation and detention in internment camps.
After 40 years, when memory is faded, the U.S. government has appointed a Commission to determine if a wrong was done and if a wrong was done, what measures could be taken to redress the wrongs, long after those who suffered most have gone to their graves and long after the rest have suppressed their painful memories into their subconscious and long after the key figures involved in Executive Order 9066 are not available.
A nation which acted with lightning speed in the suppression and internment of 120,000 persons without due process of trial, without protection of the court, without reference to the law, has given itself 40 years to bring itself under question, to judge whether even any wrong was committed.[26]
In Morikawa’s recounting, he identifies a discrepancy between the state’s conception of time during internment and redress. During internment, the state of exception rapidly condemned Japanese Americans as traitors to be removed, yet redress necessitated a slow bureaucratic procedure to see if the state did wrongdoing. In both procedures, Japanese Americans were subjected to America’s moral concerns, and the state remained the one to determine their political fates. Bascara describes the temporality of internment as a “time lag” where “the great gap of time both magnifies and blurs that relationship of causality.”[27] For Morikawa and other Japanese American internee survivors, the “lag” between internment and redress was not a period to be gleaned over, but instead a time where many survivors of the internment died and suffered without remuneration or acknowledgment by the state. Redress temporarily freezes and isolates the event, whereas, for many Japanese Americans, it was a continuous reality whose consequences are ever-present. The lag was also a time for Japanese Americans to create communities and livelihoods amidst their intense racial trauma. Heeding Benjamin’s warning “that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy,” the state’s “time lag” allows for a revisionism incorporating both the alive and the dead into its imperialist logic.[28] The hardship and beauty of Japanese American resistance to internment and its aftermath are reduced to an event and its monetary sum.
Morikawa also connects the temporality and structure of the hearings to the order of the internment camps. The commission granted each witness five minutes to present their account. Due to the short time to speak, the JACL’s testimony guidelines advised the speakers to “because of this [time] constraint, focus their narrative in very narrow and limited areas.”[29] Morikawa resists:
The timing of the commission compounds the wrong. The protracted silence adds to the injury. The evasion of guilt reinforces injustice. To further deepen the affront, witnesses are allowed five minutes to tell their stories of months and years of internment, of confinement, of deprived civil rights.
Even in the course of a commission hearing, we appear to be under orders to minimize and restrict our testimony. Is it a way of disarming us with the pretense of listening and impressing the public of a fair procedure? How can we voice our pain in 5 minutes?
The pathos of the hearing is that both the public and our people have the impression of magnanimity, to hear the deep melancholy notes of tragedy and suffering, but the hearings are structured so that there is little possibility of such happening..
To further accentuate the injustice, we, the victims, are expected to bear the moral burden to suggest the nature of the redress, removing that burden from those responsible for the injustice. We have suffered enough without the added burden of begging or demanding reparations and offering the luxury to those who ultimately responsible, of simply saying yes, or no, to our painful demands.[30]
Though forty years have passed, Japanese Americans are “under orders” in their own supposed moment of justice. In the testimony guidelines, the JACL offered advice for their presentations: “The use of drama and demonstrative aids will prove effective and move the commission. However, you must carefully develop the appropriate timing, form, and substance. Too much may create the impression that you are putting on a show.”[31] The ordering that Morikawa critiques extends to these performances; the JACL expected witnesses to be dramaturgically ordered for the committee to be comfortable. As William Hohri questions: “It was as though the former victims were pleading their case in court.… Why were these victims sharing the intimacy of their pain with these commissioners? What were the commissioners able to do for them?”[32] The state did not have to prove themselves in the courtroom, but the wronged victims had to rehearse and work on their performance for the state’s recognition. Naomi Paik frames it: “[Morikawa] illuminated the paradox of turning to the state for recognition, as the hearings implicitly reaffirmed the state’s power to determine the fact of injury and its appropriate redress.”[33] The state’s recognition necessitates ordering that inscribes the survivors within the state’s logic. For Wynter, the subject exists “in the ensemble of individual and collective behaviors needed to dynamically enact and stably replicate each such fictively made eusocial human order as an autopoietic, autonomously functioning, languaging, living system.”[34] By “autopoietic,” Wynter refers to how our actions are not governed by biological or natural laws, but instead they are governed by, and reproduce, a system of values that humans replicate to maintain a social order. In the structuring of the reparations testimonies, the courtroom engulfs Japanese American expressions of pain into a frozen past that Japanese Americans, as well as African Americans, have expected to move past. The temporal framing of the hearings serves to “stably replicate” the horrors of internment into the state’s current and more disguised forms of racialized exploitation; therefore, the behaviors in the courtroom are consigned to furthering this exploitation. Rather than “hear[ing] the deep melancholy notes of tragedy and suffering,” as Morikawa frames it, the state’s ears can only render the deep pain but also laughter and community Japanese Americans constructed during internment in a white noise. However, key to Wynter’s framing is that our autopoietic replication is not extrahumanly mandated, that is humans hold the ability to creatively construct alternative codes.
