The InBetweeners
hello
so my name is amaya okamoto i’m an
artist
and organizer currently based in new
york city
and boston usually but currently
physically in portland oregon which is
my hometown and the city i grew up in
which i’m sure
many of you all on this tedx call relate
to being quarantined with their families
or social distancing to the best of your
abilities
so at this point months have passed and
we’ve all begun to
learn the different ways in which we
interact with ourselves and with each
other
while quarantined we all impact each
other’s senses of identity
and purpose right that’s like the beauty
of being at school or being in college
is that
we get to interact with different types
of people
and people from different backgrounds
and cultures and identities and
it informs our own sense of self um
and we don’t get to do that when we are
stuck at home
and a little bit on lockdown so it’s now
more than ever
that we’re beginning to be aware of our
differences
because we don’t have access to uh
talking to other people the pandemic
is also happening at a global
time of civil and political unrest
um and especially in america it’s
happening um
during a time of an outcry
call for accountability from the
government against police violence
and a racial reckoning and a racial
reckoning
where many people are being forced to
critically reflect on their own
identities and think
maybe for the first time critical
questions like
where am i most valuable who am i
and what what are my privileges and how
can i make an
impact so i’m back in portland um
which also happens to be the widest
major city in america
and it was here in portland which don’t
get me wrong i love my hometown
where i had many of my first you know
formative experiences as a kid this is
where i had my first kiss
this is where i went to my first school
dance it’s where i drove my first car
but it’s also where you know
i was taught and i was i was
got desensitized to comments
um that were not uncommon for me uh
like you know you’re cute for an asian
girl
um or why you why aren’t you better at
math or um you’re basically white
uh to affirm my sense of belonging as
sometimes the only non-white person
individual in a friend group or a
classroom
or sometimes even in a you know on a
street or a community
so this is you know this is also the
city where
i learned to skip school or skip art
classes even
because i was scared of i was annoyed
by my art teachers commenting and
calling my art too oriental
or too political so it was here in
portland where i learned to be
embarrassed of my asian-ness and
embarrassed of my difference
but it was also here in portland or
leaving portland um where i learned
uh to embrace who i am and breaking out
of that sense of invisibility and
breaking out of that feeling
of silence of silencing that happened
here
um was the most empowering experience of
my life
so we’re going to be talking about race
intersectionality
and art um and i have tried to record
this talk
so many times so it’s a little casual
um but we’re gonna i’m gonna attempt to
kind of facilitate
a short slam poetry-esque
activity together so bear with me none
of y’all can probably see each other
um in the video so please do it with me
if you feel comfortable
a good friend of mine who is a poet
helped me develop an exercise
that kind of helps me reflect on my own
identity
and how i feel about who i am um
in all the different parts of of myself
and so it’s called how do you hold so
we’re going to do this together so
wherever you are i want you to take a
deep breath
and relax and put your feet on the
ground and
you know feel the earth beneath you and
stay rooted
and i’m going to ask you a series of
questions and i want you to respond
with your body right so the first
question
is how do you hold a pencil
how do you hold your phone when you take
a selfie
how do you hold a child
how do you hold a basketball
now how do you hold your race
is it something that you hold
comfortably is it something you’re
embarrassed about
is your race something that holds you
down
is it something that you hold in
different
parts how do you hold your gender
is does it slip through your fingers do
you keep trying to put it back together
how do you hold your sexuality
you know is it something that you keep
in your back pocket
um is it something that you hold behind
you
like you’re embarrassed is it something
that you hold proudly
so these are just a few identities there
are countless identities that make up
who we are
um but already the ways that they
interact with each other and the ways
that they
complement or or um the compliment or
kind of fight each other um it already
gets really complicated
right and so the last question is how do
we hold
all of our identities together right um
do they fit into a neat box that they
can we can throw in our backpacks and we
just hold our identities together and
who we are right
are we confident in who we are um do our
identities
fall out of that box and we’re
constantly trying to put them back in
and figure it out
you know do i do we hold our identities
in our hands and and is it complicated
and it’s slipping through our fingers
you know
and it will change the ways that we the
way that we hold ourselves and the way
that we hold our identities
changes over time as we figure out who
we are
we get more comfortable with our
identities and we get more comfortable
