5 Japanese-American Women Activists Left Out of U.S. History Books

03/08/18

The redress movement owes a lot to Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga. A hardworking single mom, Herzig-Yoshinaga resettled in New York after the war and became assistant director of a public health organization providing, as she put it, “education about venereal diseases.”

2. MICHI NISHIURA WEGLYN

After moving to New York and winning acclaim as a costume designer for the Perry Como Show, Weglyn devoted herself to researching the “untold story” of the concentration camps. In 1975, she published what came to be known as “the bible of the redress movement.” Her book exposed prejudice and misinformation as the driving forces behind the incarceration, and bolstered support for the growing movement. She later turned her attention to Japanese Latin Americans and others who had been denied reparations, advocating on their behalf well into the 1990s.

3. AKI KUROSE

Upon returning to Seattle after the war, Kurose worked for an interethnic porter’s union. Then, after some firsthand experience with discriminatory “sorry, it’s been sold already” realtors, she became involved in the open housing movement. In the 1970s she began teaching, and was soon transferred to an affluent, essentially all-white school as part of the district’s desegregation plan. Kurose managed to do her job despite having to put up with the criticism and surveillance of racist “concerned” parents.

4. YURI KOCHIYAMA

Kochiyama came into contact with the civil rights movement through Malcolm X, and she continued to work with black nationalist groups well past his 1965 assassination—supporting political prisoners and building coalitions between black and Asian American activists. She also advocated for nuclear disarmament, an end to the Vietnam War, Japanese American redress, Puerto Rican independence, and many other issues until her death in 2014.

5. CHERRY KINOSHITA

A former Minidoka inmate, she returned to Seattle with her husband after the war and joined the local Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). She was chapter president by the time the redress movement began to gain steam in the 1970s (and would go on to serve as vice governor for the Northwest district and vice president of the JACL’s national board).

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#history #asian americans #east asians #asian women #intersectional feminism

attentiondonor

Just because you run a racial fetishization porn blog and then put “this isnt a racial fetishization blog” in the description...doesnt mean that it isnt a racial fetishization blog...you twat.

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attentiondonor reblogged

diaryofanangryasianguy

02/22/18

This is not the representation I asked for

The fetishization of the Asian female is something that I am unfortunately very familiar with as an Asian American. When I Google “Asian women,” I find that a majority of the first-page results talk about why Asian women are sexy, which Asian celebrities are the hottest, and how to pick up Asian girls. We are represented, I suppose, but in a grossly eroticized and harmful way.

Until very recently, Asians in Western music were few and far between, and the only mention of Asians were in songs like Tyga’s “Hot Soup”—songs that mention Asian women in passing because we’re represented as clueless, submissive sex kittens. Kanye raps, “Eating Asian pussy all I need was sweet and sour sauce” in “I’m In It.” Jason Derulo’s “Talk Dirty to Me” features a woman with a heavy Asian accent saying, “What, I don’t understand!” after three minutes of sexual obscenity. G-Eazy’s “Fried Rice” uses a Mandarin sample—a sample which G-Eazy himself interrupts with, “What that bitch say?”—to discuss Chinese girls becoming sexually mature.

#racial fetishization #racism #asian women #asian americans #east asians