Yuri Kochiyama, Black Power, and Decolonial Reparations
And when we hear the head of a European nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. On the contrary, we say among ourselves, “it is a just reparation we are getting.” So we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as “charity.” Such aid must be considered the final stage of a dual consciousness-the consciousness of the colonized that it is their due and the consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth[35]
From Morikawa’s critique, I turn to Yuri Kochiyama’s life and praxis. Rather than experiencing the past in colonial culturally coded terms, Kochiyama demonstrates the possibilities for socialist and revolutionary forms of experiencing. I locate Kochiyama’s activism “in the process of socialization that institute[s] the individual as a human, and therefore, always sociogenetic subject.”[36] My tracing of Kochiyama’s life does not seek to elevate her from local communities, but ground her changing subjectivity through her different socializations. Wynter’s “process of socialization” is not temporally stable, and resistance transforms into a logic of continual writing rather than being written. The folding of temporalities at various times, spaces, and networks of socialization will continually redefine resistance and internment. I propose that Kochiyama’s existence and political constructions of time do not exist purely within an ontogenetic/phylogenetic individualized understanding but instead in the webs of cultural codes in which she is not only located but actively and revolutionarily constructed. Kochiyama’s notion of time is less grounded on an isolated intellectual project and more through the way that she embodies and reproduces the socialization of the Black Power movement. Due to her commitment to Third World struggles as a connected whole, Kochiyama conceptualizes time in a cross-racial manner. Alternative reparation temporalities cannot be reduced to theoretical concepts, but as Kochiyama demonstrates, they instead come from building communities, learning from others, and political application. I end the section by closely reading her testimony for reparations, and analyzing how her view toward reparations constitutes a fundamentally sociogenic practice toward constructing alternative pasts, presents, and futures. The central difference between Kochiyama’s struggle for reparations and the CWRIC’s is that whereas the latter engulfed Japanese American struggles into a progressive narrative that continues racial violence, Kochiyama’s journey through grass-roots activism in Black and brown communities connected reparations to a Third World struggle.
In 1942, the state relocated Kochiyama’s family to the Santa Anita Racetrack relocation center and later the Jerome, Arkansas, internment camp. In a later article, she reflects on her worldview at the beginning of internment: “I was so red, white, and blue, I couldn’t believe this was happening to us. America would never do a thing like this to us. This is the greatest country in the world.”[37]Amidst the immense trauma of relocation, Kochiyama took up the space of internment to reflect on her patriotic worldview: “Yesterday I wrote we should feel grateful to the government—and I certainly hope I always shall, but after some of the incidents I heard today by different hospital workers, I wonder about some things myself.”[38] Listening to these hospital workers and other Japanese Americans offered Kochiyama an entirely new perspective on race from her sheltered childhood.[39] Wynter argues that Fanon’s encounter of racism in France, from his middle-class Martinician upbringing, forces him to confront the “specific conception of what it is to be human, and therefore his prescribed role in this concept.”[40] Fanon’s double consciousness of being both subject and complete alterity ruptures the grounds of experiencing the world. Yet, Wynter argues that it is through Fanon’s rupture that there is a “transformed mode of experiencing the self,” rife with radical possibilities.[41]
As a Japanese American subject, Kochiyama’s racial experience does not exist in the same alterity as Fanon’s Blackness; however, Kochiyama’s writing demonstrates her confrontation with experiencing herself as a liberal white subject with patriotic support and the abnormal Japanese American subject. She writes on her racial experience at the camp: “Just before we went into the camps, we saw that being a Japanese wasn’t such a good thing, because everybody was turning against the Japanese, thinking we were saboteurs, or linking us with Pearl Harbor. But when I saw the kind of work they did at camp, I felt so proud of the Japanese, and proud to be Japanese, and wondered why I was so white, white when I was outside, because I was always with white folks.” Kochiyama’s epidermalization created a confusing feeling of pride and shame toward her skin. This pride came from the way Japanese Americans would form communities and organize the camps, fundamentally stemming from the care people showed each other in the traumatic circumstances. Central to her questioning was her temporal experience: “I hated Japan at the time. So I saw myself at that part of my history as an American, and not as a Japanese or Japanese American. That sort of changed while I was in the camp.”[42] Wynter conceptualizes the human as homo narrans, “insofar as it recognizes that in generating stories, humans are also generating themselves.”[43] What distinguishes humans from other biological entities is a myth-making faculty; through language, humans are able to dictate who they are in the world.[44] Kochiyama’s rupture from Americanization allows her to confront the state’s benevolent paternalistic role, and begin to develop her own creative myth-making faculty.
