Report from Tsuru for Solidarity Town Hall 3/20/2021
Beth Burbank, Clerk, Committee for Ministry on Racism
(Tsuru Rising, Tsuru Fold In)
Note: We have been exploring partnering with JASC in various ways in our anti-racism work. This is a community with whom we have a relationship and who consider us a Residential Partner. A number of us joined their soup & rice community nights last year; attended their film night on the camps and camp survivors stories; Lisa Doi mentioned below was our facilitator for our Tsuru Fold In event held after Meeting on September 27. Earlier in the year, her predecessor at JACL, Bill Yoshino, spoke on the Redress Campaign and Reparations for Japanese Americans in one of our second hours.
Lisa Doi (President, JACL Chicago), JJ Ueunten, Michael Ishii, and several other members of their Leadership Council, moderated and reported on the latest developments in the Tsuru for Solidarity Movement. They have held several digital events and programs in the past year. They have been talking to their members and held focus groups to discern way forward after canceling the in-person campaign to DC last summer against the detention camps at the border.
The result of that work has been a restructuring of their movement. They plan to have quarterly Town Halls like the one held on Saturday via Zoom. They are focused upon five broad areas of activism and created a more horizontal structure. These areas are:
· Family and Child Detention
· Adult Detention, Police and Prisons
· Healing and Healing Circles
· Community Building
· Redress and Reparations for African Americans
They have created working groups, affinity groups and committees to focus on specific areas so that people have a number of ways to get involved.
Some examples of their current projects;
· Developing a Spokesperson Project—the Japanese American story is a powerful story. They are developing a messaging strategy for speaking to reporters and congress using primarily detention camp survivors and their descendants
· Advocacy committee working with Sen Merkely (OR) and Rep Jayapal (WA) on child and family detention and the Dignity Act for Immigrants
· Abolition Study Group on Community Safety—how do we define crime? They are working on a 6 session monthly study on surveillance, detention, and services that can replace harmful structures.
· Healing Circles—they are looking for BIPOC folk to be facilitators
· Tzuru Fold In Campaign—they are currently working on folding cranes with messages of support of children and urge people to send them to Jill Biden and Kamala Harris. Several artists are also making Giant paper cranes (7 foot by 7 foot) with messages such as “Black Lives Matter” “Communities not cages” etc. These are set up at the various actions that Tsuru supports/participates.
Their Current Campaigns are:
· Close the Camps; End Family and Child Detention
Using the moral authority of their history to close detention camps. AFSC is one of the partnering groups working with them on this campaign. There is currently a rapid expansion of child detention camps and a re-opening of mass facilities in Texas and Florida—being rebranded with such names as Reception Centers and Rapid Processing Centers. This is happening very quickly and the new administration is not being transparent about what they are doing. Several previous private contractors are bidding to run these centers
· Pass HR40, the bill in Congress on Reparations for African Americans
There is much more information on the Tsuru for Solidarity website.