with our box
and taking things out and putting
different identities in
and trying out what feels most
comfortable
so hopefully that kind of made sense
because
if it didn’t that’s okay because
identity is
effing complicated and we don’t often
visually think about um how we hold the
different parts of ourselves together
and figuring out how these different
parts of ourselves
intersect and interact with each other
is a lifelong endless learning process
so just kind of my attempt at starting
to unpack and think more critically
about who we are
and how we want to present who we are
everything we do
create and say comes from our identities
and impacts our relationships how we
live in this world
our personal expression and especially
for me as an artist it impacts
the art that i create and the art that i
um
share with the world how you hold
your identities how you stand in
intersectionalities and how you interact
with other people
is at the core of starting to understand
your role in social progress and in
social justice
so to talk about and reflect on our
identities and begin to understand that
we must understand what our identities
are for me
and for america and our entire world
right now
race is the most important identity
um but for me it wasn’t always like this
as a child i
you know i’m originally from new york
city where i was out you know i grew up
really bold and privileged and colorful
as a kid you know my mom let me do
whatever i wanted cut my own bangs
wear whatever the heck i wanted um and i
grew up
surrounded by people from different
cultures and backgrounds and
i heard ten different languages every
single day walking down the street
and i was surrounded by different types
of art
growing up in manhattan when it was
still a place of
you know artists and teachers and um
young people
young people figuring out who they are
and who they want to be
and so um growing up in new york city as
a young person
i was thriving but i was also very
protected i’m the middle
child of three sisters um and
i was allowed i would grew up in a
family where i was allowed to be kind of
like
bold outrageous and outspoken and then
at school where
you know new york city is one of the
most diverse places in the world
probably
i was celebrated for my different
differences and you know my classmates
and my peers were celebrated for their
own unique cultures
and their different skin colors and i
swear i had a holiday
every other weekend or every other week
because new york city public schools
like took
a vacation on like every holiday
which is very uncommon in other cities
so
even though i know now that race
dictates
all interactions at the time or as a
child
i was not acutely aware of race
and racism the topic about
race and you know being asian when i was
like six seven years old wasn’t an
off-limits conversation
but in new york where um race is a lot
more
of a okay topic to talk about because
there are so many different races um
being asian and being other and being
different was something to be celebrated
and this was not the culture that
i had my entire life so this childhood
of color and
exploration and art came to a sudden and
frankly very
violent stop in 2007 where in an attempt
to
escape um a dangerous and unhealthy
situation
at home my mom who remains
the strongest woman i know and who has
broken more glass ceilings than i can
count
i moved my two sisters and i literally
across the country um like opposite
coasts
to start a new life from new york city
the mecca for diversity
and portland oregon the widest major
city in america
um yeah which portland oregon remains
the widest major city in america
and it was here in portland as a young
child where i experienced the most
blatant racism and exclusion and where
my mother
did her best to navigate sudden poverty
um from you know family stuff and
protect her daughters
it was not until moving to portland had
i ever experienced being
the only non-white person in a classroom
or the feelings that came along with
hiding my differences and hiding the
hardships
and struggles that i was having in my
personal life in my family and at home
um
and i felt as if growing up here that
portland or maybe the world was doing
everything possible to make me feel like
i didn’t belong
and for me as i struggled to understand
and reconcile these differences
i also began to learn the ways that
these differences
gave me insight and sensitivity to
injustice right like being different
and you know when you’re surrounded by
people who look who don’t look like you
and don’t act like you you begin to
notice those differences even more
intensely and you begin to think
differently too
someone recently asked me what fuels you
and through all my positivity and color
and openness i can confidently say that
my fueling factor
is rage when you grow up
constantly battling personal and public
demons
you really get knocked down and kick
down
but these battles
um and life experiences that i’ve had to
counteract and push through
also has gifted me with a constant
supply
of rage and passion um to correct what
is right
and what is just um and correct what is
unjust
and my upbringing of traveling back and
forth between two coasts from the
diversity of new york
um to the white utopia that is portland
prepared me
in an odd way with the insight and
passion
for social justice that i have now and
that fuels my
creative practice throughout my
