Did That Really Just Happen?

It’s Friday afternoon, and I’ve biked across the I-90 bridge to attend “Swallowing Silence: A Discussion on Power and Censorship in the Arts,” an event at the Bellevue Arts Museum, part of the City of Bellevue’s Bellwether Festival. Artists Erin Shigaki and Anida Yoeu Ali will be sharing their experiences with – well, with Power and Censorship in the Arts, including some experiences involving – ahem – the City of Bellevue and the Bellevue Arts Museum. I take a seat in the second row, feeling the disconnect between the mundane setting – rows of stackable chairs facing a poorly lit stage, screen listing to starboard, power cords snaking everywhere – and the palpable tension in the room. 

The event opens with a land acknowledgment delivered by BAM’s Interim Director (who, we are all aware, stepped in when the previous ED left under a cloud of complaints from artists of color, including Erin and Anida…). Bellevue Mayor Lynne Robinson then welcomes us, thanks the artists for being here, and gives a shout out to an impressive array of high-level City staff in the audience.

Moderator Ploi Pirapokin introduces the two panelists. Erin beckons to a white guy in a suit sitting in the front row, who stands and approaches the podium.

“Good afternoon, everyone” he says. “My name is David Marzen, and I am the Deputy Director of the Bellevue Arts Program. As my final duty, before my retirement today at 5 pm, I’d like to read the following statement.” He pulls out a tablet and begins to read:

On behalf of the City of Bellevue and the 2019 Bellwether festival, I apologize to the following artists: Khadija Tarver, James Snowden and Erin Shigaki.

I apologize for my colleagues flagging your artistic work as potentially harmful. I apologize for our offices instructing the festival staff to censor your work. I apologize that our office gaslit you when we said that anti-Asian hate speech does not happen in the City of Bellevue. As well, I apologize for continually saying that Bellevue is a “majority minority city,” while helping erase the voices of people of color within our city.

The artists are correct in accusing us of censorship. We should not have removed the lines of a poem reading, “A few years back, one of my students, an Asian American teenager from Bellevue, waiting for one of your lights to change, heard the driver of a nearby car say to her kid, ‘Stay away from them, they eat dogs.’”

I apologize for choosing to protect the name of one of our anti-Japanese forefathers, Mr. Miller Freeman – who, according to historical documents, did in fact argue for an end to Japanese migration. He was also a vocal proponent of the mass round-up and incarceration of Japanese Americans. By choosing to protect Mr. Freeman, the artist was correct in pointing out that we are in fact silencing and continuing to silence the history of the Japanese American community of Bellevue.

In conclusion, on behalf of the City of Bellevue and the Bellwether Festival, I pledge that we will individually and collectively interrupt white supremacist systems and actions in our work. If we had begun this work in a more timely fashion, perhaps we could have avoided the blatant harm to individuals involved in the Yellow No. 5 exhibit. We will commit to racial justice work in the form of diverse programming, hiring of diverse staff, and working with marginalized artists and communities. And I swear that as long as I am in this office, these pledges will be upheld. Thank you.

That last line is a little odd, given that he’s just told us he’s retiring in less than four hours – but I let that slip into the wave of stunned catharsis that sweeps the room as the man walks back to his seat. Wow. Just wow. I don’t know what I was expecting this event to deliver, but it sure in hell wasn’t that.

“Thank you,” says Erin. She is trying to get her PowerPoint going; the remote won’t cooperate. Finally it works, and she resumes:

“You know, as artists we will go ahead and take the space to imagine the things that we want to happen. Those of us involved in Bellwether 2019 have thought long and hard about the apology that we wanted to receive from the people who were involved. So we thought we would create it ourselves. The actor who delivered that apology was one of those artists who was also censored at that time.“

Wait, waitwaitwait – what? Actor? You can almost hear the screeching of mental tires in the audience, as our brains skid wildly, swerving from impressed to confused to dismayed to downright awed. Well played, artists. Imagination: 1. Reality: 0.

 

Erin begins her presentation. She talks about the life her grandparents had built in Seattle before the war: he was an architect; she ran a sewing school. They lived in a small home with their two kids, pursuing the dream that had brought their parents to the U.S. from Japan. “Incarceration destroyed that dream,” she says. The family spent the next three and a half years in a concentration camp in the desert. Erin’s father was born there, delivered by a horse veterinarian because there was no doctor available. It’s a terrible but familiar story, shared by 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were removed from the West Coast in 1942.

Erin moves on to the 2019 Bellwether Festival, which invited artists to “reflect on the roots of Bellevue.” The two sculptures she created for the show were a nod to her parent’s trophy shop.* One honored her father’s birth at Minidoka; the other the Japanese farmers who settled in Bellevue before the war. The label she wrote for the second piece read:

The plaque commemorates the back-breaking and dangerous work of the Japanese immigrants and their descendants, who cleared the land and made Bellevue suitable for farming and homes. After decades of anti-Japanese agitation, led by Eastside businessman Miller Freeman and others, Executive Order 9066 authorized the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, including the 60 families who farmed Bellevue. The Freeman family was amongst the biggest beneficiaries of the appropriation of these farms. Today, the same family, headed by property developer Kemper Freeman Jr., remains a powerful force in Bellevue. This commemorative plaque is a reminder that America’s racial policies have always had many economic motives and beneficiaries.

