Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.
Amid the social upheaval of World War II, women entered the American workforce on an unprecedented level. And, for younger Chinese American women in the San Francisco Bay Area, the war made it possible to smash not just entrenched gender barriers, but racial ones as well.
“Partly because of a scarcity of English-language sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did not share the experience of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” she reports. But she uses newspapers, company records, and oral histories to push back on this view.
Many Chinese American women already worked out of economic necessity. Yet racial discrimination and social isolation typically restricted them to jobs in Chinatown enclaves.
“It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to,” Zhao explains. “The decades-long isolation had also limited the ability of immigrant Chinese working women to communicate with the outside world.”
During the war, women were also encouraged to adopt domestic roles—preparing “nutritional food” for their families and “show[ing] our fighting men that we are… absolutely behind them.”
But World War II still marked a major turning point—especially for younger, unmarried daughters of Chinese immigrants. Many of these women had either a high school or college-level education.
“With relatively few household responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had the freedom and independence to work outside the home,” Zhao writes. “Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese American women were among the first American women to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force.”
In fact, Zhao’s research turned up only four women who were older than forty during their wartime jobs. Still, those wives and mothers capably juggled their duties at home and on the home front. (snip-More; it’s a worthy click!)
The Emmett Till Memory Project teaches new generations about the tragedy that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. Preserving its digital assets is vital.
On a late August day in 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, Till stopped with his cousins at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy chewing gum. There, Till whistled at the clerk, a brazen act that violated the norms of the Jim Crow South and so angered the clerk’s husband and brother-in-law that they killed the boy.
The events and locations that tell the story of Till’s life and death have been memorialized in different ways and forms over the ensuing decades. The Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), an app, is one of them. It uses digitized archival documents, photos of those involved and of sites central to that fateful August day, and more so that users may educate themselves about who Emmett Till was and why his death still resonates. The ETMP’s digital assets are vital to ensuring the ongoing preservation of Till’s memory as well as his legacy.
That’s where Portico comes in. Dedicated to digital preservation, Portico has partnered with the ETMP to ensure the safekeeping in perpetuity of these digital artifacts.
Historian Dave Tell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, as well as the co-founder and director of the Emmett Till Memory Project, spoke with JSTOR Daily’s Sara Ivry about the Project and why its partnership with Portico is so critical.
Sara Ivry: How did you first learn of Portico?
Dave Tell: Kate Wittenberg reached out to me as part of the DEI efforts of her organization, specifically, a pilot project to support the preservation of archival content about under-represented topics that might be at risk. Kate contacted me about the time that we were massively reorganizing the Emmett Till Memory Project. She asked if she could just come along and preserve the site as it existed. I said, “Well, yes, you can, but we’re also trying to make it way better.” She sat in on development meetings over the last few years with us and has been an integral partner, not only in helping us think about preserving the site but helping us make design decisions that would render the site preservable.
Can you describe a little what the site was before you revamped it and what you were trying to do in the renovation?
The short story is we went live in October of 2019, and then in the pandemic, we used our last $10,000 of grant money to pay a DEI consultancy to tell us what we did well and what we did poorly. They did this entire audit, focus groups, they talked to the family, they talked to scholars. They looked at analytics, and they came back to us. Essentially, they told us great content, very bad design, which in retrospect is not surprising. Everyone on the project had been a content expert; we had never had design people on board. We had never had UX people.
The design only works for people who already know the story, they told us, which of course was a devastating blow to us. They also said this reads as if it was written by a middle-aged white guy and I’m like, “Well, I wrote it and I’m a middle-aged white guy—so fair enough.”
So, we hired a woman named Renee Payne out of the Rhode Island School of Design who runs a graphic design firm called included. She specializes in computer design for veterans of the Civil Rights movement; her clients include the families of Andy Young, Harry Belafonte, and family of Malcolm X. She assembled a team of young designers of color, and I said to them, “Nothing is sacred here. Let’s make this as good of a project as it can be,” and they reimagined it from the ground up.
When exactly then did Portico come on board?
Kate came in in the middle of this revamped process, and one of the specific things she encouraged us to do was to avoid third-party dependencies. The example that I understood was if you embed a YouTube video, your content is only as secure as YouTube, which you have no control over.
