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Learning from an Unimportant Minority: Race Politics Beyond the White/Black Paradigm
Race is all around us, as one of the main structures of capitalist society. Yet, how we talk about it and even how we think about it is tightly policed. Everything about race is artificially distorted as a white/Black paradigm. Instead, we need to understand the imposed racial reality from many different angles of radical vision. J. Sakai shares experiences from his own life as a revolutionary in the united states, exploring what it means to belong to an unimportant minority.
118 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2015
125 people want to read
About the author
J. Sakai
15 books75 followersJ. Sakai is a revolutionary intellectual with decades of experience as an activist in the U.S.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 13, 2021
This is a transcript of a speech that Sakai gave so it's not super in-depth or edited but it was illuminating. I haven't read Settlers yet so this was my first introduction to Sakai. He's funnier than I expected and has a lot to share about the Japanese-American experience as well as how various groups outside the Black/White binary have been racialized in a way that serves American capitalism/white supremacy. I wasn't super clear on how Japanese in the U.S. moved from being farmers to middle-class and this text explained that trajectory. I knew some about Japanese internment but hadn't realized it was so transparently enacted to serve white California agriculture and how reparations were connected to covering up Indigenous slavery and genocide, etc. Definitely want to learn more now!
January 24, 2020
Easily digestible, this slim book presents a transcript from a conference talk J. Sakai presented on the intersection of capitalism and race in America. While I do wish that this book was more research heavy and included citations, I do find the history Sakai provides signifiant for anyone unfamiliar or vaguely familiar with the discrimination Japanese people have experienced in the United States. Sakai's book deserves parallels to likes of Malcolm X or Franz Fanon, insofar as Sakai is concerned not only with providing a counter narrative to hegemonically-sanctioned history but with resisting the forces that privilege one group of people over others. Just as important, Sakai shows us that when we allow binaries to remain in place, people who fall outside that binary may become coopted in service of the status quo.
March 24, 2016
I found this little book to be really illuminating.
I read it really quick and now i've picked it back up to reread. It's a transcribed talk. So it's not organized like a normal book or essay. It's stories about US history and stories about Sakai's life interwoven to try to illustrate the way race works in America. He does this by specifically explaining the different and evolving ways Japanese Americans have been racialized according to the whims and capitalistic needs of American imperialism and white supremacy.
I find race in the US to be very confusing. I'm kind of always trying to remedy this for myself, to make some sense out of the racial order that makes up our realities.
Sakai acknowledges this in the opening page:
"Race is notoriously slippery, awkward to hold onto as a subject, yet totally all around us. Totally. All the time, every day, we breathe it; after all, it is us, so we can't ever be far from it. This seeming contradiction of what should be so simple being endlessly complicated in society is because how we think about race, how we talk about race... capitalism is constantly trying to police this. They don't want to neaten it, they actually want to constrict it and keep remaking it in their own distorted images and stamping it on our faces."
And so from there he teases out a lot of the ways this has happened to Japanese people in the United States.
And as a result, I'm feeling just a tad less confused about America.
I read it really quick and now i've picked it back up to reread. It's a transcribed talk. So it's not organized like a normal book or essay. It's stories about US history and stories about Sakai's life interwoven to try to illustrate the way race works in America. He does this by specifically explaining the different and evolving ways Japanese Americans have been racialized according to the whims and capitalistic needs of American imperialism and white supremacy.
I find race in the US to be very confusing. I'm kind of always trying to remedy this for myself, to make some sense out of the racial order that makes up our realities.
Sakai acknowledges this in the opening page:
"Race is notoriously slippery, awkward to hold onto as a subject, yet totally all around us. Totally. All the time, every day, we breathe it; after all, it is us, so we can't ever be far from it. This seeming contradiction of what should be so simple being endlessly complicated in society is because how we think about race, how we talk about race... capitalism is constantly trying to police this. They don't want to neaten it, they actually want to constrict it and keep remaking it in their own distorted images and stamping it on our faces."
And so from there he teases out a lot of the ways this has happened to Japanese people in the United States.
And as a result, I'm feeling just a tad less confused about America.
June 27, 2022
"As long as we're talking about unimportant minorities, we should check out the reality that the euro-settler ruling class is always changing the whole game up on us. There's nothing that we own here, it's only loaned."
^basic idea but I like the way it's written so...
Really excellent read. Sakai is a revolutionary Asian activist, not as well known as Richard Aoki or Yuri Kochiyama, but a fair name in his own right--he wrote the book "Settlers," which was a fundamental text for the anticolonial liberation movements he was involved with. Anyway, here Sakai discusses his experience in the Japanese American community and the shifting racial statuses during and after WWII; the book is well worth a read on this alone. But he really shines when talking about parts of history that were swept under the rug, like the Aleut removal to Alaska or the 1942 movie Little Tokyo (in which the big reveal is the entirety of the Japanese American population working undercover for Japan...like wtf how racist can you get lol) or even more recent events, like the 2007 murder of Du Doan.
Book highlights!
Reparations and False "Testimonies":
Basically in exchange for reparations, Japanese Americans who were at the internment camps would go to testify to their experiences and it was supposedly this open, honest thing...but actually one's transcript of what they were going to say had to be reviewed by the govt before, and they weren't allowed to talk about the Aleut removal during WWII. And they were openly "allowed" to pitch the whole civil rights act cf yelling about capitalism and fighting before being dragged out of the courtroom. It reminded me of how people talk about the importance of different narratives (like our teaching of American history w focus on marginalized groups instead of white men) but they're still remaining within the bounds of what the euro-settler/dominant class is comfortable with. They seem to give us a lot (to keep us complacent), but it's actually very little. Sakai discusses how for truly revolutionary Japanese Americans, apologies and reparations aren't enough, they want actual change but it's not really happening--everything is still going on, just further below the surface.
