May 10, 2022 - Straight White American Jesus
04:19
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Axis Mundi | |
| Axis Mundi | |
| In 2014, I moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in order to teach at Rhodes College. | |
| Moving to the Bluff City gave me the chance to connect for the first time with family on my mother's side. | |
| She was born in Portageville, Missouri, about 90 minutes northwest of Memphis, in the region where Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri triangulate. | |
| It was enlightening and affirming to see the place her and my grandmother spoke about so often throughout my childhood. | |
| Every time I met a new person in Portageville, my first thought was, their accent sounds exactly like Grandma's. | |
| About two years later, in 2017, I drove in the opposite direction, southwest of Memphis, along the eastern border of Arkansas. | |
| Three hours after leaving the Bluff City, I arrived in McGehee, Arkansas, in order to visit the sites of the two easternmost Japanese internment camps, Rohwer and Jerome. | |
| In 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast. | |
| They were given no trials, no due process, and no reason for their eviction other than sharing ancestry with the enemy who bombed Pearl Harbor. | |
| Members of my dad's family were relocated to the swamps of Arkansas in the early 1940s. | |
| My visit to McGehee was a home going in ways similar to my visit to Portageville. | |
| Both were trips to see where my family had come from, the soil that shaped its American experience, and the roots of our culture. | |
| Instead of laughing and breaking bread with newly met cousins, as I had done in Missouri, in McGahee I webbed at the foot of memorials to the Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated there, the ancestors whose American story was shaped by imprisonment and prejudice. | |
| This is one of the strange aspects of being biracial, holding two distinct histories, and thus two distinct memories, in the same body. | |
| The hardest part as a mixed white person is knowing that at any given time, past or present, one side of your family could be removed or imprisoned in ways people from the other side can't imagine. | |
| The questions I've asked myself over the years don't have easy answers. | |
| How do you balance the idea of America as a light to the world when events like Japanese internment are less random blips in your country's history and more like the standard used to keep white Christians at the top of the cultural hierarchy? | |
| How do you think of your homeland as a city upon a hill when it so often sets up the system to marginalize and incarcerate its non-white peoples, or drags them outside the city gates altogether? | |
| In other words, how do you balance the promises of democracy with the realities of undemocratic policies, laws, and actions? | |
| Thanks for listening to this free sample of The Orange Wave. | |
| My name is Brad Onishi, the author and creator of the series. | |
| I want to invite you to head over to our show notes and to hit the link if you'd like to continue listening to The Orange Wave. | |
| I know a paywall isn't something you want to see, and I get it. | |
| But I poured my heart and soul into making this docuseries, and we're an indie podcast. | |
| We're self-funded, self-produced. | |
| We do everything we can on our own to do this work. | |
| And so, it's a nominal fee, and your contribution will help us make more of these docuseries, continue to do our show a couple times a week. | |
| Thanks again. |
Export Selection