Month: July 2020

On running

| Joe Ponce

. . . Or, on segregation, part I

Dr. Mitchell often reminds us on social media that, for those who are physically mobile, running helps writing. This has been true for me. I’ve been running quite a bit since spring semester ended and the weather warmed up. And I’ve completed an 80-page draft of a chapter on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (2015) from scratch during the same period. There’s still a lot of work to do on it (besides condensing and cutting), but at least the main argument, close readings, and most of the contextual material is outside my head and put into sentences and paragraphs and sections.

In addition to helping writing, running has helped my thinking. My paltry music playlists wore out real fast, so I discovered, belatedly, the world of intellectual-political podcasts. (When did I become one of those middle-aged people who stopped keeping up with new popular music?) This venture started out rather lukewarm with David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (meh not so much because of the content — although the episodes that address “race and class” after George Floyd’s murder and the mass demonstrations seem stunningly uninformed about the history of Black [cultural] studies and Black feminism — but because of his talking style).

Things caught fire, though, when I got hooked on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, hosted by Joshua Briond and Jared Ware, and listened to interviews with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney on their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), Joshua Myers on Cedric Robinson and the Black radical tradition, Vijay Prashad on CoronaShock and the Tricontinental, Asad Haider on capitalism and COVID-19, Robin Kelley on his previous interview “Solidarity Is Not A Market Exchange,” Ju-Hyun Park on U.S. imperialism in Korea and Parasite, Johanna Fernández on her book The Young Lords: A Radical History (2019), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her book Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), Nick Estes on his books Our History Is the Future (2019) and Standing With Standing Rock (2019) and the Red New Deal, and Danny Haiphong on his co-authored book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (2019).

While I have much more to listen to on MAKC, I’ve recently moved to the New Books in Asian American Studies and New Books in African American Studies series on the New Books Network and been treated to interviews with Iyko Day on Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (2016), Jane H. Hong on Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (2019), Dean Itsuji Saranillio on Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (2018), Aimee Bahng on Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (2017), Jinah Kim on Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (2019), Long T. Bui on Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (2018), Simeon Man on Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (2018), Anne Cheng on Ornamentalism (2019), Grace Wang on Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race Through Musical Performance (2015), Peniel E. Joseph on The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (2020), Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith on Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (2019), and Leslie Harris on her co-edited Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (2019).

Listening to these scholars and activists discuss how various colonized and racialized peoples have survived and resisted the onslaughts of settler colonialism, slavery, imperialism, war, segregation, militarism, political repression, racial capitalism, and other forms of devastation, displacement, and dispossession has been enlightening and inspiring — and, of course, infuriating that these practices of radical survival and critique have been necessary in the modern world in the first place.

Only slightly less infuriating is the activity of running itself. Because I do not want to drive somewhere to go for a jog or run along busy streets, my usual route takes me through a wealthy, predominantly white suburb. (I live within the boundaries of the city proper, tyvm.) I’ve clocked about 60 runs since May that average around 5.5 miles each, and I can honestly say that I’ve seen exactly one other person of color not working, an Asian American woman out for a stroll, during all that time. The few other people of color I’ve seen are delivering mail or packages for the postal service, FedEx, or Amazon, or doing yard maintenance or house construction.

When my spouse and I used to frequent a nearby pub in that suburb years ago, we learned why. A server overheard me complain for the umpteenth time about the overwhelming whiteness of the restaurant and cheerfully explained what she learned in high school: that the town implemented racially restrictive covenants in the early twentieth century. In Planning for the Private Interest: Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900-1970 (1994), historian Patricia Burgess writes of these exclusionary practices, “In the 1920s deeds often prohibited ownership or occupancy by blacks or Asians or limited it to Caucasians, which generally excluded blacks, Jews, and Asians. State and local courts generally upheld this practice until the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer” (31-2).

