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Docs Under MAGA Including "Union": Stranded, Abandoned & Hollywood 'Kryptonite'
theankler.com/p/docs-under-maga-stranded-abandoned-hollywood-kryptonite
Alex Gibney on 'no appetite [to] offend', buyers ghosting Oscar shortlist films, Amazon's $40M Melania check and CEOs' fear
NICOLE LAPORTE
JAN 22, 2025
TRUMP TIME The 47th President and his MAGA movement will loom over Sundance documentarians looking for a sale and distribution.
When documentarians and doc lovers alike gathered in Park City, Utah, a year ago for the Sundance Film Festival, Joe Biden was embarking on a too-close-to-call race for the White House, Participant Media was an active buyer — it picked up three titles at the fest — and Netflix acquired the ambitious documentary Power, a blistering indictment of the American police state, even before it premiered at Sundance.
On the eve of Sundance 2025, the whiplash effect is here. For documentary filmmakers whose work explores political subject matter, sure, Sundance might offer a prize and even put a film into the awards conversation. After all, 10 of the 15 documentary shortlist films in contention for an Oscar nomination screened here last year. But neither Sundance nor any festival can now guarantee what every political filmmaker really wants: a buyer and distribution.
The MAGA-sphere that ushered Donald Trump back to the Oval Office could already be seen in the doc market last year — even before he won. Three political films from 2024 on the Oscar doc shortlist have yet to be picked up for distribution by a studio or streamer:
The Bibi Files, an expose of the corruption charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, directed by Alexis Bloom
No Other Land, about efforts by the Israeli government to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank to make way for settlements that had resulted in U.S. sanctions (Trump lifted those sanctions on day one)
Union, a cinema vérité look at the first successful unionization effort of an Amazon fulfillment center
“There is less and less of an appetite to distribute films that might offend some people,” says Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian and a producer of The Bibi Files.
If doc makers had any hopes for a return to the resistance boom times of the first Trump administration — when the likes of RBG and Knock Down the House were hot properties — one need look no further than the inauguration on Jan. 20 to see just how little interest corporate behemoths are likely to have in any documentaries that challenge the new status quo or risk offending President Trump. There was not only Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO Tim Cook but also the CEOs of the two platforms docs rely on to promote their work — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai — all sitting behind the 47th President after donating millions to his inauguration committee.
BILLIONAIRES’ ROW From left: Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk at President Trump’s inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20. (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
“Streamers are associated with big businesses, be they retail or tech devices, and they don’t want to offend potential customers,” says Gibney, who directed Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. “Bibi Files, four to five years ago, would have been snapped up and I think would have done very, very well.”
Today, the kind of political documentary project subject to bidding wars is one that’d be laughed off Main Street Park City. “Forty million for a Melania Trumpdoc? Really?” says Gibney. He’s referring, of course, to Amazon having just spent $40 million on a documentary about the First Lady, directed by the suddenly un-canceled Brett Ratner. Worse, Amazon won the rights by besting Disney, fresh off caving on its lawsuit with Trump over George Stephanopoulos’ alleged defamation, and Paramount, currently trying to get the Trump administration to approve its acquisition by Skydance. That deal, of course, is backed by Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, who appeared at the White House on Jan. 21 where he and the President made goo-goo eyes at each other.
LOVE MATCH President Trump and Larry Ellison, the fourth richest person in the world. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
No wonder then that the purchase has been called “payola” by Democratic political strategist James Carville, and widely interpreted as a sign that Amazon, like many other tech companies, is genuflecting before the incoming President.
“And she’s the executive producer?” Gibney continues, incredulously. “I guess that’ll be the future: The First Lady of whatever administration comes into office and [companies say], ‘Let’s make sure we get on the President’s good side.’”
But as one documentary filmmaker tells me: “Love it or hate it, that film is going to be a big hit.”
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Et Tu, Jeff?