After the war, Kochiyama moved to New York City with her husband, Bill Kochiyama. The Kochiyamas faced employment discrimination and financial difficulties, living in low-income housing near African Americans and Puerto Rican immigrants, which allowed her to explore and participate in the burgeoning Black Power movements. Stuart Hall writes on the ways that cities hold racial and economic boundaries, yet these boundaries hold an “overlapping matrix or palimpsest effect” where the boundaries fold onto one another in differential networks.[45] In New York City, housing projects for people of color came from discriminatory practices that sought to externalize people of color in redlining networks. However, the palimpsest effects of the manners in which people inhabited these spaces and interacted demonstrate creativity and resistance. Through the complex multicultural palimpsests, there becomes a “constitutive outside” where there can be “different time schemes: personal time, family time, work time, social time, nonsocial time, the time of Europe, the time beyond Europe. We occupy more than one of these chronotopes.”[46] Crucial to the reparations project is conceiving of a different ordering of time beyond the European colonial understanding. Kochiyama’s socialization allowed her to learn from the experiences of different races on how the past ruptures into the present, and this was pivotal toward her developing an approach to historical justice predicated on a connected Third World struggle beyond Europe’s time.
From her multiracial neighborhood, Kochiyama learned stories of the Jim Crow South and Puerto Rican colonization, and she began to understand an alternative historicism predicated on anti-Blackness and imperialism.[47] Through participation in local direct actions and becoming more familiar with her community, Kochiyama and her husband Bill would join the Harlem Parents Committee Freedom (HPC) School. She described her experience as a pivotal moment in her journey of becoming radical: “Every one of our children went to the classes. Bill, my husband, and I went to the adult class and in ‘63 and ‘64 the whole family became active in the school boycotts… Attending the school gave me my first opportunity in years to really take time to read books.”[48] Her theoretical and practical education from marginalized groups and social movements in New York allowed her to learn of the quotidian ways different races would practice time and politicized her understanding of time away from Western progress. Kochiyama’s location in New York City allowed her to explore and participate in the burgeoning Black Power movements. Wynter describes these social movements as “fundamentally reveal[ing] the gap that exists between our present ‘mental construction of reality’ as one projected from the perspective (and to the adaptive advantage) of our present ethno-class genre of the human, Man, and its biocentric descriptive statement, and the way our global social reality veridically is out there.”[49] It is precisely within this temporal gap inherent to the notion of progress that organizations such as the HPC and Kochiyama theorized and acted against the established timeline of racial struggle , working instead toward alternative futures.
Through her continual engagement with racialized local communities, Kochiyama participated in various revolutionary and Black Power movements, such as the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). To understand Kochiyama’s praxis, it is essential to displace revolutionary activism from a masculine-centered view. Kochiyama was far from the Black masculine vanguard political presence and instead came from being “willing to do the behind-the-scenes work, with little public recognition or reward.” Kochiyama would assist movements by connecting activists in her massive social networks and offering her own home as a place to sleep and eat.[50] Kochiyama displaces “family” and “care” from their trapped domestic significations to one intimately connected with creating a new world: “But the most important, I feel, is sowing the seeds of love and justice in fertile minds that its regeneration can extinguish the continuous fires of greed and imperialist wars. Mothers and daughters united—may make a qualitative difference in this world of mushrooming uncertainties.”[51] In a common Third World feminist vein of discovering the radicality of one’s traditional parents, Kochiyama views care as creating new values that can move against the colonial sociogenic code. In a letter directed to “All brothers/sisters/comrades/friends,” she provides the addresses of Kwamé Turé, Robert F. Williams, Marc Crawford, and Florence Kennedy to send them letters in support of medical issues and illnesses. Contextualizing the addresses, she writes, “This is a missive to ‘connect’ people in that circle of activists who are concerned about the well-being of their comrades. As a ‘movement family’ whose circle has no ending or beginning, let’s all stay in touch with each other, enlargening the circle, letting one another know we care. Energize one another. The struggle is gonna get hotter n’ hotter! We need everyone!”[52] The constitutive outside’s differential networks are not passively constructed but products of Kochiyama’s efforts to care for and connect people. Resisting whiteness’ sociogenic temporal ordering cannot be reduced to an isolated reimagination, but rather involves creating a new ordering of people and communities that will alter our experience of time. From writing letters to thousands of Japanese American soldiers to sleeping in a baby’s crib to make sure someone had a bed to sleep in, to staying up until four AM writing letters for political prisoners, Kochiyama demonstrated a precedent of care.[53] This is what must be followed.