Ethnic studies scholar George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998/2006/2008) outlines the limitations of the Supreme Court ruling:

Although it prevented states from enforcing restrictive covenants on their own, the decision did not make it illegal for property owners to adhere to them voluntarily, and it did not ban the registration of restrictive covenants with local authorities. [. . .] White home owners, realtors, and bankers realized that restrictive covenants could remain in force despite Shelley v. Kraemer, and, more important, that the ruling did nothing to challenge the other major mechanisms for real estate discrimination: redlining (denying loans to areas inhabited by racial minorities), steering (directing minority buyers solely to homes in minority neighborhoods), and block busting (playing on white fears of a change in neighborhood racial balance to promote panic sales, getting whites to sell their homes for small amounts and then selling those same homes to minority buyers at extremely high prices). (26-7, in 2006 edition)

One of the ways that this suburb’s developers circumvented the Supreme Court decision was, according to the author of the blog Unshoveling the Past, by “mandating membership in a community or association as a condition of purchase of sale. Potential house buyers had to gain approval of membership by the association in order to purchase the property. In addition, the association retained first right of purchase on all lots or homes offered for sale.” The blogger tells the story of how this particular practice came to an end in 1970. An African American family from New Jersey had wanted to buy the home next door to her family, but the association purchased it instead when they discovered that the potential buyers were Black. The blogger’s parents, another white couple, and the African American buyers filed a suit which “requested the dissolution of the association, the award of $15,000 in damages to Ashley [the New Jersey buyer], and the removal of the restrictive covenants from all deeds.” The Franklin County court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs: “Judge Clifford Rader approved the dissolution of the association Monday and declared all of the restrictive covenants null and void.”

There is a pre-history to this form of racial segregation in the housing market. As it turns out, the high school that the pub server attended, and which I pass (giving it a wide berth) on my running route, sits on top of a former cemetery that a master blacksmith, Pleasant Litchford, had designated in the nineteenth century for the burial of African Americans since they were excluded from the “white” cemeteries in the area. According to this informative video made for Columbus Neighborhoods with Diane Kelly Runyon and Kim Shoemaker Starr, authors of Secrets Under the Parking Lot: The True Story of Upper Arlington, Ohio, and the History of Perry Township in the Nineteenth Century (2017), Litchford had been an enslaved person in Lynchburg, Virginia, who bought his freedom then moved with his wife and four sons to what was then known as Perry Township, Ohio, in 1832. By the time of his death in 1879, he and his family had become quite prosperous (a “millionaire” in today’s terms) and had acquired a great deal of land — on which he had previously established a “Colored School” for Black children, and through which he, along with abolitionist and Baptist minister James Preston Poindexter and others, operated an underground railroad system for enslaved fugitives. That land was subsequently sold off as developers sought to incorporate the town, which, in turn, annexed additional large chunks of land during the mid-twentieth century.

In 1955, the Litchford family’s and others’ remains were exhumed and moved to Union Cemetery to make way for the high school. It wasn’t until several years ago that Starr and Runyon learned of the removal and transfer. Props to them and other local folks who are unearthing this history of racial segregation and seeking to make it more widely known through public venues and educational curricula. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Runyon and Starr state in an interview that the UA public library has not invited them to speak about their book.) There is also a Change.org petition to name the high school library after Pleasant Litchford in recognition of his historical presence, social involvement, and success on the school’s grounds.

The effects of these racial and socioeconomic restrictions are hardly a thing of the past, as contemporary demographic information about the suburb shows. Data USA offers these statistics for 2017:

  • Population: 34,943
    • White (Non-Hispanic): 89.7%
    • Asian (Non-Hispanic): 4.92%
    • Two or More Races (Non-Hispanic): 1.85%
    • White (Hispanic): 1.83%
    • Black or African American (Non-Hispanic): 0.904%
  • Median income: $110,397
  • Median property value: $357,200

The U.S. Census Bureau provides these updated numbers:

  • Population estimates (July 1, 2019): 35,366
    • White alone: 91.5%
    • Black or African American alone: 0.6%
    • American Indian and Alaska Native alone: 0.0%
    • Asian alone: 5.5%
    • Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander alone: 0.0%
    • Two or more races: 1.9%
    • Hispanic or Latino: 3.1%
    • White alone, not Hispanic or Latino: 89.1%
  • Median household income (in 2018 dollars), 2014-2018: $115,093
  • Median value of owner-occupied housing units, 2014-2018: $376,400

There is, of course, a much longer pre-history of Native presence in this area and state. I can’t speak to the accuracy or epistemology of that horrific number, 0.0%, in the present and will defer to the American Indian Studies Program at OSU, which notes that “Central Ohio is a traditional homeland of the Shawnee Nation; Delaware, Wyandot, and other Indigenous nations also have strong ties to these lands,” and to the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio, which is “devoted to preserving and restoring balance in the lives of American Indian and Alaska Native youth and families living in and around Ohio through culture, wellness, community, and education.”

