Wing Luke attack: Eyewitness perspective

Re: “Man charged with hate crime after vandalism at Wing Luke Museum” [Sept. 18, Local News]:

I just lately visited the Wing Luke Museum with 30 members of Tsuru for Solidarity — a Japanese-American grassroots mission combating racial and state violence. We had been there to view “Resisters,” an exhibit telling the tales of Japanese People who resisted their unjust incarceration throughout WWII and connecting their resistance to present-day struggles for justice. As a substitute, we survived a racist assault by a white man wielding a sledgehammer.

I’m no stranger to anti-Asian assaults. I and seven,390 members of the Seattle Nikkei neighborhood had been forcibly eliminated to the positioning of the Washington State Honest in Puyallup. Eighty-two years later, it destroys me to see this racist violence persist.

Don’t let the Seattle Police Division — with its racist historical past and the identical division that labored with the FBI to arrest my father on my fourth birthday in 1941 — make itself the hero of this story. Regardless of many calls, it wasn’t the police who disarmed and de-escalated the scenario, supplied care and help, and cleaned up the shards of damaged glass. We took care of one another, simply as have generations of native Asian People. We should heart the voices of the Chinatown Worldwide District and the Asian American neighborhood at giant.

Nikki Nojima Louis, Albuquerque