We really thought long and hard about what technologies we could preserve, and Kate and her colleague Karen Hanson pushed us to think about what exactly we’re preserving. The technologies we are currently depending on do not last forever, right? We changed our mindset. We don’t want to preserve this project so that like it will look the same for everyone into the future, but we want to preserve the assets.
Make images preservable, the text—the component parts.
Eventually we’re going to have a lot of immersive stuff on there. It’s only halfway there now. Portico helped us understand better to preserve the components that make up immersive pieces. In the future, people can use whatever technology is then current, use our same data, and create their own project.
I hadn’t thought about the built-in obsolescence of technology, and that we have to account and plan for that in the design of an app or site as well as in the design of an archive. Had you considered that before Portico got involved?
No, I’m a humanist by training, so when I first started thinking about digital preservation, probably a decade ago now, my gut instinct was we make the website just like a book. It’ll sit there unchanged forever. And Portico has been instrumental in changing the way I think about preservation—that first of all, forever might not be the goal.
Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley on the exterior of the house they lived in from 1950–1955. Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP
Second, what gets preserved is not necessarily the sort of same experience that our users have today. What really matters and what needs to be preserved is what we have. The Emmett Till Memory Project has amazing artifacts. We have hours of audio with the family that they’ve given us permission to use that no one else has. We can tell the story in incredibly intimate ways and that’s super important. When you open this app, you’ll hear the voice of Reverend Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin, narrating the story as all this stuff flashes on the screen behind you—I don’t care if the flashy, immersive technologies are preserved forever. But I care deeply that the audio files—and the voice of Rev. Parker—gets preserved. Someone else can build their own tools with that stuff. My ability to make that distinction is a testament to Kate and Portico.
Why is digital preservation of these assets critical in any case?
It’s almost hard to answer this question without going into cliche other than to say: Ignoring the past is a critical component of white supremacy. Full stop. What we want to do and what the family wants to do is tell the story—not that telling the story is sufficient for the change that they and I want to see, but it’s a critical part of the change that they and I want to see.
The Interpretive Center—what’s the first line of their mission statement, “We believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth,” right?—that’s a sentence that accurately describes the vision of the Till family and it certainly describes my vision.
What was the origin of this app?
If you start from the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 you have to count 49 years and 11 months before the state of Mississippi dropped a single dollar on the Till story. Eighteen citizens of Tallahatchie County thought that was ridiculous; they put up a commemorative sign that got shot, defaced with acid, spray painted.
Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour sign, ca. 2015. Photo by Pablo Correa via ETMP
In 2014, I got invited to go down, I’d been writing about Till for a decade and a half by then, and the question was: How do we tell Till’s story in the context of vandalism?
It’s easy to shoot a sign in the middle of the country. It’s harder to shoot an app.
What are some of the assets on the app that stand out to you?
My favorite by far are the hours of audio, oral history we have of Reverend Parker that was taken in his church in Chicago. We also drove him from site to site; we put a microphone on his lapel and on the sun visor of the car. And we just asked him what these sites meant to him as we went from place to place. All that audio’s not up yet, but we have it. (snip-a bit More)
Mehdi Hasan then joins, first touching on the already-advancing relationship between the Trump and Netanyahu administrations as Israel prepares an annexation of Northern Gaza, before shifting back to the still-developing numbers from Tuesday’s blowout win by Trump and the GOP, looking at Trump’s wins among minority voters (particularly Latin men), and unpacking why his vision was able to appeal to groups he actively seeks to discriminate against. After expanding on the major role misogyny and racism played in grounding Trump’s campaign against Harris, Hasan and Emma parse through the divide between blaming the campaign and blaming the voters, discussing the complete gap in perception and reality around border crossings, crime, and inflation and the failure of messaging behind, before wrapping up the interview with what Democrats have to change about the way they do politics. Emma also touches on a note on fighting fascism from a French Leftist.
We got our vaccines and tRump’s plan for mass for profit prison detention camps for migrants.