Kochihyama’s participation in the RNA displays an understanding of reparations beyond integrationism, and the creative nationalist possibilities in racial struggle. The RNA struggled to create a nation within a nation; they fought to take the land of five southern states and produce a black nation with self-determination. Kochiyama attended “three weekly classes on nation-building, revolutionary first aid, and gun control.” One of the lessons from the RNA nation-building sessions stressed reparations of 300 billion dollars from the state to finance the new nation.[54] For the RNA, reparations went hand in hand with lifestyle changes and were inseparable from the formation of a revolutionary culture to contest internalized whiteness. RNA member and Black Nationalist Queen Mother Audley Moore argued, “We demand reparations for the white man imposing his names on us, taking our names completely away from us.”[55]Kochiyama practiced this change in lifestyle politics by changing her anglicized name “Mary” to “Yuri.”[56] In a workshop as a citizen of the New Afrikan nation with RNA president Imari Obadele, the attendees discuss the process of starting a New Afrikan school. The workshop discussed how establishing schools was essential for organizing “parents, then the neighborhood, and eventually the community.” While Obadele made most of the comments, Kochiyama briefly contributed by bringing up prizing an autobiography of Malcolm X or free tickets to “The River Niger” to incentivize children into participating in fundraising Black trivia events.[57] It is unclear how familiar Kochiyama was to RNA’s reparation project, but given her high level of involvement it seems unlikely she would not have encountered discourse around reparations in the organization. For the RNA, reparations were part of a broader lifestyle and systemic revolution that went beyond repairing the American state.
Kochiyama was a significant advocate for the Japanese American Redress, and she helped establish the Concerned Japanese Americans (CJA) organization to set up a hearing in New York City. CJA was originally established concerning the racial violence against Iranian immigrants during the Iranian hostage crisis. Yuri Kochiyama, along with Bill Kochiyama and Sasha Hohri, formed the organization and connected the violence against Iranian immigrants in possible threats of deportation and internment to the treatment of Japanese Americans in 1979. In response to a letter from close friend and RAM founder Muhammad Ahmad, previously known as Max Sanford, expressing solidarity with Japanese American reparations in 1982, she writes:
It was heartening to know that others are aware of the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans that took place some forty years ago, as many Americans still do not know. The same situation holds true for African people, Indigenous people (misnomered American Indians), and Hawaiin Polynesians– all who are seeking redress and reparations too. We wish to convey our solidarity to each of these groups, and hope that Third World peoples will have more interaction with each other.
Knowing of the years of surveillance, harassment, surveillance, and illegal detention that you, yourself have undergone, we hope that someday you may be able to speak to a Japanese American audience. Many in the Japanese community are not aware of the long history of abuse and human rights violations that African people have endured.[58]
Throughout her struggle for reparations, she attempted to produce webs and link struggles across racial, temporal, and spatial terrains. Her education on reparations involved the connection with political economy and Black dispossession, not seeing reparations for Japanese Americans in an antagonistic position to Black reparations. Rather, she took reparations as grounds for educating the Japanese American community toward anti-Black violence and the links between the contemporary struggles of Black political revolutionaries and prisoners to the logic of incarceration.