This despairing comes as the doc community is still reeling from Covid largely killing the theatrical market for their films and streamers having snapped their pocketbooks shut after a period of frothy overspending. Participant, which won four best documentary Oscars in 20 years, closed up shop last April; imagine the shock for the community then when Participant founder Jeff Skoll, who financed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, revealed even his own MAGA turn:
As an agent tells me, any documentary “that whiffs of progressive wokeness, for lack of a better term, is kryptonite right now.”
Yet despite all of the political and cultural headwinds, filmmakers are getting creative in trying to get their projects seen. I talked to Gibney, Joe Berlinger(Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost) and Matt Tyrnauer (The Reagans, Where’s My Roy Cohn?), Toronto International Film Festival programmer Thom Powers, Union producer Samantha Curley, agent turned producer Kevin Iwashina (Jiro Dreams of Sushi), agents and nearly a dozen others to find out what exactly is going on — and it’s not pretty (but also not entirely hopeless).
My interviews paint a picture of Big Tech’s influence to make political docs “invisible” not just in terms of buying but also promotion, but also how to bypass traditional distribution to make sure important films are still seen — and why the shifts may not entirely be about politics at Netflix, Amazon and Apple. My interview subjects also offer solutions that start to answer the question of, as Iwashina puts it, “How do we assemble ourselves and support one another in creating a more positive environment for everyone?”
No one involved with Union, directed by Stephen Maing and Brett Story, thought that Amazon would be a buyer for a film featuring its own employees “working in the most insidious and harshest working environments,” as Maing said at The Ankler x Pure Nonfiction Documentary Spotlight earlier this month. “Amazon is considered more dangerous than logging and law enforcement.”
But what the filmmakers hadn’t anticipated was Amazon’s influence within the industry. “There were other (buyers) who wouldn’t touch it because it was about Amazon,” says Samantha Curley, one of Union’s producers and cofounder of Level Ground Productions, which focuses on socio-political stories. “We heard from sales agents and some other friends inside companies who said they just do too much business with Amazon to jeopardize” that relationship.
But, Curley believes, there’s more to it. A lot.
Docs Under MAGA: Stranded, Abandoned & Hollywood 'Kryptonite'
theankler.com
Alex Gibney on ‘no appetite [to] offend’, buyers ghosting Oscar shortlist films, Amazon’s $40M Melania check and CEOs’ fear
For Japanese Americans displaced by war and now wildfire, roots remain elusive
Families whose homes burned in the LA fires recall second world war evacuations and fight to retain connection
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/california-wildfires-japanese-americans
For Japanese Americans displaced by war and now wildfire roots remain elusiveFamilies whose homes burned in the LA fires recall second world war evacuations and fight to retain connectionLynda Lin Grigsby in Altadena CaliforniaMon 10 Feb 2025 16.00
The beige ranch house on Mariposa Street had a tatami room with paper windows – a love letter painstakingly built by Johnny Kamon for his bride as a tribute to their Japanese heritage.Since purchasing the home in 1965 in Altadena – a suburb nestled against the San Gabriel mountains about 15 miles north of Los Angeles – multiple generations of the Kamon family have poured their woodworking skills into making the home their sanctuary.When construction of the tatami room was completed the couple carved their names in the concrete for their son Johnny to remember forever: John & Mieko 10/1/1986.In January the wildfires that swept out of Eaton Canyon took the Kamons’ home. The signatures are still there amid the debris and layers of ash – most of the remains of the place that once housed three generations of their family.engravings of names in concrete View image in fullscreenThe signatures of Johnny Kamon’s parents. Photograph: Courtesy of Johnny Kamon“I used to be the one that said our house will never burn down” said Johnny 37. “Which is why I lost everything.”symbol00:0103:12Read MoreThe Kamons are one of the many Japanese American families in Altadena where the wildfires have become the latest blow to a community already battling a slow-drip decline in connection. Many of these families rebuilt their lives after the trauma of second world war incarceration and created a tight-knit safety net of cultural and religious institutions that for years affirmed their identities and fostered a sense of belonging.Over time that social fabric frayed. Friends moved away. Gatherings dwindled. Children lost interest. In the aftermath of the fires an existential unease lingers. Could Altadena’s dwindling Japanese American community survive yet another upheaval? This anxiety lives as an unwelcome guest in Johnny’s already crowded mind.He worries about what could be lost.