There are some distortions because I moved a lot due to pain in my hips and back. But it looks OK but if you want just listen to the audio. I put a lot of effort into the video. Hugs
I talk about tRump’s new Sec Of Defense being a Christian nationalist fundamentalist fanatic, a white supremacist, and a hater of the LGBTQ+. I talk about how he wants to purge the ones he doesn’t like from the military and how tRump hopes to use him to purge the military of anyone not cis straight white Christian and totally loyalist to tRump, the Dear Leader.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joins Meet the Press to discuss his criticism of the Democratic Party and what’s next for Democrats after Kamala Harris’ projected loss.
I am so tired of this stupid lie. The right / republicans keep using it because the children they stole from parents at the border back during tRump’s term have never been found and returned to their parents. That is what this asshole false claim is about. Here are the facts. Hugs
Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have recently claimed that hundreds of thousands of migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied are missing, then criticized the border policies of the Biden administration and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, repeated the claim during Tuesday night’s debate.
“We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” he said as he met Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in what is likely the last debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.
But immigration experts say the claims regarding missing migrant children lack significant context.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: The Biden administration has lost more than 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children.
THE FACTS: This claim misrepresents information in an August report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody.
The report noted that more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not, as of May 2024, received a notice to appear in court. Additionally, more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children got a notice to appear but then failed to show up for immigration court hearings. Those figures came from ICE and covered a period from October 2018 to September 2023. During that period there were a total of 448,820 unaccompanied children released by ICE to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
But experts say it is a stretch to refer to roughly 300,000 children as “lost” or “missing.”
“This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem,” Jonathan Beier, associate director of research and evaluation for the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program, wrote in an email.
Plus, President Joe Biden only entered the White House partway through this period. It includes approximately 15 months when Trump was president and does not specify how many children arrived in the U.S. under each president.
Experts say there are many reasons why the children might not have appeared for hearings or received a notice to appear in the first place. For example, they only get a notice to appear when removal proceedings against them have begun, and if ICE hasn’t started that removal process, they wouldn’t have gotten a notice in the first place.
A lack of communication between government agencies could mean a notice is sent to the wrong address if it has been updated with one agency and not another. A child’s guardian may be unable to take them to court, perhaps because they live on the other side of the state.
The report does not provide any explanations.
“All of these factors can explain some of the deficiencies and a conclusion that the children are missing could be very, very premature,” said Raul Pinto, deputy legal director for transparency at the American Immigration Council.
Carmen Hills, an ICE spokesperson, said the agency agreed with the inspector general’s recommendations to improve information sharing within ICE and externally with HHS, but disagreed with the suggestion that the children are missing.
“We are concerned that the report’s findings are misleading and may be misconstrued because they fail to acknowledge key facts,” she said.
Hills said ICE does not generally issue court notices to unaccompanied children “until after they have been placed with sponsors who have been vetted by HHS” so that they can get settled and seek legal help.
Representatives for HHS and Vance did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
An unaccompanied migrant child is defined by the U.S. government as someone who is under 18, lacks lawful immigration status and has no parent or guardian in the country to take custody of them. When they’re apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security, they’re transferred to the HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
They are then placed “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interests of the child,” according to the resettlement office. That can mean shelters, foster care or residential treatment centers, among other options. If possible, children are released to sponsors, often family members, who can care for them.
Removal proceedings may be initiated by ICE and the Department of Justice. Some children are able to stay in the U.S. legally if they qualify for asylum, special visas for victims of abuse, trafficking and other crimes, or other types of immigration relief. In those cases, removal proceedings may never start.
Please remember what Stephen Miller wants to do. He is a white supremacy Nazi with Jewish heritage. His own family immigrated here. But I am sure they will be safe from the purge as was Melania and her parents. Remember he was behind the separation of children from their parents who cross the border. The parents were deported while the children were given to Christian adoption agencies to sell. Many have never been found. He was behind the lawsuits that wanted any and all DEI programs stopped in the collages and private business claim it displaced white men for every job given to a woman or brown / black person. Remember he wants to end both birthright citizenship and deport people born to undocumented people even though they are US citizen. Remember that during tRump’s first term many non-white people were deported even though they were citizens and had a hard fight getting back into the US. It is back to carry your papers if you are not white and even then it is going to be hard for many. Hugs.