On 16 July 1981, Kochiyama spoke at the Washington CWRIC hearings. She begins the hearing detailing the interrogation and death of her father, Seiichi Nakahara, by the FBI. In the intense racism after Pearl Harbor, They interpreted Nakahara’s friend’s message, “Sorry cannot meet you for dinner. Regret unable to eat samma[a type of fish],”[59] as evidence of collusion. After the interrogation, the FBI incarcerated and later hospitalized Nakahara for medical issues with the tag “Prisoner of War” on his hospital bed. Improper medical attention and possible torture resulted in Nakahara’s passing on 21 January 1942. She then refers to the time lag between her father’s death and the moment of redress as a temporal opening:
Thirty-nine years have elapsed. We have all grown, we have had time to think; from apolitical naive provincials, we have become more conscious of American policies, both domestic and foreign. And we have also learned the buriedhistory of ethnic people’s struggles.[60]
Rather than Morikawa’s reference to the time lag to critique the state’s ordering of time, she frames the time lag as a period of growth and education. Time becomes “time to think,” and she connects her vision of temporality to one of education and studying. In the time lag, Kochiyama increasingly participated in radical movements that moved against the anti-Black logic of surveillance and incarceration that killed her father. Kochiyama’s studying does not refer to the university’s pedagogical emptiness but to caring, listening, and fighting with other racial groups. Whereas the CWRIC frames unearthing the buried history regarding the state’s legacy of “justice,” Kochiyama views sublimating the repressed memory not as recovery but a resurgence of sorts, drawing connections to other racialized groups’ “buried histories.” This sublimation requires that growth is cross-racial and internment connects with America’s crimes across the color-line. Memory does not leave the historical referent as isolated and stable but instead becomes plastic in its ability to connect to a revolutionary cross-racial temporality. To continue with her testimony:
Each nationally oppressed group, victims of dispossession, dispersement, and disempowerment by the U.S Government has a responsibility to expose their own grievances that the common denominators that generate racism and hate, that creative hysteria and rumors that ramify inequities and injustice, that validate, culminate, and climax into concentration camp experience, can be obliterated. We Japanese in America must speak up now. We are not just fighting to win monetary compensation for ourselves. It is a moral duty, that this awesome, unpredictable time in history, to fight for human rights, human dignities, and human enhancements when constitutional avenues for basic needs are dwindling and being modified.
Much has been said about great American traditions, but there is a difference between lofty pronouncements and actual practices. Violation for the ethnic and the poor have never halted. This is our responsibility and yours. Does money really tarnish injustice? Injustices sully justice. Reparation is just restitution in a society such as this.
May you, the commission, utilize everything in your collective sensitivity and political understanding to conduct an investigation and reach the conscience of Congress that redress will set a precedent of justice that will be historical.[61]
Against the stability of the human, Wynter invites an ontological struggle: “The Argument here redefines Marx’s class struggle in the terms of a ‘politics of being:’ that is, one waged over what is to be the descriptive statement of the human, about whose master code of symbolic life and death each human order organizes itself.”[62] Kochiyama argues for the necessity to “speak up” and “fight” against the violent colonial coding that produced internment but also the globalized racialized struggle as a whole. This task requires fundamentally rethinking the order in which the experience of internment is organized, and actively mobilizing the experience under a new code that can struggle against the colonial order. Kochiyama resists the “American traditions” and instead argues for a new view of time that links the histories of oppressed groups into a revolutionary formation. Studying and growing during the time lag, participating in cross-racial organizations does not fall into the American tradition but instead obliterates it. Wynter argues that fundamental to Fanon’s sociogenic project was a “‘space of transculture,’ as a space from which to define the human outside the terms of any one member of the class of such principles, statements and codes, he had thereby laid the basis for a fundamental recognition on our part.”[63] Foundational to the transcultural project is creating networks of care, and it is only through these networks that people can collectively redefine the colonial code.
Kochiyama recognized that “we are not just fighting to win monetary compensation for ourselves,” and victory can establish a precedent for land and freedom struggles worldwide. This precedence does not have to be constrained within the state; Moten and Harney write on the possibility of precedence “which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence[64] as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss).” This precedent does not simply generate another political regime but gets at a “richness we have, [Zoe Leonard] says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go.”[65] Kochiyama’s cross-raciality does not merely construct a rigid political coalition but something more, something that changes the experience of the self and suffering to a destabilized site of care. Kochiyama’s justice of the historical referent is not a matter of repairing but taking up a new temporality where one learns, grows, and cares from the past into the future. Kochiyama’s experience of internment was not a progressive time that culminated in reparations but a continual fighting in which reparations were but a moment in the liberation of all racial groups.
Conclusion
The problem considered here is one of time. Those Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive.
~ Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks[66]
Most Japanese Americans who worked years and years for redress never thought it would happen the way it did. The papers have been signed, we will be given reparation, and there was an apology from the government. I think the redress movement itself was very good because it was a learning experience for the Japanese people; we could get out into our communities and speak about what happened to us and link it with the experiences of other people. In that sense, though, it wasn’t done as much as it should have been. Some Japanese Americans didn’t even learn that part. They just started the movement as a reaction to the bad experience they had. They don’t even see other ethnic groups who have gone through it. It showed us, too, how vulnerable everybody is. It showed us that even though there is a Constitution, that constitutional rights could be taken away very easily.