upbringing i began to develop an acute
i went reading a little bit i began to
develop a lens of race and acute
sensitivity
to injustice and this lens of injustice
and this lens of race
um which i see everything with is what
is
the lens that i approach each one of my
identities with
it’s the lens that i approach each one
of my intersectionalities
and every interaction that i have with
um is to build lens of race
and justice and what is right
as a person but especially as a woman of
color
i relate to the intense feelings of
difference and oppression
that happened especially when you’re
surrounded by people who you do not
relate to
um the feeling of being not enough for
myself but also the feelings of not
being i’ve not been enough for the world
um you know it caused me for years to
struggle
um it caused me it caused me to kind of
struggle
when i felt when you feel so knocked
down and small um
and you want to help the world you
really struggle with understanding
how you can even interact with and
support
upheaval and injustice at kind of a
national scale
um you know how do i as an individual
these are the questions i would ask
myself is like how do i as an individual
um respond to increasing visibility
in this world of police brutality gun
violence
attacks on women’s rights tightening
borders
overall invisibility um these are kind
of just a few of the
i think pro um i would say problems that
our generation
gen z is really fighting and confronting
um uh yeah but
when we as individuals begin to
understand
who we are and our privilege and our
privilege
our privileges and how we hold our
privileges
we also begin to understand where we are
most valuable
and the roles in social justice that we
can fill so as an artist
it is my duty to witness and record the
times that we’re living in
my early childhood experiences set the
foundation for my understanding of who i
am
and how i interact with the world my
peers and my art
the first piece that i ever created for
in support of the movement for black
lives was in 2015 and it was a portrait
of
michael brown jr who was shot and killed
in ferguson missouri
and this piece and a series later became
banners
and posters and it was marched through
the streets of my hometown
the widest major city in america my last
year of high school
in 2018 the parkland high school
shooting
in florida sparked national student
outrage
and i created art in response to gun
violence as a way to
cope with increasing anxieties and fears
of our generation and connect with other
young people
across the country last year
the celebration of the 50 years since
the stonewall riots in new york city
which was
the first gay pride parade um in the
fight for gay liberation
um i created a series of planned
parenthood um to honor the work of
stormy delivery
sylvia rivera and marsha p johnson
and as a young queer person myself the
opportunity to memorialize and honor
these queer icons that make my own
open existence possible was the greatest
honor
as an asian-american person in social
justice
in general i struggle to find my place
and so to quote the historian jeff chang
whose book we gonna be all right
has basically become my personal bible
um asians he categorizes as the
quote-unquote in betweeners
you know we’re in between black and
white in between complicity and freedom
in between narrow self-interest and
equal justice
right asians kind of exist on this line
and we have in many instances the
privilege of the decision to choose
which side of history we’re on
and now is not the time to be complicit
right now in america but
everywhere now is the time to step up
and choose what side of history we’re on
because racial justice impacts us all
and now is not the time to be neutral
not only for asian americans but for
everyone
we all have the opportunities in our
lives to choose
which side of history one who we are and
where we come from
fuels the way that we approach and
interact with others
when we work to understand our
differences we’re able to recognize them
and effectively work together to take
down the unjust systems
that define our world there is a place
for everyone
in justice work whether that’s being an
artist an organizer
a medic a supporter a friend or even
on the front lines of protest there is
no
what is really important to understand
is that there’s no perfect or
right way to interact with activism
because it’s not like there’s a
blueprint
or definition of like how a young person
can change the world
and no matter what we do we have to
remember that this fight right now
is not going to end with our generation
or even the next
or even the next right this is
hundreds of years of um of battling
historical oppression and injustice but
now is not the time now is the time to
step up and think critically about how
we
hold our identities and about how we
share and present them
with others and we have to be open to
shifting the ways
that we carry all of our identities
together
um and and and share them with other
people
each of us i’m talking to all of you
each of us have our own experiences with
oppressions
and sufferings whether that’s with our
older siblings
horrible bosses or bullies on the
playground
but the big question to take away
is how are you going to use your
experiences with those oppressions how
are you going to use your story
um and your experiences to help and
fight for others
and so with that thank you