“And the potential for this history to one day truly just be history” Johnny said quietly.‘I give it all to Altadena’: a refuge for the marginalizedAltadena as described in Naomi Hirahara’s 2004 book The Summer of the Big Bachi has a “slight wildness to it” that sharply contrasts with its manicured neighboring cities. Here many residential streets lack sidewalks but backyard chickens are common.Altadena also has a long history of being a refuge for marginalized people.In 1944 amid heightened anti-Japanese sentiment inflamed by the second world war an Altadena family welcomed Esther Takei Nishio a second-generation Japanese American into their home so she could leave an Arizona prison camp and attend college.After Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order calling for the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast. The US government built 10 main prison camps to incarcerate more than 125000 Japanese Americans in remote locations. Takei Nishio’s presence was a test case to prepare the community for the return of Japanese American friends and neighbors.Years later when discriminatory housing practices were de rigueur Altadena and a swath of north-west Pasadena – its neighboring city – were among the few areas where people of color could live buy property and cultivate a rich history.two young girls sitting next to each other View image in fullscreenNaomi Hirahara (right) as a young girl with a friend in Altadena. Photograph: Courtesy of Naomi HiraharaAltadena was the kind of place where Japanese Americans played basketball in local leagues and ran for the high school track-and-field teams under the watchful eyes of Coach Mack Robinson an Olympic silver medalist and brother of the legendary Major League Baseball player Jackie Robinson.Hirahara 62 immortalized Altadena in her writing because this was where her parents set their roots in the 1960s after surviving the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Altadena was where a fourth-grade teacher planted a seed for her future career by encouraging her to become a writer.“In terms of my literary development” said Hirahara. “I give it all to Altadena.”In 1956 about 1600 Japanese American adults and businesses were recorded in Pasadena and 125 in Altadena according to a Japanese American business directory. To resettle in the area after the second world war the burgeoning Japanese American community established cultural and religious centers like the Pasadena Buddhist Temple the Pasadena Japanese Cultural Institute and the First Presbyterian Church of Altadena to create spaces for joy and community for the mushrooming Japanese American population.“We went there because there was nowhere else to go” said Bryan Takeda about the cultural and religious institutions that provided safety for Japanese Americans still reckoning with how they were treated during the war.For Takeda 69 the landscape of his childhood memories is outlined by Altadena and Pasadena’s undulating mountain backdrop. In this community where he progressed from taking kendo classes to serving on the board of directors of cultural institutions he has noticed a troubling trend – dwindling interest.Younger generations of Japanese Americans are not joining these monoethnic cultural institutions said Takeda the founder and CEO of Hikari Japanese Academy: “They don’t need to in the ways we did.”Then the fire tore through.Echoes of displacementFor some the fear and sudden dislocation caused by last month’s wildfires felt eerily familiar.“The thought has crossed my mind as we’re using the word ‘evacuation’” said Jane Kawahara 85. “You know I’ve been evacuated before.”Kawahara was not yet three years old when she and her family were ordered to take only what they could carry to live behind barbed wire at Poston – one of the 10 main concentration camps the US government built during the second world war.Last month as smoke filled her Altadena house Kawahara evacuated with less than she could carry. She only took the essentials: a toothbrush medication clothes and her sweetheart. She patted a framed black-and-white photo of her husband Harry Kawahara who died last year at 92 years old.