These histories and ongoing processes of racial segregation and settler colonialism are meant to frame my real point — my petty rant — which is a simple Public Service Announcement: WALK/RUN AGAINST TRAFFIC. BIKE WITH TRAFFIC. That typically means walk/run on the left side of the road. Not the right.

As much as I can, I run on the street rather than the sidewalk. I’m not a runner per se. For me, it’s about getting outside and away from my computer, not training or working out or anything like that. But I have read that asphalt is less punishing on your feet and joints than concrete, which makes a difference at my age. And some of the sidewalks themselves are so uneven and buckled from tree roots pushing up, that it’s hazardous to run on them (not “practicable” in legal parlance), especially when you’re trying to focus on a podcast.

So when I have to face a walker or runner coming at me on my side of the street, I get absurdly, ridiculously, exorbitantly angry. As the only person of color out running and as someone who can be mistaken for Chinese during the xenophobic COVID-19 kung flu pandemic, I can only imagine what I look like running on the left side of the street: a brown foreigner who doesn’t understand the rules of the road in this country.

What is even more rage-inducing is when I am forced to get out of someone else’s way who makes no attempt to move over, especially on the sidewalk. I’m way oversensitive about this because of breathing-while-running during coronavirus (leave extra space), and, again, because I look (kind of) oriental. But my rage also wells up from my awareness of the racist Jim Crow custom of Black people and other people of color having to step off the sidewalk to let white people pass. The entitled presumption that oncoming walkers, sometimes in horizontal pairs or groups, don’t have to move over for me sends me into towering heights of fury. And it’s not like I’m a speedy runner, either. My not-training-for-anything-listening-to-anti-racist-imperialist-capitalist podcasts pace is slow. Plenty of time to avoid a (corona cloud) collision and make a decision. So when it’s thrown back in my court, I cannot very well run straight at people, particularly mothers or nannies with double-wide strollers that hog up all the space, yelling this PSA and history in their faces as they scatter like affronted doves. I am no gentleman about it, I am not nice, but eventually I go around.

It is little consolation to take note of the signs that have cropped up in people’s yards since the protests against police violence erupted several months ago. Granted, my route traverses a very small part of the suburb, but in the hundreds of properties I pass, I’ve counted about a dozen or so signs that say “ENOUGH” in yellow letters against a black background (I guess this means: enough with the police and vigilante killings of Black people); about as many “UA Loves UAPD”; and two or three actual “Black Lives Matter” signs. The expressions of support for the police became more visible around July 4th. And all I could think was: of course, you do. The police work exactly as they are supposed to in your neighborhood — to protect your property while respecting your privacy. I often see one police car either parked under a tree or roaming down streets. Never have I seen an officer get out, much less stop or apprehend anybody.

Here is legal scholar Michelle Alexander putting this version of policing into perspective in her highly influential book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010/2012/2020):

From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription “uppers.” All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not. (124, in 2012 edition)

The ludicrosity of imagining such scenarios is partly a result of the “political rhetoric and media imagery” starting in the 1980s that shifted from depictions of “white recreational users who snorted [cocaine] in its powder form” and focused on “the drug treatment industry, such as rehabilitation clinics, and emphasized the possibility of recovery,” to news and other media representations that fixed “in the public imagination the image of the black drug criminal” (105).

The war on drugs obviously was and is not waged in politically and economically resourced white communities. “Instead,” Alexander writes, “when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ‘hood.” The “hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities” and those communities’ lack of political power has combined to make them “convenient targets” in this domestic war:

What happens to them does not directly affect — and is scarcely noticed by — the privileged beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stop-and-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are the primary targets. It is not uncommon for a young black teenager living in a ghetto community to be stopped, interrogated, and frisked numerous times in the course of a month, or even a single week, often by paramilitary units. (124-5)

It goes without saying that such policing tactics are not in effect where I go running. I can only speculate that, because of the racial and economic segregation of this capital city and its suburbs as a whole, the majority of the suburbanites not only do not notice what goes on beyond their invisible walls, but also can scarcely believe that this kind of militarized overpolicing — and not just (“enough” with) the killings of Black people — are what the calls to defund the police and reallocate resources to community-building are seeking to redress.