Stephen Miller speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pa., Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
President-elect Donald Trump is naming longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.
Confirming the appointment, Vice President-elect JD Vance posted a message of congratulations on Monday to Miller on X and said, “This is another fantastic pick by the president.” The announcement was first reported by CNN.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, dating back to his first campaign for the White House. He was a senior adviser in Trump’s first term and has been a central figure in many of his policy decisions, particularly on immigration, including Trump’s move to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrence program in 2018.
Miller has also helped craft many of Trump’s hard-line speeches, and was often the public face of those policies during Trump’s first term in office and during his campaigns.
Since leaving the White House, Miller has served as the president of America First Legal, an organization of former Trump advisers fashioned as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging the Biden administration, media companies, universities and others over issues such as freedom of speech and religion and national security.
He was also a frequent presence during Trump’s campaign this year, traveling aboard his plane and often speaking ahead of Trump during the pre-shows at his rallies.
Miller drew large cheers at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden during the race’s final stretch, telling the crowd that, “your salvation is at hand,” after what he cast as “decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation — their jobs stolen looted and from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries. The lives of their loves ones ripped away from then by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”
“We stand here today at a crossroads,” he went on, casting the election as “a choice between betrayal and renewal, between self-destruction and salvation, between the failure of America or the triumph of America.”
Because it is not a Cabinet position, the appointment does not need Senate confirmation. ___ Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay Read on Substack (Language NSFW, as always with Jeff Tiedrich’s writing)
the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media utterly failed us during the 2024 campaign season.
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn came right out and said it: defending democracy is a ‘partisan act,’ and we won’t do it — and, fuck us all, the press kept their word, and didn’t do it. they enthusiastically put their fingers on the scale for Donny Convict.
arguably, the media’s worst transgression was the sanewashing — the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent.
a minutes-long disjointed word-salad about how tariffs on Chinese goods were going to lower the cost of childcare became “a major economic speech.”
Donny’s inability to keep his increasingly-demented mind on the topic at hand — his crazypants pinballing from they’re eating the dawgs to Hannibal Lecter wants to have you for dinner to would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted — was explained away by Donny as his brilliant “weave.”
[Wishcasting is] the act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.
sure enough, the media has now gone into overdrive, churning out piece after piece in which they promise us that if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay.
not twelve hours after the election had been called for Donny, the Times wasted no time in assuring us that the election of a vindictive fascist is an amazing opportunity for vindictive fascism not to happen.
what kind of magical, everybody-gets-a-pony thinking is this? just fucking stop it.
did Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat both experience some kind of recent head trauma that has caused them to forget the years 2017 through 2020? Donny’s first presidency was a dumpster fire of corruption, mismanagement and mass death — but somehow now, given a second chance to fuck shit up worse, Donny’s going to bring us an “American renewal”?
anything’s possible, right? overnight, Donny Convict could magically become a wise and fair statesman — also, technicolor pigs could fly out of my ass.
oh my god, the media never stops imagining that Donny is going to somehow become presidential. during his first term — over and over — every time Donny stopped short of taking out his dick and pissing on the floor, the press would fall all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to proclaim him presidential.
spoiler alert: Donny never became presidential. not from the the first time he threw a ketchup-hurling tantrum in the White House, to the moment he absconded back to his Florida golf motel, taking with him boxes of stolen classified documents.
the premise here is that if we’re respectful to Donny — if we fucking kowtow to him, and stop opposing him — he’ll be nice to us in return. he’ll become — dare I say it? — presidential.
Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.
Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery.
okay, I will grant that Newsweek may be half right. Lisa Murkowski seems to genuinely loathe Donny, and we can probably count on her to vote against the worst of his fuckery — but Susan Collins? the credulous naïf who assured us over and over again that Donny had learned his lesson, and would never transgress again?
now, let’s bask under some rays of hope from people who aren’t just blindly wishcasting, but are actually offering reasoned arguments.
in the middle of a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the Trumpian horrors to come, the Guardian gives us this:
Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”
Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen,” she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”
Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.
Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.
I sure hope to fuck they’re right.
This is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means disengaging with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
Scottie's Playtime 