“I love Altadena for its diversity” said Kawahara a retired school nurse. The Mediterranean-style house she has lived in for 50 years still stands but Kawahara cannot move back in until the smoke and ash damage is remediated. On visits back she’s picked up precious relics initially forgotten in the evacuation frenzy including her mom’s hand-carved wooden bird pin – a memento from Poston. a pin in hands and a woman holding a black and white photo of a manView image in fullscreenJane Kawahara holds her Poston bird pin and a photo of her husband Harry. Photograph: Lynda Lin GrigsbyIn quiet moments she has thought about moving to a different home – maybe even a different city – but she quickly batted the thought away. Altadena is where Kawahara raised her family and poured decades of work into the Greater Pasadena Japanese American Citizens League chapter a civil rights organization.Her generation’s leaders marched in countless protests and fought for many social issues including ethnic studies. It’s time to take a backseat she said as supporters for the next generations.Kawahara turned the bird pin over slowly in her hands as she wrestled with an uncomfortable question: what happens if not enough people step into vacated leadership roles?The fires forced everyone to reconsider the value of everyday objects places and even institutions – what deserves to be saved and what happens when all is lost?“I think the Japanese American community – all ethnic communities – are precious” Kawahara said. “Their culture is precious.”A fragile futureAfter the fires the physical structures of Altadena and Pasadena’s Japanese American institutions remained intact. But their future stands at a crossroads.At the Pasadena Buddhist Temple the fires consumed the homes of seven members said the temple co-president Jeannie Toshima. “Many more have been impacted.”On a January morning after the ominous black smoke cleared the temple buzzed with life. Volunteers distributed and delivered essential supplies and bento lunches to those affected by the fires.Buddha statue View image in fullscreenA Buddha statue in the back yard of Johnny Kamon’s home. Photograph: Courtesy of Johnny KamonRon Toshima 73 pointed to a black-and-white photo of the temple’s 1958 dedication where a crowd stretched the width of two buildings. Subsequent photos show a steady decline of faces.Now a Sunday service attracting 20 people is considered big said Ron adding: “Even without the fire the future of the temple would have been in jeopardy.”For now temple members can only hope that new and existing members will eventually fall into formation with them.“With these institutions people kind of took them for granted like they would always be there” Hirahara said. “Maybe there will be more thought that these things aren’t going to just magically continue.”Historically adversity has bonded the Japanese American community. But the fires have scattered residents and temple members to other areas for temporary refuge – including Johnny Kamon. His return date he said is still unknown.He’s visited the ruins of his home. Amid the devastation one object stands unscathed – his back yard marble Buddha statue. It reminds Johnny of a Japanese phrase shogyō mujō the importance of embracing impermanence.All things come to an end.“Instead of clinging to the past” Johnny said “I focus on what lies ahead which makes me hopeful and excited for the future.”
For Japanese Americans displaced by war and now wildfire, roots remain elusive
www.theguardian.com
Families whose homes burned in the LA fires recall second world war evacuations and fight to retain connection
Restored Anti-Fascism Mural by Philip Guston Unveiled in Mexico
In 1934, two young artists drove from Los Angeles in a beat-up car to Mexico, to create a powerful artwork about repression. It was concealed — and then forgotten.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/arts/design/philip-guston-mural-mexico.html
Detail of the Philip Guston-Reuben Kadish mural, “The Struggle Against Terrorism,” 1935, after restoration in Morelia, Mexico, 2025.Credit…via The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth
By Victoria Burnett
Published Feb. 1, 2025
Updated Feb. 4, 2025, 9:29 a.m. ET
When an Argentine architect, Luis Laplace, saw a neglected mural by the North American artists Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish at the Regional Museum of Michoacán, in the Mexican city of Morelia, seven years ago, he resolved immediately to try to save it.
“What struck me was the scale of it, the beauty, the history,” he said of the mural, titled “The Struggle Against Terrorism.” It is a kaleidoscope of persecution and resistance made in 1934-1935, when the artists were barely in their 20s.
Painted on a wall in a colonial palace in the heart of Morelia, the pink-stoned capital of Michoacán State, the surreal, Renaissance-influenced composition of broken bodies, ominous hooded figures and tools of cruelty was crumbling and faded. Whole sections of the piece were missing. The patio was being used to store chairs.
“I was quite astonished,” said Laplace, who is based in Paris but at the time was working on a project in Morelia.
On Friday, the 1,000-square-foot mural was unveiled anew in Mexico following a six-month restoration that has re-created missing sections and returned its original vibrancy. It is being inaugurated at a moment of heightened tensions between Mexico and the United States over the steep tariffs President Trump is moving to impose.