JACL, Division within Japanese American Community:
I don't know too much about Japanese American history but I know JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) are the main players in the known, approved history. But Sakai talks about division within the Japanese American community and how the JACL were pro-govt and informers to the US govt in the concentration camps, who landed on their feet right after internment w loads of money compared to everyone else, who were more about assimilation than anything else. They were resented in the community for the betrayal (Sakai wasn't allowed to play with a kid because his family were informers), and because most Japanese Americans backed out of politics they just kind of left them alone to do their own thing. And since the informers had connections to Washington and all, they were the ones who rose to power and the classic token POC. This division is something that should be more well-known IMO (I mean, it's on JACL's wikipedia page lol) but I'd never heard mention of it. Might just be my ignorance on Japanese American history in general though.
This was a transcribed speech, so there are no citations but almost everything he discusses is searchable online. The one thing I couldn't find any mention of was the false testimonies. This is pretty important to address so here's my take: I did some research about validity of sources during HSS600 (this class fr my one personality trait) and tbh forgot a lot of it lol but I know there's a ton of theory surrounding this idea of how individual narratives that contradict the collective aren't necessarily any less true. And an important facet of history and historical research is not shying away from sources that contradict these established narratives, thinking about whose voices are represented in sources and why. This is my first relatively unknown book that actively challenges established history (like the history of what the left supports) and also like, Sakai is a radical lol, so obv what he talks about isn't going to be easily accessible online and probably requires a lot more reading. Anyway, this was overall super interesting, gave me a lot to reflect on. Highly rec.
^basic idea but I like the way it's written so...
Really excellent read. Sakai is a revolutionary Asian activist, not as well known as Richard Aoki or Yuri Kochiyama, but a fair name in his own right--he wrote the book "Settlers," which was a fundamental text for the anticolonial liberation movements he was involved with. Anyway, here Sakai discusses his experience in the Japanese American community and the shifting racial statuses during and after WWII; the book is well worth a read on this alone. But he really shines when talking about parts of history that were swept under the rug, like the Aleut removal to Alaska or the 1942 movie Little Tokyo (in which the big reveal is the entirety of the Japanese American population working undercover for Japan...like wtf how racist can you get lol) or even more recent events, like the 2007 murder of Du Doan.
Book highlights!
Reparations and False "Testimonies":
Basically in exchange for reparations, Japanese Americans who were at the internment camps would go to testify to their experiences and it was supposedly this open, honest thing...but actually one's transcript of what they were going to say had to be reviewed by the govt before, and they weren't allowed to talk about the Aleut removal during WWII. And they were openly "allowed" to pitch the whole civil rights act cf yelling about capitalism and fighting before being dragged out of the courtroom. It reminded me of how people talk about the importance of different narratives (like our teaching of American history w focus on marginalized groups instead of white men) but they're still remaining within the bounds of what the euro-settler/dominant class is comfortable with. They seem to give us a lot (to keep us complacent), but it's actually very little. Sakai discusses how for truly revolutionary Japanese Americans, apologies and reparations aren't enough, they want actual change but it's not really happening--everything is still going on, just further below the surface.
JACL, Division within Japanese American Community:
I don't know too much about Japanese American history but I know JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) are the main players in the known, approved history. But Sakai talks about division within the Japanese American community and how the JACL were pro-govt and informers to the US govt in the concentration camps, who landed on their feet right after internment w loads of money compared to everyone else, who were more about assimilation than anything else. They were resented in the community for the betrayal (Sakai wasn't allowed to play with a kid because his family were informers), and because most Japanese Americans backed out of politics they just kind of left them alone to do their own thing. And since the informers had connections to Washington and all, they were the ones who rose to power and the classic token POC. This division is something that should be more well-known IMO (I mean, it's on JACL's wikipedia page lol) but I'd never heard mention of it. Might just be my ignorance on Japanese American history in general though.
This was a transcribed speech, so there are no citations but almost everything he discusses is searchable online. The one thing I couldn't find any mention of was the false testimonies. This is pretty important to address so here's my take: I did some research about validity of sources during HSS600 (this class fr my one personality trait) and tbh forgot a lot of it lol but I know there's a ton of theory surrounding this idea of how individual narratives that contradict the collective aren't necessarily any less true. And an important facet of history and historical research is not shying away from sources that contradict these established narratives, thinking about whose voices are represented in sources and why. This is my first relatively unknown book that actively challenges established history (like the history of what the left supports) and also like, Sakai is a radical lol, so obv what he talks about isn't going to be easily accessible online and probably requires a lot more reading. Anyway, this was overall super interesting, gave me a lot to reflect on. Highly rec.
February 11, 2021
Such a sweet little book with Asian American histories that I hadn't encountered elsewhere.
Especially appreciated his descriptions of the politics around Japanese internment during WWII.
Especially appreciated his descriptions of the politics around Japanese internment during WWII.
September 10, 2021
Brilliant and lucid
September 28, 2024
Looking forward to reading more J. Sakai!
October 18, 2015
Great book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews