Interview by Chloe Tarrasch, Haas Institute Communications Fellow
UC Berkeley Professor Evelyn Nakano Glenn, who was recently awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, discusses her study of Japanese American self-evacuees during World War II as well as Native American exclusion from conversations about race and gender. Prof. Glenn is on the Executive Committee of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and a professor of Gender and Women Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.
Could you talk a little about your recent award, the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence?
Evelyn Nakano Glenn: This is part of the Chancellor’s office’s effort to recognize faculty contributions to the university. Generally, faculty is evaluated on the “big three,” which are scholarship, teaching and university service. But more specifically in the latter category, there’s been an emphasis in the last few years on contributing to diversity at the university—not just among faculty, but students and staff—by promoting and supporting traditionally excluded groups or underrepresented groups. The award was for my work founding the Center for Race and Gender and my mentorship of students of color at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My own scholarship happens to focus on issues of race and gender equality, citizenship, and so a lot of my work addresses issues of inequality in our society. I try to find some of the underlying social, structural, cultural factors involved.
I understand that once you win the award, you receive $10,000 in grant money. Could you expand on the research you plan to do with this grant?
ENG: I have one ongoing project on what I call “Japanese American Self-Evacuees.” In the early days of 1942, the U.S. army created a barred zone which included California, Oregon, eastern Washington and part of Arizona. The army initially urged Japanese Americans to move from the banned area in late February and March of 1942. But two weeks later, they declared that, in fact, Japanese Americans could not move and would have to stay in place. Then, the army rounded up Japanese Americans in the barred zone and incarcerated them in concentration camps. There was that brief amount of time, maybe about three weeks, when some Japanese Americans were able to move on their own. About 5,000 people left on their own during that period, and their story has never been told, because the defining event for Japanese Americans was the internment experience.
There’s a much wider range of experiences among those who escaped the internment camps. Some people actually ended up in circumstances that were probably worse than going to camp, because they were targeted and felt very vulnerable and unprotected from racism. Japanese-American kids were subject to violence, stoned at schools, bullied, locked in closets, all sorts of things. And then on the other hand, there were some people who wound up in nice situations. There was a family that was connected to a white Protestant church, and the church members contacted a congregation in Madison, Wis., who then adopted this family and sponsored their move to Madison. They were given a really nice house to live in, much better than what they were living in California. On the other end, there were people who were promised farmland or something like that, but it often turned out to be un-arable. So they had an unusually tough time. In some cases in, they were even forced to convert to Mormonism to get their children enrolled in school.
I guess one of the questions I was really interested in is what happens to those who don’t share the experience that defines an ethnic community? How does this affect their ethnic identity and sense of ties to the community? Because the one unifying event for the Japanese American community was the incarceration camps, and so, for a long time after the war, when a Nikkei met another Nikkei they would ask “What camp were you in?” And they would establish a connection based on relatives and friends that were in the same camp. The people who didn’t go to camp didn’t have anything to say to that question.
I understand that the story hasn’t been told, but were there any other reasons that inspired you to research this topic?
ENG: I had a neighbor in Cambridge, Mass., and she’d been my neighbor for many years. It wasn’t until I came back to California, and she happened to be visiting her daughters here that she told me she self-evacuated with her father and mother to Utah. She talked about how her parents tried to enroll her in the local public school; they were told by the principal that she would have to convert to Mormonism, even though they were originally Buddhist. When she and her family came back to California and went to their Buddhist temple, the girls in her age group said, “Oh, no, you’re not like one of us, you don’t belong.” The family felt rejected. I don’t know all the connections, but basically she chose to live in Massachusetts with her husband and never wanted to come back to California. So even though her three daughters moved there for college and stayed, she stayed in Massachusetts even after her husband passed away. I felt like this was such a personal, sad story. Even though she had a good life and was not an unhappy person, her story correlates with the internment and the Japanese American community.
I decided to research this partly because it’s an untold story, but also because it has these resonances for me with the issue of community memory and narratives that ethnic communities create to tell their collective story. That narrative is passed on intergenerationally and serves to validate one’s place in American society. However, when a community makes certain claims about shared experiences, it excludes others who did not share that experience.
Transitioning topics, in November, the United States celebrated American Indian Heritage Month. I know in some of your articles, you’ve talked about Native Americans and how they’re not as included in the discussion about marginalized communities in America. I was wondering if you could talk about your research on Native Americans specifically.