As well as a team of conservators and contractors, the effort involved the Guston Foundation, which paid around $150,000 for the project; several Mexican cultural institutions; a local grandee; and a lot of diplomacy, Laplace said. He joked that the people of Morelia had never “seen so many people interested in a single mural.”
Guston (who at the time still went by his birthname, Goldstein) and Kadish were commissioned by the museum to paint the fresco at the recommendation of the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom they had met in Los Angeles in the early 1930s while Siqueiros was working there. They are among a handful of American muralists who produced work in Mexico in the 1930s; a mural by Grace Greenwood, a Brooklyn artist, covers a wall in a different area of the Morelia museum.
The Americans drove some 1,700 miles to Morelia from Los Angeles in a beat-up car in the fall of 1934 and spent six months there, working feverishly with help from Jules Langsner, a friend and future art critic. After the piece was unveiled in early 1935, Time magazine described black-clad civil servants and farmers in straw hats gazing at the mural in “open-mouthed wonder.”
A black and white photo of young Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish and their friend Jules Langsner in front of their mural in Mexico.Credit…via The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth
The wonder didn’t last, however. By the mid-1940s, the mural, with its inverted crucifixes and naked bodies, was deemed so offensive to clerics that the museum agreed to conceal it behind a huge canvas screen, said Jaime Reyes Monroy, the musuem’s director. His predecessor, Eugenio Mercado López, said he had been told angry locals had damaged the mural in some way and that the canvas was intended, in part at least, to protect it.
In exchange for obscuring the mural, the church gave the museum an 18th-century oil painting known as “The Transfer of the Dominican Nuns to a New Convent,” which still hangs there.
The mural languished, hidden, until 1973, when it was uncovered during repairs to the patio, Reyes said. Over the next 50 years, there were sporadic efforts to patch up the work, but they were overwhelmed by the strong sun and relentless humidity.
“It had been covered for so long,” said Reyes, “people had honestly forgotten about it.”
It wasn’t only Morelians who overlooked the mural. Ellen G. Landau, an art historian and author of a book about the impact of Mexico on American modernism, said the art world and even Guston and Kadish diminished the importance of the Morelia fresco, which she believes reverberated through their careers.
Mexico gave the artists latitude to explore their preoccupations, Landau said. This was a contrast to the prescriptions of the Works Progress Administration in the United States, for which both artists also produced murals.
“When the W.P.A. wanted a mural for a post office, they wanted a certain topic,” said Sally Radic, executive director of the Guston Foundation. In Mexico, she said, “they just did what they wanted and that’s why it was so universal.”
With that freedom, Guston and Kadish created a work where the horrors of the Inquisition intersected with those of the Ku Klux Klan and the Gestapo, said Landau. The mural includes a swastika and three hooded figures perched on ladders and a scaffold above scenes of torture — images that would recur in Guston’s later work. To the left is a cartoonlike depiction of people being burned alive that Landau identified as a rendition of a 15th-century woodcut showing the slaughter of Jews at Trent.
Image
A mural in blues, yellows, reds, including Ku Klux Klan figures and inverted crucifixes.
Guston and Kadish created a work where the horrors of the Inquisition intersected with those of the Ku Klux Klan and the Gestapo. The mural includes three hooded figures perched on ladders and a scaffold above scenes of torture — images that would recur in Guston’s later work.Credit…via The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth
The references to repression in the mural were personal as well as historical and global, Landau and Radic said. Guston and Kadish had experienced right-wing thuggery in 1933, when members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s so-called Red Squad destroyed portable murals that the artists had helped produce for the Communist-affiliated John Reed Clubs. Kadish’s family’s apartment was ransacked by the police a few years earlier, according to an essay by Landau, and he witnessed a cross burning on the lawn of a Jewish home.
For Mercado, the former museum director, the mural holds an urgent message for Michoacán, a lush, beautiful state that is plagued by brutal drug-related violence.
“It’s agonizing,” he said. “It’s a call to the local community that we can’t be indifferent to suffering.”
