“Out of the Margins”
Last weekend I participated in an amazing “Out of the Margins” gathering at the University of Michigan.
The conference was convened by Scott Kurashige to challenge Asian Americans, now approaching 15 million, to resist the model minority stereotype and exercise our rising influence in a time of rising crises.
Scott, an award-winning historian and director of the university’s A/PIA (Asian/Pacific Islander American) Studies Program, is the co-author of The Next American Revolution (TNAR). He imagined the book, selected the materials from my speeches and articles, organized them into chapters, did the research for the endnotes, wrote the introduction, and made all the publishing arrangements with University of California Press.
The title comes from chapter 6 in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century in which Jimmy wrote that “the revolution to be made in the United States will be the first in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things.”
The weekend gathering included lively public and private conversations, moving performances by poets and dancers, inspiring examples of youth leadership, e.g. the boycott against bullying at South Philadelphia High School, and an excerpt from a documentary on me that the filmmaker Grace Lee is producing.
I participated in a conversation on TNAR with Mabel Williams and Michael Hardt. Mabel is a veteran of the 60s. With her late husband, Rob Williams, she organized the self-defense movement against the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe, N.C.
Michael is co-author (with Antonio Negri) of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, and professor of literature at Duke University. I especially recommend his little book on Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, in which he explains how both Lenin and Jefferson understood the patience and practice in self-governing which is required to go beyond Rebellion to Revolution.
I also participated in Glenn Omatsu’s interactive workshop on “Teaching and Learning to transform ourselves and our communities.” Glenn was in his early 20s when we met at an Asian Americans for Action conference at Pace College in 1970. Now he is a graying, animated, innovative professor of Anti-colonial, Holistic, and Community-based education at state, city and community colleges in California. glenn.omatsu@csun.edu/
He has developed imaginative ways to help students make the paradigm shift from mainstream education (and its goal of acquiring knowledge for self-advancement) to transformative education. E.g. students break up into small groups and create ways to introduce themselves to larger groups by sharing a piece of "culture” representation (jewelry, song, dress, spoken word, etc). Or they devise ways to challenge the work of another group.
Our small group, mainly students, created a small flyer criticizing a campus Asian GLBT organization that we felt was evading important movement building issues.