~ Yuri Kochiyama, “Then Came the War”[67]
Can discourse on reparations exist in alternative modes that do not place international or domestic survivors of historical injustices in a “Why them and not me” position? In contrast to accounts that praise Japanese-American reparations as progress or critics that label it as reformism, Eric K. Yamamoto explores a third option. Yamamoto’s third option involves viewing reparations as not final endpoint but as part of an ongoing process that Japanese Americans continue to shape instead part of a broader logic that Japanese Americans are continually writing.[68] The redress movement offered Japanese Americans “an emotional catharsis within the Japanese American community, with former internees for the first time giving voice to feelings they had kept buried for nearly forty years.”[69] These factors cannot be dismissed, and with the ongoing rise of juridical cases for reparations throughout the country, I do not believe in abandoning juridical tactics. The success of Japanese American reparations, as well as hopefully other reparations movements, must be celebrated but not seen as an end. Verdun’s “Why them and not me?” is not a fixed historical question, activists can still draw from the success of Japanese American grassroots organizing for the liberation of all racial groups. I write this paper to note how reparations alone are far from sufficient in our task to build a new world, but when connected to larger struggles, reparation offers healing, or catharsis, that is indispensable.
Reparations did not temporally close the historical referent of internment for Kochiyama; she continued her struggle long after the monetary compensation. In September 2001, Japanese Americans held a vigil for 9/11, where Kochiyama connected the bombings to the atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Middle Eastern Immigrants in America. She additionally connects the violence to Japanese American’s experience of internment and argues that to rectify the historical justice of internment is to fight for the liberation of the Middle East. She finishes her speech with:
At this critical time, when provocative actions are victimizing Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, we Japanese Americans Yonsei [fourth generation], must stand up and show our solidarity to the people of the Middle East. Our fight, our fight meaning everybody’s fight, must be to stop wars, racism, hatred, and the dehumanization of humanity. We must all learn to live as equals, as neighbors, and as internationalists. Thank you.[70]
Reparations did not end the logic of internment, and Kochiyama refused the closed Model Minority narrative by reframing the “we” from its liberal beginnings to a new humanism where third-world alliances can challenge Empire and Capital. Angela Davis argues that when thinking about Malcolm X, a dear friend and pivotal influence on Kochiyama, it is necessary to “rethink and reshape the contours of our political activism” to follow their radicality, rather than temporally freezing them and yearning for the past.[71] To follow Kochiyama and the Black Power movement is to take up their struggle as open rather than dogmatically closed; we must challenge masculine coded vanguardist models and the neoliberal co-optation of revolutionary language such as “equality” and “third-world alliances.” Such a task requires, as Wynter frames it, not to restore the human from colonialism’s dehumanization, but to affirm our creativity and therefore create new notions of time and what it means to be human. To follow Kochiyama and Malcolm X is to look at their constant learning and refusal of the present as definitive. Reparations do not need to seal Japanese American experiences into the materialized tower of the past; through continual praxis and fighting, Kochiyama displays how different modes of being human and experiencing can radically shift the past, present, and future.
[1] Pritish Das is a graduate of Kenyon College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy, and is currently a Master’s student in the University of Chicago’s Political Science program.
[2] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier, (New York: Grove Press, 1988),p p. 158-9.
[3] Vincene Verdun, “If the Shoe Fits, Wear It: An Analysis of Reparations to African Americans,” Tulane Law Review 67:3 (1992-1993): pp. 597-668, 647.
[4] Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976), p. 36.
[5] Gary Okihiro, American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders, (UC Press: Oakland, 2015), p. 280.
[6] Jovan Scott-Lewis, Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), pp. 26-27 Scott-Lewis writes: “Those instigated, deputized, and predatory Whites released the hatred that drove the long tradition of the White violence of death and removal… The violence was simultaneously destructive as well as constructive. Over those two days, the violence facilitated the resumption of a particular order of the world. Indeed, these acts recalibrated Tulsa’s racial, economic, and political relations. The recalibration did not simply return White Tulsa to the status quo but expanded the reach and impact of White control over the entire city” Driving my analysis is questioning whether reparations resumes the “particular order of the world,” or whether it can offer a moment to radically rethink this ordering and create praxis for alternative worlds.
[7] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (London: Pluto Press, 2008), trans. Charles Lam Markmann, p. 4.
[8] Wynter, “Unsettling,” p. 329.
[9] Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997),p. 60.
[10] Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 85-86.
[11] Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 1.
[12] President Jimmy Carter, quoted in Hatamiya, pp. 87-88.
[13] Introduction to Testimony Guidelines by Japanese American Citizens League’s National Committee for Redress, 1981, ddr-densho-67-131-mezzanine-5d9d0db892, Densho Digital Repository, available at https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-67-131-mezzanine-5d9d0db892/ (Accessed 17 August 2023).
[14] Example of actual written testimony presented before the Senate Committee hearing on S. 1647 by Minoru Yasui, 1981, ddr-densho-67-131-mezzanine-5d9d0db892, Densho Digital Repository, available at https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-67-131-master-5597571e28/ (Accessed 17 August 2023) Emphases are mine.