Radic said the mural’s resonance made saving it a “pet project.” She and Laplace spent years trying to navigate Mexican bureaucracy before Alejandro Ramírez, a Morelian resident and chief executive of the movie theater chain Cinépolis, helped them find “the right door to knock on,” Laplace said.
Before restoration began, engineers used ground penetrating radar technology to identify the source of humidity that had caused the mural to fade and crumble. They moved downspouts that were causing damp in the wall and used infrared lights and fans to dry it out.
Image
A detail of a worn, faded and Surrealistic fresco depicting a large torso and a female figure naked and hanging tied to a wall.
Detail of “The Struggle Against Terrorism” before restoration, in 2022. The surreal, Renaissance-influenced composition of broken bodies, ominous hooded figures and tools of cruelty was crumbling and faded, and whole sections were missing.Credit…via The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth
“Humidity is like an illness for frescos,” said David Oviedo Jiménez, a mural conservator at the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts and Literature who was part of a four-person team that just finished restoring the work. When the team started work, the fresco “was in a terrible state,” he added.
Starting in September, Oviedo and his team stabilized the surface with sealant and repaired blank areas with a mixture of slaked lime and marble sand. They used photographs and traced the original outlines of the painting to re-create missing sections. They painted these with vertical brush strokes, a technique called rigatino that is used in fresco restoration so that people looking at the work can distinguish the new paintwork from the original.
Radic, who saw the restored mural for the first time this week, said the transformation was “beautiful.” Speaking from Morelia by phone on Thursday, she said that the greater vibrancy intensified the sense that the colossal figures in the work are descending upon you, adding, “They did an amazing job.”
Laplace, the architect, who has yet to see the restored fresco, predicts that the restoration will rekindle interest in the work among fans of Guston and Kadish but also among Morelians.
Restored Anti-Fascism Mural by Philip Guston Unveiled in Mexico
www.nytimes.com
In 1934, two young artists drove from Los Angeles in a beat-up car to Mexico, to create a powerful artwork about repression. It was concealed — and then forgotten.
Farm workers in Mexico, NAFTA USMCA, Slave Labor and the Legacy of Al Rojas
youtu.be/SBZWIePtfrk
Al Rojas, one of the founders of the United Farmworkers Of America UFWA played an important part in the formation of that union and his work not only took place in California but throughout the country and Mexico. This LaborFest.net event on July 2, 2025 to commemorate his life looks at his history of organizing in his early period, the struggle against NAFTA, USMCA and slave labor conditions. It also looks at his work with farmworkers in Baja, Mexico who work for contractors of Driscoll's.
LaborFest.net
Production Of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
Why a Canadian director’s documentary on Amazon’s labour unrest is striking a chord
www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/article-why-a-canadian-directors-documentary-on-amazons-labour-…
JASON MCBRIDE
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Natalie Monarrez appears in the documentary, Union, which follows the Amazon workers who managed to form the Amazon Labor Union.
In the week leading up to Christmas, 7,000 Amazon employees went on strike in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco, amounting to the largest labour action in the company’s history. Among those striking workers were employees at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment centre on Staten Island, which two years ago became the company’s first warehouse to successfully unionize.
Adding to the momentum of this movement, a documentary about JFK8’s unionization, titled Union, was shortlisted for an Academy Award the day before the strike. The film, co-directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, follows the small group of JFK8 workers that, with grit, ingenuity and almost superhuman self-belief, manage to eventually form the Amazon Labor Union.
The filmmakers eschew narration and talking heads, and instead patiently observe the slow, messy labour of organizing, as attentive to its frustrations as to its rewards. While the film inevitably focuses on the nascent union’s first president, the charismatic and controversial Chris Smalls, it provides plenty of room for his fellow organizers and their particular perspectives. It’s a political film of rare intimacy, and quietly inspirational.
“It’s really valuable to see people win,” Story says of her protagonists. “Like, we don’t see people win, ever.”
Story, a Torontonian, had made previous docs about climate change and the American prison industry, as well as a short film, CamperForce, about itinerant Amazon workers. After Union’s producers, Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone, decided they wanted to make a film about Smalls, they enlisted Story.