This is the label text that was censored by Bellevue arts administrators, one of whom told Erin he was afraid he would lose his job if the information about the Freeman family remained on the label. Works by Kahadija Tarver and Jim Snowden were also censored.

 

A few months after this debacle, Erin was invited to install a mural at Bellevue College. The piece, titled “Never Again Is Now,” featured an enormous black and white photograph of two Japanese American children who were incarcerated in California, along with a text panel connecting this shameful history to the detention of migrant children at the US border and urging viewers to “work together to make ‘Never Again’ a reality.” A few days after the mural was installed, an administrator at the college literally whited out the sentences that named Miller Freeman as a leader of the anti-Japanese agitation in Bellevue.

“I was angry, but not entirely surprised,” Erin tells us. “I felt the same emotions my ancestors felt but were unable to speak: sorrow, anger, confusion, mistrust, dismissal, disrespect, shame, and self-hate.”
 

The person who defaced the mural lost her job, as did the President of the college. But for Erin the true healing came from her community. Asian Pacific Americans and their allies turned out by the hundreds to support her at a Remembrance Ceremony held on the campus two weeks later.  

When a friend asked her why she kept fighting this same battle, she told him, “Man, I can’t let it go. This is too important. It was already white-washed once – for decades. Over my grandparents’ dead bodies! No way, I’m not gonna let it go.”

 

Erin’s fellow panelist, Khmer American artist Anida Yoeu Ali, takes the mic and tells us about a time early in her career when the Ministry of Culture in Vietnam forced her to cut the yellow stars out of a textile installation, so it would not resemble the Vietnamese flag. During the opening reception for that exhibit, the government cut off the electricity; Anida had to perform by candlelight. She says that when she tells this story, people always shake their heads and say “Well, what do you expect – it’s Vietnam!” To which she replies, “Well, let me tell you what happened when I tried to do an installation at the Smithsonian…” She describes a litany of American-style bureaucratic power plays, ending with her being contractually obligated to stand silently in the middle of her installation, with the warning that if she “went rogue” and tried to move or speak, the curators would be fired.

(This pattern of holding the jobs of (usually white) museum staff hostage in order to force artists (of color) to compromise their creative vision strikes me as particularly insidious. Nobody has ever put me in that situation; I can only hope I would have the courage to tell anyone who tried, in no uncertain terms, exactly where to shove that nonsense.)

The three women on the stage continue to share painful stories, exasperated rants, and pointed exhortations. They have been repeatedly harmed and traumatized, mostly at the hands of well-intentioned white museum staff – people like me. Some of it is hard to hear. All of it feels very, very real. My knee-jerk defensiveness prickles at the back of my neck. I carefully brush it away, consciously focusing my energy on the voices coming from the stage.

Ploi turns to the audience for questions, and the white woman next to me stands up. “I’m not from Bellevue,” she says, “but I was deeply affected by this presentation.” I realize I know this lady: it’s Tilman Smith, an anti-racist educator whose workshops for white women have changed my life. “I'm wondering, though, since so  many official people from the City of Bellevue are here today” – she turns around and smiles at the people seated behind us; nearly half are Bellevue employees – “I'm just curious how this struck you all. How you are responding to this, since so much of it concerns you directly?” She’s not taunting or goading them; she is extending a genuine invitation: Can you bring your full humanity to this important moment? Can you engage authentically with these women, their pain, this history – this opportunity?

There is an awkward silence. And then, through the door Tilman has opened, walks the Mayor of Bellevue.

Lynne Robinson makes her way to the podium and removes her mask. “This has been very moving,” she says. “I feel the pain.” She swallows, goes on. “And to be honest, I was totally suckered in by the apology. And I was so proud of what you wrote… that I would like to sign it. And own it. Because it says everything that our City believes.”

And sign it she did.**

There has been a lot of awkward applause over the course of the afternoon, ranging from sincere and supportive to strained and performative, from the dutiful to the wary to the utterly nonplussed. Now there is an explosion of clapping and whooping that feels entirely different: full-throated, whole-hearted, triumphant. When it is over Tilman and I look at each other, wide-eyed, silently seeking confirmation. Did you see what I saw? Did that really just happen? Right here in the lobby of the Bellevue Arts Museum, before a Friday afternoon audience of two dozen people?

I have to head back over the bridge, but I stay long enough to check out some of the 2021 Bellwether show, thank the BAM staff, and congratulate Erin and her crew for so skillfully and creatively manifesting The World As It Should Be. Then I unlock my bike and ride off into the sunset, still shaking my head in amazement. I know this doesn't mean systemic racism has been banished forever from the City of Bellevue, but it was, as Erin confirmed later, "really something." And I'm so grateful I got to witness it.



Note: If you want to see for yourself, check out the video from the event, now available online.


*JAE Awards, located on Beacon Hill. If you were a soccer parent in South Seattle in the late 20th century, you’ll remember this place fondly. Fun fact: J, A, and E are the initials of the owners’ three daughters – Erin is the E.  


**Not on stage, in that moment, but immediately after the event, when Erin had rustled up a paper copy.