Why do I persist, then, in subjecting myself daily to these torturous uncertainties and indignant resentments? (All in my head, of course.) Leaving aside my refusal to drive to find a peaceful trail that is likely overcrowded with corona breathers these days, the statistics cited above already paint a picture: it’s a nice neighborhood, it’s a safe neighborhood — yes, including for me, who is not a Black man (I am not Ahmaud Arbery) nor a trans or cisgender woman nor a gender nonconforming person. The homes and landscaping are well-kept, the flowers colorful, the curb appeal appealing to look at. The traffic on the side streets is fairly sparse. But most important to me, the mature trees provide protection from the energy-sapping sun (I am the opposite of Superman). In fact, over these many months and years of running, I’ve plotted my route by following the smoothest, newest asphalt and the most shade.

And no, I do not try to stay out of the sun for fear of getting too dark. I look forward to every summer when I can get back to what I fantasize would be my year-round hue, if not for the depressing fade that happens over winter.

I plan to take up the question of Filipinx racialization in another post. There’s some interesting conversating happening on that prickly issue in this moment. In the meantime, I will practice putting my steps on autopilot, my mask on Asiatic inscrutable, bracket the indignities of swerving around the coronawalkers, and concentrate on what’s going on in my earbuds, lest I actually open my mouth and say out loud what’s running through my mind.

On politicization

| Joe Ponce

. . . Or, On Afro-Asian connections, part I

In my last post, I referenced the ways that Black studies discourse has critically engaged with the politics of representing Black suffering and death, noting in particular the wide range of possible effects that these images and live scenes can have on differently positioned witnesses, spectators, consumers, and mourners. That the same image or social event can have widely disparate meanings — for some, another unjust instance of oppression; for the unsympathetic, a justified use of force to maintain the racial order of things — offers one way into the question: what instigates non-Black folks to become politicized? Though that process could be variously defined, I mean it in this context to signal shifts in thinking and behavior whereby a person becomes cognizant of the historical existence and contemporary persistence of state-sanctioned, extra-legal, and interpersonal forms of anti-Black racism and self-consciously seeks to remedy those past and present wrongs.

I’m specifically inquiring about the politicization of Asian Americans in support of Black liberation. Leaving aside, for now, the many articulations of “Asians for Black lives” that are circulating in public discourse, I’ve been able to come up with only a handful of Asian American radicalization narratives more generally in literary history (though undoubtedly there are more I’m missing). Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946) is perhaps the most well-known example of transnational radicalization in the Asian American literary archive. His narrative persona grows up during the U.S. colonial period an impoverished peasant in Pangasinan, Philippines, where his family is subject to immiseration by absentee landlordism and other forms of exploitation, and he later becomes a labor activist and organizer on the U.S. West Coast.

Subsequent Filipinx American martial law novels like Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter (2010/2012), and Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018, a deliberate play on Bulosan’s classic text) feature privileged female protagonists who reject their elite backgrounds and become activists fighting against the repressive Marcos dictatorship. Interestingly, neither Hagedorn nor Castillo overtly explain why Daisy Avila or Hero (Geronima De Vera) joins the New People’s Army in their respective texts. Dogeaters‘ chapter titles narrate the beauty queen Daisy’s political awakening through allusions to fairy tales — “Sleeping Beauty,” “Epiphany,” “Breaking Spells” — but doesn’t divulge how she came to her decision to denounce the beauty pageant as anti-feminist on public television, renounce her crown, and abscond with the guerrilla rebel Santos Tirador. Castillo as well withholds Hero’s reasons for dropping out of medical school at University of Santo Tomas when she is recruited by two NPA cadres. Though Apostol, for her part, does explain why Sol gets briefly involved in activist work as a college student — she finds out that her parents are supplying arms to the violently repressive Marcos regime, hence the title — hers is the least optimistic about the prospects of what I called “revolution from above” in a review of the novel.

There are other literary examples. The Pakistani immigrant Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) comes to recognize how U.S. imperialism operates through military interventions, financial coercions, and immigration policies, abandons his upward mobility trajectory in the U.S. (Princeton degree, a high-paying job at a valuation firm), and returns to Lahore to become a lecturer and political mentor to activist students. The clone Evie in Larissa Lai’s dystopian sci-fi novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) seeks to sabotage the power of the corporations because her and her sister clones’ “human” rights have been nullified by the splicing of 0.03% carp genes into their genetic codes. And a whole array of characters in Karen Tei Yamashita’s recreation of the Asian American and allied social movements in I Hotel (2010) become engaged in a variety of political activities and artistic and cultural work in the Bay Area during the 1960s and 70s.