She moved to New York in the spring of 2021 and started working on the film. After five months, given the demands of the filmmaking and her personal life – the pandemic was still raging, she had a two-year-old daughter, and a full-time job teaching in the cinema studies department at the University of Toronto – she joined forces with Maing, a Brooklyn-based documentarian.
Story then travelled back-and-forth from Toronto and New York, while Maing and their small crew remained on the ground in Staten Island. Story reviewed rushes at home – in the end, they had about 700 hours of footage – and she and Maing would discuss them over the phone.
“It’s actually really useful to have that on a film,” Story says, “because you can get so mired in inner drama and minor details that you can’t quite see what’s translating to an outside viewer.”
Union has, fittingly, racked up a number of impressive wins itself. It premiered at Sundance last January, where it received the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change. It’s since played more than a hundred international festivals, and counting. It’s been a critical darling, as well, with both the New York Times and New York magazine calling it one of the year’s best films.
One fact, however, has both overshadowed and underscored Union’s success: no major distributor will touch the film. Despite the acclaim, hiring what Story calls one of the industry’s best sales agents and receiving praise from a number of buyers, Union remains unsold a year after its premiere.
Story’s still a bit mystified by the situation, but argues that, in an era of increased media consolidation, where a handful of tech companies largely control what we see, hear and read, the film’s subject has scared off potential distributors.
“Amazon’s a big studio and a big streaming platform, and many smaller players have to work with them,” she says.
“So when we talk to theatrical distributors that have more than one client, some of them have said, ‘I have to work with Amazon and this would compromise my relationship with them.’ Is Amazon calling up Netflix and saying, ‘Don’t buy this movie?’ I don’t think that’s happening. But I also think their interests are the same.”
Making things difficult, as well, is distributors’ seeming aversion to risk. The big streamers have for years avoided politically or artistically innovative films, Story argues, preferring instead tried-and-true subjects such as celebrity and true-crime docs.
“I think our film is risky for political reasons because it shows in real time a group of people challenging a big tech corporation.”
Four months after Union premiered, the filmmakers decided to distribute it themselves. On the one hand, that route has given them more control of where and how the film is shown. They’ve held free screenings for other unions and Amazon workers, thanks to a special online fund they set up on their website.
But it’s also an additional full-time job that the directors didn’t anticipate having to take on. Story is still teaching, and working on a new documentary – an archival film about the late writer and critic, John Berger – but has spent much of the last year travelling with Union and doing yet more rounds of press.
“With self-distribution, it’s partly about becoming your own hype machine,” she says.
This distribution hiccup, in a way, parallels the scrappy journey of the Amazon Labour Union itself. Nobody thought the organizers would succeed, and even after they did, their fight was just beginning: Amazon still refuses to recognize the union, nor will they negotiate a contract with it. Hence, the strike last month. While that job action ended on Dec. 24, the Teamsters, with whom the ALU affiliated last June, have promised further labour disruptions this year.
When Union premiered, union membership in the United States was about 10 per cent, half of it what it was 30 years earlier. But there has been, in the past couple of years, a resurgence of union activity, led by young, diverse workers at places such as Starbucks and Trader Joe’s (and in Canada, at Indigo and Via Rail).
While Story hesitates to describe her film as an organizational tool, she recognizes its power as such, and is pleased to play a role in this resurgence: “It’s really useful to see real people who are not particularly heroic, just regular people like you and me, put the work in and scare the hell out of a massive company that we know has way too much power.”
Union screens Jan. 11 and 12 at the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto, and can be streamed at unionthefilm.com until Jan. 17.
Why a Canadian director’s documentary on Amazon’s labour unrest is striking a chord
www.theglobeandmail.com
Union patiently chronicles the slow, messy labour of organizing employees at an Amazon fulfillment centre and has racked up a number of wins itself, despite being shut out by major distributors
Slavery and Capitalism
sleigh1917.medium.com/slavery-and-capitalism-f59ec63916d1
Marxists have debated the connection of slavery to capitalism since Marx. Some see it as a pre-capitalist holdover. Others see slavery as an integral part of capitalism. Marx’s writings could be said to support either view. He did say that the slave owners were capitalists. Most of Capital and other writings, however, says or implies that capitalism is based on free wage labor.