[15] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 36.
[16] Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong, p. 81.
[17] Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong, pp. 55-56.
[18] CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, XVI. Though I am critical of the CWRIC, the prologue that I quote was from the Civil Liberties Education Fund, a project funded as part of the reparations to educate the public on the general wrongdoings. In addition, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a fervent political activist and member of the Third Worldist Asian Americans for Actions, played a pivotal role in writing Personal Justice Denied. My criticisms of the JACL and state’s role do not seek to erase the important work the Education fund, Herzig-Yoshinaga, and countless others have done with the legacy of internment. As will be discussed more in depth in the conclusion, the current task is to build off the work Japanese American activists have done in their reparations struggle, yet ensure that work is linked to different racialized struggles. This task cannot discount the CWRIC’s testimonies, Personal Justice Denied, and the Civil Liberties Act, but it also cannot dismiss the structural critiques foundational to these projects.
[19] One can also see this sentiment in the JACL’s testimony guidelines: “Don’t draw comparisons, e.g., Holocaust, Sioux nation, Black slavery, that will invite questions which may prove difficult to answer. Keep in mind the make-up of the commissioners.” “Suggested Guidelines for Oral Testimony,” 1981, ddr-densho-67-13, Testimony Guidelines, Densho Digital Repository, available at https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-67-131-master-d2175eb9fa/. (Accessed 17 August 2023), Emphases are mine.
[20] Congress.gov,. “H.R.442 – 100th Congress (1987-1988): Civil Liberties Act of 1987,” 10 August 1988 . https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442.
[21] CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, p. 460.
[22] Victor Bascara, “Cultural Politics of Redress: AssessingReassesing the Meaning of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 after 9/11,” Asian American Law Journal 10:1 (2003): pp. 185-214, 192.
[23] “Mail Call: A Belated Apology,” The National WWII Museum, last modified 14 February 2019, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/mail-call-belated-apology.
[24] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 122.
[25] Bascara, “Cultural Politics of Redress,” p. 194.
[26] Reparations testimony hearing by Commission On Wartime Relocation And Internment Of Civilians, 22 September 1981, Personal Justice Denied: Public Hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment, 1981. Archives Unbound (accessed 17 August 2023), link.gale.com/apps/doc/SC5104915795/GDSC, 147, Emphases are mine.
[27] Bascara, Cultural Politics of Redress, p. 203.
[28] Walter Benjamin, “Theses On the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books), p. 255.
[29] “Guidelines for Written and Oral Testimony,” 1981, ddr-densho-67-131, Testimony Guidelines, Densho Digital Repository, available at https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-67-131 (accessed 17 August 2023).
[30] National Archives, Public Hearings 22 September 1981, p. 148, Emphases are mine.
[31] Checklist for Presentation Before the Redress Commission, 1981, ddr-densho-67-131, Testimony Guidelines, Densho Digital Repository, available at https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-67-130/?format=doc (Accessed 17 August 2023).
[32] William Minoru Hohri, Repairing America, (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988), p. 99.
[33] Naomi A. Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) p. 37.
[34] Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to give Humaneness a different future: Conversations,” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick, 9-89, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 32, Emphases are mine.
[35] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 59, Emphases are mine.
[36] Sylvia Wynter. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press), 1991, p. 42.
[37] Yuri Kochiyama, “Then Came the War,” in Race Class and Gender In the United States: An Integrated Study Sixth Edition, ed. Paul S Rothenberg, (New York: Worth Publishers, 2001), pp. 340-347, 342.
[38] Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority, p. 95.
[39] Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle, p. 52.
[40] Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, and the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to be Black,” in National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, (Routledge: New York, 2001), pp. 30-66, 34.
[41] Wynter, “Toward the Sociogenic Principle,” p. 36.
[42] Kochiyama, “Then Came the War,” p. 344-5.
[43] Bedour Alagraa, “Homo Narrans and the Science of the Word: Toward a Radical Caribbean Imagination,” Critical Ethnic Studies 4:2 (Fall 2018): pp. 164-81.
[44] Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe,” pp. 24-5.
[45] Stuart Hall, “Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities.” In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 386-408, 389.
[46] Stuart Hall, “The Multicultural Question.” In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 409-434, 419.
[47] Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle, p. 83.
[48] Yuri Kochiyama, Kazu Ijima, Virginia Kee, Min Matsuda, “Veteran Political Activists’ Roundtable”, IKON 2:9 (Fall: 1988): p. 24, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28038436.
