Exhibit shows groups facing hate together

By Mahlon Meyer
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

When the windows of the Wing Luke Museum were smashed last year by a man spewing anti-Chinese sentiment, the group came together.

They had been meeting since early that year. But this would not be the first crisis they would face.

The more recent one involved the invasion of Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military’s response.

In recent months, Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State (BHS), faced extraordinary pressure to walk away.

She stayed.

“Lisa really listened to my concerns,” said Johnson-Toliver in an interview, referring to the executive director of the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, Lisa Kranseler.

Thus, an agreement was forged.

The group would focus exclusively on local concerns. While this had been the original intent, the reaffirmation became crucial.

“Our agreement was that this exhibit would be about the local community—what happened here, what we did to confront it, and what we can do together,” said Kranseler in an interview.

Confronting Hate Together

The exhibition and project, “Confronting Hate Together,” involving three disparate community groups—Black, Asian, and Jewish—opens at the Wing Luke Museum on May 22.

It showcases how the three communities showed resilience and built community in facing a common struggle of ostracism, discrimination—and hatred.

The project is testimony to the power of communities working together.

“The message I repeatedly learned and am carrying in my heart is that there’s this power and necessity to confront hate in relationships and to hold in for the long journey,” Cassie Chinn, deputy executive director of the Wing Luke Museum, the third community leader to join the project, told the Northwest Asian Weekly.

The group began to meet in early 2023 with the goal of opening an exhibit about how the three communities had confronted discrimination in the past.

The exhibit will display the contents of a national exhibit from New York on the same theme, along with local histories and stories of resilience and building community.

It coincides with both Jewish American Heritage Month and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.  

Confronting racism in the past

The project began when Kranseler saw a national exhibit in New York in 2022. It detailed a campaign by the American Jewish Committee to confront hatred and bigotry from 1937 to 1952.

“Their first goal at the time was to counter antisemitism, but they expanded their programming to include anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of WWII and the incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and the ongoing racism toward the Black community,” said Nance Adler, a teacher at the Jewish Day School, at a talk at the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) in February, introducing the program.

The exhibit depicted the attempts of activists at that time to enlist the most powerful forms of popular culture to confront hate. These included everything from superman comic strips, to Madison Avenue advertising executives, to movie stars like Judy Garland and entertainers like Bob Hope.

Among groups targeted were labor unions, “to teach and educate about hate,” said Kranseler.

Seeing the exhibit of this campaign in New York, Kranseler wanted to bring it to Seattle.

“I decided I would bring it to Seattle, but it would be much more impactful to involve other local communities,” she said.

So she approached both the Wing Luke Museum and the Black Heritage Society.

Both were on board.

Common ground

From the start, however, they had to find common ground.

It was easy.

“We grew up in the Central District together,” said Chinn.

Redlining forced Jews, Asians, and Blacks to live in the same areas—banished from white-owned areas, such as Broadmoor, which had the earliest restrictive language against those three groups in 1927.

All three groups had been subject to hate in different ways.

Chinn, at the February unveiling of the project, talked about other ways the Wing Luke Museum had worked to “confront hate in communities.”

A redlining walk had been established in Seattle so interested students of history could traipse along the borders the city’s fathers set up to divide whites from other races.

The Wing Luke Museum had been part of efforts to establish a memorial across from the dock where Chinese laborers had been forced out of the city at gunpoint in 1886.

Choices confronting hate

Johnson-Toliver, in the interview, detailed the importance of Black-led media and how its reporters had been on the front line in covering police brutality and protests in 2020 and before.

I shared with her how the Urban League had helped me get my finances together before getting married—even though the advisor was initially surprised I wasn’t Black.

Johnson-Toliver also showed appreciation for a concept introduced by Adler at the MOHAI event.

Witnessing a hate crime, one has the choice of being either a bystander or an “upstander”—someone who does something about it.

Yet Johnson-Toliver expanded on this by bringing in a group—“Right to Be Heard”—that clarified ways in which an “upstander” can respond when witnessing an act of hate.

One can choose to “distract, delegate, document, delay, or direct”—taking on different levels of engagement with the perpetrator or providing support for the victim.

Opposing all harm

Johnson-Toliver also listened intently and with solidarity to respect concern in the Black community, across social media and direct comment, that expressed criticism of the conflict in Gaza.

In the end, her response was: it is better to remain part of the conversation, to be part of the solution.

“As always, I remain open and unwavering on behalf of BHS and our position opposing all harm against all people,” she said.

At the same time, the group’s agreement that the exhibit would focus only on local issues brought clarity to her focus.

The group decided to produce four podcasts—one for each community, and one jointly.

Each podcast referred to both the community’s own struggle but also how it intersected with and, in many cases, was supported by the other communities.

Intersections

As an example, the BHS podcast featured the voices of five prominent Black leaders—Acacia Salisbury, a young journalist, who had just returned from Tunisia; Rev. Dr. Carey G. Anderson, the Senior Minister of First African Methodist Episcopal Church; Michelle Y. Merriweather, president and CEO of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle; Eddie Rye Jr., veteran activist, community leader, and radio show owner; and Steve Sneed, actor, writer, and artistic manager, on the front lines of discrimination and racism in the arts and cultural arenas.

For its part, the Jewish podcast included the community’s welcoming of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Each podcast is deeply involved with concerns for other communities—they’re inspirational, they’re emotional,” said Kranseler.

Finding humanity

The three community leaders said the process itself was significant.

“Hate is about dividing people. But that’s why we called it ‘Confronting Hate Together,’” said Chinn. “Trying to listen to understand, you’re not going to agree on everything, but to be in a relationship with people who don’t always hold the same viewpoint and ideas, how do you reframe the dialogue by centering in on the humanity in folks?”

For Chinn, the effort also involved honoring the past.

“For me, the idea was to look toward the past for inspiration. How could I carry forward the examples of community leaders from before? Where did we see this historical legacy of interracial collaborative relationships?” she said, mentioning the Gang of Four.

The Gang of Four included Bernie Whitebear, Larry Gossett, Robert Maestas, and Bob Santos. They founded in 1982 the Minority Executive Directors Coalition and many other initiatives.

(At the MOHAI talk, a student asked if indigenous populations would be involved in the project. Johnson-Toliver said they had met with leaders and were working to expand it. Still, she and others acknowledged this was a start and there were manifold challenges of just working with three groups).

A beginning

At present, the exhibit will have three panels for each community, detailing the story of how each has confronted racism not only as a group but with other marginalized groups.

There will be one joint panel.

Then there will be the 10 panels from New York.

“The exhibit is just the beginning of our solidarity and unification and commitment to each other,” said Kranseler.

To learn more about the Wing Luke Museum, including directions, go to wingluke.org.

Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.