As a child, Michael Wakita’s grandmother saw racism at a Japanese internment camp in Lillooet, British Columbia, where her extended family of 14 lived in cramped and primitive quarters. But she also found humanity a few miles away, where a doctor provided her housing so that she could attend a local school during the week.
It was one of many lessons that Wakita took from his grandmother to create a poster – “Japanese Canadians: From Racism to Redress” – that he presented Tuesday in the Nott Memorial.
He was one of 70 students in four sections of the Sophomore Research Seminar: “Opium East and West” (Joyce Madancy, History); “Japanese-American Internment in World War II (Andrew Morris, History); “Balancing Acts: Research in Gender, Work and Family" (David Cotter, Sociology); and “African American Protest Movements” (Melinda Lawson, History).
Both of Wakita’s grandparents were in the camp as children, his grandmother from 1942 to 1951, his grandfather from 1942 to 1949. The families were close, and the two married as adults after they left the camp. His grandfather passed away before Wakita was born. His grandmother runs a general store in western British Columbia.
“I spoke with her a lot,” said Wakita, a student in Morris’ seminar section, about preparing for his topic. “Her first memory of the camp was as a 9-year-old on her first train ride,” he recalls. “She thought she was going to a picnic.”
Instead, she found a tiny building of two-by-fours and plywood that offered little protection from the harsh elements. “B.C. has terrible winters,” said Wakita, a native of Kitimat, about 500 miles north of Vancouver. “It sounded miserable.”
Wakita found that Japanese Canadians, like their counterparts in the United States, had a strong loyalty to their adopted homeland despite the racially motivated treatment they endured. About 21,000 Japanese Canadians went to Canada’s internment camps, mostly in British Columbia, during and after World War II, Wakita said. In the Redress of 1988, the Canadian government apologized and offered compensation.
Wakita found the experience of preparing his topic "a lot different than the usual problem solving" he does for his coursework in Mechanical Engineering. "When you're looking into something like this, there's so much information between primary and secondary sources."
Among the other students who presented:
- Anthropology major Sara Mark ’10 of Needham, Mass. gave a poster on “Race and Drugs” as part of Prof. Joyce Madancy’s class on “Opium East and West.” She argued that race was the most significant factor in Congress passing harsher laws for opium and crack cocaine offenses. She compared perceptions of opium users in the late 19th century to those of crack cocaine users a century later. Crackdowns on both groups, she said, were motivated largely by white individuals' fears of minorities. Mark said she found the topic appealing because of her interest in the problem of racial profiling and the suppression of African Americans. Of the course, she said, “Once I got into the research, I found so many interesting things that I wouldn’t have had the chance to learn in a traditional lecture course. Prof. Madancy walked us through the research and how to do citations. We learned the subject and how to do research at the same time.”
- Psychology and Theater major Kiki Lightbourn ’10 of Miami, Fla. , studied black poets during the Harlem Renaissance for Prof. Melinda A. Lawson’s class on the “African American Protest Movement.” She found that black women poets were not discriminated against during this time period for their race, but rather because of the subject matter they chose. In her poster, “Resisting the Harlem Renaissance,” Lightbourn illustrated that black women poets, including Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett and Georgia Douglass Johnson, preferred to write about love and nature instead of writing about black pride and the struggle for equality, as did their male counterparts, such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Dubois.
- Environmental Studies major Brian Cooke ’10 of Mashpee, Mass., researched the “Role and Reactions of Students in the Late Civil Rights Years” for Prof. Lawson’s class. He studied written and oral histories of black and white students who participated in student sit-ins from 1960 to 1964 to protest segregation in Greensboro, N.C., Albany, Ga., and throughout Mississippi. “I thought it was important to study and present this subject from a student perspective,” said Cooke. “It was interesting to search out the primary sources for my research and see what they revealed about the reactions during that period.” Cooke showed that although black and white students both believed the sit-ins accomplished something, many of the black students still held strong resentments about the white students’ participation.
- Psychology major Katie Smidt ’10 of Andover, Mass., researched “School, Sex and Substances” as part of Prof. David Cotter’s class on “Balancing Acts: Research in Gender, Work and Family.” She focused on the prevalence of alcohol and drug use and sex among students whose mothers were not at home after school. She also considered math grades for this population. She found a correlation between students whose mothers were not home after school and an increased use of alcohol and drugs and sexual activity. Surprisingly, however, it was the students whose parents were home after school who reported lower math grades. “I found that the students whose parents weren’t home after school exhibited more independence,” said Smidt. “The students whose parents were home tended to help them with their homework. So, when it came time to take the tests, they weren’t able to perform well without parental assistance.”
The Sophomore Research Seminar introduces students to independent research – library skills, constructing an argument and providing evidence to back it up, said Madancy. Tuesday’s session also served as a checkpoint of sorts, allowing students to test and defend their arguments as they prepare their final papers.
“These posters give students another way to visualize the outline of their argument,” Madancy noted.