[49] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation– An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:2 (Fall 2003):pp. 257-337, 312, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
[50] Diane Fujino, “Grassroots Leadership and Afro-Asian Solidarities: Yuri Kochiyama’s Humanizing Radicalism,” In Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 300-302.
[51]Yuri Kochiyama, Passing it On– A Memoir, (Los Angeles: UCLA press, 2004), pp. 207-210.
[52] Yuri Kochiyama and Bill Kochiyama, “Letter to Unspecified,” 4 March 1982, Muhammad Ahmad-Correspondence, Yuri Kochiyama 1978-2001, Black Nationalism and the Revolutionary Action Movement: The Papers of Muhammad Ahmad, Archives Unbound, accessed 18 April 2024, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/SC5103272101/G-DSC.
[53] Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle, pp. 44-45; Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle, p. 96; Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle, p. 78. Again due to length, I did not adequately explore Kochiyama’s immense work on imprisonment and its close connection to her experience of internment. In a conversation with prison activist Gary Tyler about my research on Kochiyama, I asked if he had ever heard of her. He responded along the lines of being familiar with her name and then remembering her sending him a letter. Mundane praxis such as writing letters is the heart of any revolutionary movement, and the scope of Kochiyama’s outreach is aweing; Kochiyama, Passing it on, pp. 175-179. To exemplify Kochiyama’s care, I quote a beautiful story from the end of her memoir: “One day when I came home from the pilgrimage to Malcolm X’s gravesite, Bill greeted me with, ‘There’s someone waiting for you in the bedroom.’ I was immediately upset. Why would he bring someone to the bedroom? I went there and sitting pertly on our bed was the cutest yellow-brown Care Bear with a red heart on his cuddly belly waiting to be hugged. I melted immediately. Bill was so pleased to see my response. The Care Bear became very special in our lives…. Soon after, for reasons we are not sure, close friends began gifting us with bears, and our bear family began growing.… They are not simply toys; they are an integral part of the love and caring of many friends. More than that, the bears with their different looks, colors, and sizes remind me of the world’s people— of every race and background, and the preciousness of their being.”
[54] Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle, p. 179.
[55] Queen Mother Audley Moore, “Queen Mother Audley Moore interview pt. 1: The Early Days,” Black Communist History, Liberation School, 11 December 2018, Audio, https://www.liberationschool.org/queen-mother-audley-moore-interview-pt-1-the-early-days/.
[56] Fujino, “Grassroots Leadership,” p. 299.
[57] Republic of New Afrika Education Committee’s Minutes transcripted by Margaret Tarter, 16 February 1976 Republic Of New Africa (2). n.d. MS Black Nationalism and the Revolutionary Action Movement: The Papers of Muhammad Ahmad, Archives Unbound, link.gale.com/apps/doc/SC5103279143/GDSC, 27 Accessed April 2024.
[58] East Coast Japanese Americans for Redress letter to Muhammad Ahmad on Japanese American reparations, by Yuri Kochiyama and Bill Kochiyama, 4 March 1982, Muhammad Ahmad-Correspondence, Yuri Kochiyama 1978-2001, MS Black Nationalism and the Revolutionary Action Movement: The Papers of Muhammad Ahmad, Archives Unbound, link.gale.com/apps/doc/SC5103272101/GDSC, Accessed 18 April 2024.
[59] Kochiyama, Passing It On, p. 5.
[60] Reparations testimony hearing by Commission On Wartime Relocation And Internment Of Civilians, 16 July 1981, MS, Personal Justice Denied: Public Hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment, 1981, National Archives (United States), Archives Unbound, link.gale.com/apps/doc/SC5104912767/GDSC, p. 453, Emphases are mine, Accessed 17 August 2023.
[61] CWRIC, 16 July Public Hearings, p. 453, Emphases are mine.
[62] Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” p. 319.
[63] Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” p. 328.
[64] Recall Kochiyama’s earlier line: “As a ‘movement family’ whose circle has no ending or beginning, let’s all stay in touch with each other, enlargening the circle, letting one another know we care.”
[65] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, All Incomplete, (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2021), p. 24.
[66] Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 176.
[67] Yuri Kochiyama, “Then Came the War,” p. 347.
[68] Eric K. Yamamoto, “Friend, or Foe or Something Else: Social Meanings of Redress and Reparations,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 20:2 (Jan. 1992): pp. 223-242, 240.
[69] Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong, p. 94.
[70] Yuri Kochiyama, “Yuri Kochiyama in Response to 9/11,” Speech Audio, Internet Archive, 2001, https://archive.org/details/YuriSpeech01, Accessed 17 August 2023.
[71]Angela Yvonne Davis, “Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X,” In The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James, (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 288.