ENG: I’ve been bothered for a while that my own work, which is on certain groups–African American, Latino, Asian–did not include Native Americans. I did include them in my most recent work, Forced to Care, where I talk about a number of issues around women of color who have been forced or coerced to do domestic work and caring labor for white people.
More recently I’ve been writing an article on settler colonialism as a framework for analyzing race and gender formation within the United States’ distinct form of colonialism that is based on the elimination of the indigene. A settler colonialism framework has been widely used in Australia for a while and more recently has been taken up by U.S. scholars to analyze the long history of genocide and eliminatory policies directed at Native Americans. The purpose of settler colonialism is to take the land, which is different from classic colonialism where the aim is to exploit both the resources of the colony and the people of the colony to enrich the metropole [the colonizer’s country]. In a settler colonial situation, the invaders aim is to stay permanently and occupy the land. The logic of settler colonialism thus requires eliminating the native inhabitants whether through genocide and violence or through biological or cultural assimilation, which is essentially aimed at erasing native cultures and ways of life. I then tried to think about that in relation to race and gender formation in the United States. That encounter with the native is a really big moment in the formation of whiteness. This simultaneously created the native as the “other” and the white settler as the “citizen subject,” which is not just an ethnic identity but also a national identity, in that the nation itself is equated with whiteness and hetero-patriarchy.
Looking at where other groups have fit into this framework: once you take the land, how do you develop it? And that’s where labor comes in. Settlers in the U.S. enslaved Indians and engaged in an Indian slave trade. In the end, however, the settlers decided to use slaves from Africa as a labor force to build and then work on plantations. So you can see this triangular relationship developing where you have white settler, the eliminable Native who becomes invisible and the black slave. Then you have various undesirable Others, which would include groups like Mexican Americans, or the Chinese who were brought over to build the railroad.
I argue that we need to have a settler colonial framework to do a more historically anchored, more specific account of racialization, gendered racialization in the U.S. so Native Americans are more essential to that story. But it also recognizes that not all the racisms are identical, but that they’re connected through an underlying framework of settler colonialism.
How do you think that the Native Americans not being a part of the story of settler colonialism has affected their current culture and their identity?
ENG: I think the main thing is their invisibility and how Native Americans are seen as ghosts—they’re something of the past, not of the present. And the other way people treat them is as an ethnic group, or another racial group. There are reds, there are yellows, there are blacks. But in fact, the experience of Native Americans is quite unique. You can’t reduce all racism to the same thing or even rank racisms. Sometimes, people anchor the U.S. racial system in a black-white dichotomy. Other groups are viewed as sort of in-between, and those in-between groups are either honorary whites or partly-colored people. I think the relations are more complicated than that. I’m not trying to say that we replace theories such as Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation, but I think that we need to add settler colonialism to the mix to really have a full account of race and racism in the United States.
Through your lens of research on race and gender, what does a fair and inclusive society look like to you? How do you think your research relates to a fair and inclusive society and helps us further that goal?
ENG: My role has been more of a critic and analyst of injustice and exclusion, not of inclusion and fairness. You have to understand injustice and exclusion in order to achieve something that’s fair and inclusive, and so much of my work has been looking at different levels of the structure of the global economy. I also look at on the ground interactions and how inequality is performed and viewed on an everyday level. One of my interests has been in caring labor and domestic service, so I’ve been very interested in the interactions of the white employer and the immigrant or racial minority employee and how that relationship plays out in both personal and structural ways.
What are the most dire issues that we’re grappling with today that need to be addressed to create a more just society?
ENG: The biggest threat is this whole liberal ideology based on individualism that essentially monetizes and capitalizes everything. For example, university education is viewed as a way to increase your human capital, and the student is viewed as investing in the growth of her human capital, so she’ll be able to earn a larger return. In that conception, it makes sense for students to borrow and go into debt with the expectation that the investment in education will pay off in higher earnings later on. There is almost no recognition that widespread and equitable education is a public good. The individualism that it’s based on really undercuts notions of justice and fairness. Fairness indicates that it should not be the case that some people are entitled to endless resources and endless wealth, while other people who are “failures” are not entitled to decent levels of living wage. So, that circumstance is the challenge. We can have certain pockets where we deal with this fairly, but the economy as a whole is just so unjust.