That period of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements is the setting for prominent Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama becoming political — a process of politicization that, as she tells it in Passing It On: A Memoir (2004), was directly affected by her exposure to and engagement with the Black freedom struggle. Born to Issei parents and raised in San Pedro, California in 1921, Kochiyama writes that “In our Spanish-style house with a cactus garden, I was sheltered, lived comfortably and safely, religious, provincial, and apolitical in thought” (9). She reflects on the privileges and limitations that her early years in San Pedro afforded her:

As much as I enjoyed growing up in a friendly cosmopolitan small town, I needed to leave it and grow up, open myself to new ideas, meet new people, learn from life’s experiences. My provincial mentality and apolitical ideas needed to change and develop. I needed to leave San Pedro in order to enlarge my worldview, so that the people and encounters I speak of could become the primary sources from which my political ideas and philosophy have grown. (xxiii-xxiv)

The first major — catastrophic — event that took her out of her small town and her “provincial mentality” was being evacuated, relocated, and incarcerated along with 110,000+ other Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR’s signing of Executive Order 9066. Kochiyama’s father was detained by the FBI immediately after December 7, 1941, and died the next spring. She and the rest of her family were first sent to live in the makeshift horse stalls at the Santa Anita Racetrack Assembly Center while the camps were being constructed in the U.S. interior, and eventually transferred to the concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas.

Kochiyama considers the impact of incarceration on her worldview at a couple of moments in the memoir. In the introduction, she writes: “Before the war, I was seeing America with American eyes. What happened to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor made me see the world and America with entirely new eyes — Japanese American eyes. In many ways, this marked the beginning of my political awakening and development” (xxiii).

In a later chapter, she describes getting a job at the USO in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so she wouldn’t have to return to Jerome: “It was challenging but very liberating. First, I was on my own, and second, it challenged my thinking. I knew I was beginning to change my thinking, and I welcomed more changes. How little I understood about anything in life, and until that time was I indoctrinated with status quo mainstream American ideas, but I now knew it was time to go on my own and think for myself” (17).

Given the formative influence that Japanese American incarceration had on changing her “mainstream” American ideas, it is all the more remarkable that she attributes the beginning of her “political activism” not so much to her experience in Jerome’s concentration camp but to her family’s move to Harlem in 1960 with her husband Bill and six children ranging from one to thirteen years of age: “In December 1960, we moved to a new housing project in Harlem — the Manhattanville Houses on 126th and Broadway. It was a low-income housing project surrounded by Latino and Black families, and it was in this new neighborhood that at the age of forty, my political activism began to take shape” (47).

The rest of the memoir goes on to describe a multitude of activists and causes that she worked with and for over the next 40+ years, including her friendship with Malcolm X and her involvement with the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission, the anti-Vietnam war movement, Asian Americans for Action, the Republic of New Africa, support for political prisoners (Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, Mumia Abu Jamal, Marilyn Buck, Steve Yip, Yu Kikumura, David Wong, Eddy Zheng, Lolita Lebron, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier), and numerous anti-imperialist struggles (she was part of the 19th Venceremos Brigade in 1988 and visited Peru in 1993 on a human rights mission).

Kochiyama emphasizes the pivotal moment that launched this restless activism near the beginning of the documentary Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama—A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation (2009), produced by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan. The film splices together conversations between the two women that took place in Santa Barbara in 1996 and Oakland in 2008 and is currently streaming for free on the web through Films for Action. (Ok, so the main impetus behind this inordinately long blog post was to cite this documentary and encourage people to watch it. I don’t see it get a whole lot of airplay.) In the first few minutes, Kochiyama replies to Davis’s invitation to “tell me how it all began,” by saying, “I didn’t become political until late. I was 40. And actually, I didn’t become political until we moved to Harlem. [. . .] And that changed our life because, well, we said, we better learn something about the Black community, Black movement.”

By contrast, Davis describes her upbringing in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, and the white supremacist violence she and the Black community there were subjected to during the Bull Connor years. Her recollections of that childhood in 1996 and 2008 are fairly mild compared to the stark description she provides in a 1972 interview with Swedish journalists while in a California prison that is part of The Black Power MixTape, 1967-1975 (2011). Davis responds to questioning about the Black Panthers, revolution, and violence with an exasperated explanation of having been surrounded by state and vigilante violence all her life, citing, among other incidents, the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed four African American girls and injured at least twelve others. Davis ends her critique of the question, “So that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just, I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

In Mountains That Take Wing, Davis concludes of the impact that the two women’s differing circumstances had on their political trajectories, “I think place has a lot to do with the politicization,” and Kochiyama agrees.

There is much to say about how segregation can throw up obstacles to interracial relationships for someone like Kochiyama, and make being “political” a matter of necessity and survival for someone like Davis. But it is instructive to hear how the Kochiyama family’s first thought upon moving to Harlem is not to try to maintain distance or differentiate themselves from their neighbors but to learn about the Black movement and immerse themselves in the Black community. Passing It On describes the family’s support for Black struggles, in part, through their “Christmas Cheer” newsletters, which started in 1949 but turned political in 1963, as well as their resonantly titled “North Star” family movement newsletter, which lasted from 1965 to 1969. Here’s one choice snippet from the former that is prescient in its call to white and non-Black people of color to reckon with colorism in our communities:

World renown[ed] sociologist, John Hope Franklin, stated: “Almost invariably the Negro progresses only to the extent that the white man advances in understanding that a human being is a human being. The Negro cannot achieve except where the white man has advanced enough to allow him.” But it is not only the white man, but the yellow man, the brown man, and men of every light pigmentation who have imbued self-elevation by lighter-coloring who are guilty of the ferment in race relationship[s]. Each must examine himself for the varying degrees of prejudice are found in every ethnic and religious group at every level and every area individually and en masse, not only in America, but on every continent. The cry, heard round the world, for human rights, dignity, and freedom must be answered with social justice. . . . (110-11)

The “North Star” newsletters, meanwhile, take up such issues and formations as Black nationalism, SNCC and the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and Black political prisoners, along with the anti-Vietnam war and Asian American movements.

What I find most moving and inspiring about the documentary is being given the opportunity to watch two seasoned women-of-color activists talking with one another in their homes. Although the film does include clips of them speaking at public rallies, podiums, and conferences, most of it is comprised of extended scenes of their conversations in interior spaces. They don’t try to one-up each other on points of radical theory or political causes they’ve been involved in or famous activists they’ve known (obviously, they are the famous activists we’ve come to know). They don’t try to prove to each other or the camera who is more down with the people or more woke. And the fact that we are listening in on a Japanese American woman and an African American woman discuss their ideas about and experiences with social justice movements breaks with the predominant Afro-Asian studies tradition which manifests an “almost-exclusive focus on men as political and historical actors in the construction of cross-racial solidarities,” as scholars Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar write in their introduction to the special issue of S&F Online, “Queer and Feminist Afro-Asian Formations.” What comes across in the film is not “heteromasculinity” or “heterosexual couplehood” as the “structuring conditions of possibility for cross-racial solidarity,” as Reddy and Sudhakar put it, but genuine curiosity about each other’s lives and viewpoints and an equally generous willingness to reveal them.

In giving us this glimpse of their conversations, the film shows Kochiyama and Davis modeling for us what M. Jacqui Alexander eloquently describes as becoming women of color:

In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each others’ histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying-comparison oppression. We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company. (M. Jacqui Alexander, “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves,” in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005], 257-86; 269.)

This isn’t to posit false equivalences across racial-gender experiences and histories, or to assert that directing attention to one group’s oppression to combat the mythologies that substitute for knowledge somehow deflects attention away from oneself or other groups (e.g., the stupid all lives matter response to Black Lives Matter). The dialogues in the documentary themselves contravene such oversimplifications and abstractions, even as they suggest that to become fluent in each others’ histories may require not only yearning for but being present in each others’ company.

Toward the end of Mountains That Take Wing, Davis asserts the need for Kochiyama’s story of politicization to become one of those histories that should be more widely known: “Your history and how you became conscious of fighting racism and inequality and injustice and fighting against war — we need to understand better how that happened so that it’s not accidental, so that we can actually encourage it.”

And she emphasizes Kochiyama’s efforts to work across social differences in these anti-racist and anti-imperialist projects: “Your history as someone who has always encouraged community building across the divisions that usually keep us apart—”

At this point, Kochiyama interjects, “Oh yes, there must be that kind of alliance, that kind of getting to know one another better, and doing things together, oh yes. Ok, so where do you think it has to begin?”

Davis’s answer: “Well, I think it begins wherever you are. My sense has always been that activism isn’t something special. It’s not located in a particular space. It’s about doing the work you’re able to do given the position you’re in at any given moment.”

It doesn’t have to take a dramatic move into open air or closed prisons or a racially different neighborhood to become political. Nor does it require having bombs go off in your neighborhood in response to “integration.” It can begin and continue by critically reflecting on the positions we’re in, here and now, while remaining open to being moved.