Beyond White

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 6th, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A friend and I were laughing last week about the insidious antics of someone, and the words “Oh, that’s beyond white!” came out of his mouth.  I don’t remember who we were laughing at.  It could have been something from the current slough of national politics.  Maybe it had nothing to do with politics whatsoever.  It could have been anything, anybody.  Outrageous arrogance associated with whiteness is a contagious disease in our culture, and it takes conscious effort to resist.  No one is immune, not even people from other races.

           

     Last Friday night Nikiko Masumoto performed her one-woman play “What We Could Carry” for the Reedley Peace Center.  I’d been wanting to see this play since I first read about it in the Fresno Bee five years ago, when she returned to the Valley to farm with her family.  The play is a re-creation of the 1981 testimonies of Japanese-Americans who suffered the WWII internment, testimonies which led, eventually, to formal apologies and minimal monetary restitution from the federal government.  It was one of the dark chapters in U.S. history, but, as one of her characters says in the play, this chapter, in terms of how our country has dealt with other (i.e., non-white) races, is not the exception, but the rule.  From that point onward in the play, we listened to their testimonies differently.

           

     Mas Masumoto, Nikiko’s father, has been a friend to me since he performed in my first Humanities event in Parlier, early in 1991.  He was teamed with the poet Omar Salinas from Sanger, a town which is less than 5 miles away from the Masumoto’s farm in Del Rey, but the two writers had never met.  Race and social inequality associated with different occupations can create divides “below” white, as Mas testifies in a beautiful short piece called “In the Fourth Grade” published in his first book, Country Voices:  The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community (1987.)

           

     I have always loved watching Mas give presentations, but Nikiko’s performance was something else.  It was breathtaking.  With only a kitchen stool and battered suitcase as props, she created times and places of the evacuation; with just a music stand and microphone she transported us to the hearing rooms where the testimonies were first given token (and only later serious) attention.  The civic necessity of a whole community speaking up in their own defense was overwhelming, as the different people who did so showed up in Nikiko’s body, came out of her mouth.  Her passionate representation of those people, men and women, young and old, quietly respectful and righteously outraged, gave me new respect for the power of theater, of face-to-face communication, however ephemeral it might seem.  In the blink of an eye, that woman can change hearts.

           

     And changed hearts is what we’re going to need if we’re ever going to move beyond white, beyond the supposed superiority of that race of people and the privileges still associated with it.  Beyond white is where we need to go.  And as we move into the season where Joseph and Mary take their historic, arduous trip to Bethlehem, where they, as swarthy folks of Jerusalem, would be counted and taxed for the white folks in Rome, we have yet another opportunity to move in that direction.  Peace unearth.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rowdy mixture of European peasants who writes.  You can send her your beyond white experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 03247 or leave a comment below.

A Little Drought Music

Published in edited form October 1, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.
    
     Sunday morning, when I woke to a sunrise dampened by orange-edged clouds and robins singing for rain, I felt blessed to have such beauty in my life.  Then the first drops sounded on the patio roof, and I ran outside to the clothesline where I’d hung my cotton quilt to dry the night before.  In my bedroom I unfolded the heavy wooden clothes rack my aunt had used many winters in Washington and spread the quilt on it to continue drying, proud that I’d tricked Coyote into releasing some moisture from those clouds.  I was making a pot of tea when the drops increased to a shower, and went back outside to drag a few more things under cover.  Then I poured a steaming cup and sat inside reveling in this music so familiar to my Pacific Northwestern ears.
    
     Saturday I’d spent time working on an answer to Mas Masumoto’s call for some “art of the drought” in last Sunday’s Fresno Bee (9/22/14.)  He used the example of Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” and its impact on public opinion during the Okie/Arkie migration from the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.  I know the photo well, and many of her others:  I worked with the photographer’s husband, Paul Taylor, near the end of his life during my early days at Berkeley.  He knew the power of her art, and when they combined it with his facts and knowledge, they created a document of that drought’s causes and effects - An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - that was never surpassed. 
    
     This drought is different, at least the one here in California that politicians are trying to fix with legislation and taxpayer monies.  There were no irrigation projects then in the midwestern half of the country when farmers (mostly small independent, tenant and sharecrop families) were dried up and blown off the land.  After awhile, politicians tried to fix things with legislation and taxpayer monies, but ended up benefiting mostly the larger farmers who turned their tenants and sharecroppers out, replacing them with tractors purchased with the government funds.  This, in turn, enabled them to buy out (for pennies on the dollar) their drought-stricken small-farm neighbors still plowing with mules.
    
     About two-thirds down in Mas’s column there’s an uncharacteristically political suggestion that voters should approve the water bond in the upcoming November election.  The point of the piece is that artists should find ways to the voters hearts to help make that happen, although he never comes right out and says so, or explains why they should.  That would be fine with me if I were sure the bond would be used to provide more water where it’s needed, which I think is on the smaller, independently owned farms the irrigation projects were built to support in the first place, but I’d have to be brain dead to be convinced of that.  In California water always flows uphill to the pinnacles of power, and we’re hardly even embarrassed anymore to admit that yes, the big boys and girls will get their share first, and we get to share what’s left.  I think the hope is simply that if there’s more supply, the shortage will have more acre-feet in it and go around a little further.  Maybe this drought’s not so different after all.
    
     Knowing Mas’s good heart, however, I think what he was really calling for was art that would call on us as a people to share the shortage, bond together and lean into the wind, to work on fixing the problems together that this drought has revealed.  Like “Come on, people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try and love one another right now,”  that line from the Youngbloods’ song from our era, Mas’s and mine, our beautifully idealistic generation so crassly labeled “Boomers.”  To put our money, our water, our efforts and our faith where our mouths are.  That, of course, would require us to rise up united and take the power back from those who are using the drought to advance their family fortunes, like the Resnick’s and the Westlands’ Fortune 600’s.  Like John Vidovich’s Sandridge Partners, who Judge Harry N. Papadakis “just said no” to a couple of months back.  It would require us - even the educated “us” - to get educated about water in California, and from some entity other than the California Water Foundation, which serves as a mouthpiece for the big boys, teaching us the proper propaganda to make us good citizens of their empires.
    
     After Sunday morning’s blessed rainfall, when God let those raindrops blow where and when He willed, I have a song to suggest we learn to sing in these days of anxious anticipation of the coming water year.  It’s a song by John Pitney, that dairy kid turned Methodist minister from Oregon, titled “I Will Sing,” pure Judeo-Christian tradition straight out of the Book of Habakkuk.  It’s about being thankful for what we have and trusting God will provide, even in times of drought or other hardship.  Here’s the first verse:


When the fig tree’s barren in the field,
I will sing, I will sing.
And the produce of the olive fails,
I will sing, I will sing.
When the fields are yielding up no food,
And the flock be cut off from the fold,
And there be no cattle in the stalls,
I will sing, I will sing.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Pitney disciple who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your drought music ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.