Slavery arose in the North American colonies primarily but not only in the South. It was integrated into the world market which was becoming more capitalist. Merchant capitalism was giving way to productive capitalism. By the time of the Civil War the Southern economy was integrated into the capitalist world market. Slave owners were capitalist investors and were financed by and financed capitalist banks in the North. As Marx said wage labor needed slave labor as a pedestal.” Without slavery, no cotton, without cotton no modern industry” etc.
This leads some Marxists to end the query there. Slavery was capitalist period. The implication is that chattel slavery is just as likely to be part of capitalism as wage labor is. This in turn can deemphasize the centrality of the waged working class in capitalism and in its potential overthrow.
Contradictions of Slavery and Capitalism
“Wage labor is the most adequate relation of production for capitalism”
There are contradictions between chattel slavery and capitalism. In a capitalist economy, accumulation is as Marx said, “the law and the prophets.” Capital accumulation was largely the replacement of human labor by machines. Chattel slavery contradicts this in two ways: profit that could be invested in fixed capital such as machinery must instead be invested in buying the laborer, not just buying labor power. Less is available for actual accumulation. Secondly, since slaves cannot be readily laid off, the incentive to replace labor with machinery is lower than in wage labor capitalism.
Another contradiction is that physical coercion requires extra expenditure of resources. Slave owners must hire more overseers. This cuts into their profit. Free wage labor relies on economic compulsion and therefore does not require this extra expense.
Wage labor is the most adequate relation of production for capitalism. It affords the capitalists the most flexibility. They can hire and fire at will. They can expand or contract production as needed for profit maximization. There is no point in laying off a slave. Of course, slave owners can sell slaves if they don’t need them. However, their ability to sell them depends on the slave market. Very likely, if production is down and they need to sell, other slave owners do as well.
Chattel slavery requires a bigger up front investment for a similar return. Slaves as Marx put it are not part of variable capital. They are instead part of constant capital. Owners have to pay a larger sum of investment to buy the slave for life. Wage labor requires only investment in variable capital for the next week, two weeks etc. of the laborer’s life. The extra cost of buying a slave all at once cuts into profit rates by raising the investment required.
Wage labor lets capitalists off the hook for social reproduction. Under chattel slavery, owners must invest in the upkeep of their property. With wage labor, capitalists do not have to care if their workers live or die. If one dies, the capitalist simply hires a replacement. Wage labor makes planning easier. Instead of the capitalist having to calculate costs of living expenses for their workers, they simply allocate a certain amount of money for wages based on balance of class forces. Capitalists prefer to commodify the wage relation.
Marx defined capitalism as universal commodity production. Making labor power a commodity flows from the drive for profit and accumulation under capitalism.
This is similar to their approach to social welfare in modern capitalism. When capitalists and their state determine that they must give social welfare to prevent riots and potential revolution, they prefer to give money rather than actual concrete services. They give money welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers etc. Again, this makes for easier planning. They can calculate exactly what to grant. They do not have to figure out what it would actually take to provide the human need for housing, food etc. They say “Here is your benefit. You figure out how to make it meet your needs. If it isn’t adequate, that is your problem.” The bias toward commodification is inherent in capitalism, both so as to prioritize capital over human needs and for ease of planning and profit maximization. This is why Universal Basic Income is supported by some capitalists. It is based on continued commodification of services.
All of this means that there is a bias for wage labor within capitalism. Capitalism can operate with chattel slavery but chattel slavery is an outlier.
Despite chattel slavery’s contradictions to capitalism, there are specific conditions in which it will be the preferred method of exploitation. Though capitalists are as Marx said “ the personification of capital”, they first of all seek profit, not an idealized version of what a capitalist should be.
One example of chattel slavery as an outlier in the capitalist system was the slave South in the U.S.
Why Did Chattel Slavery Arise?
“coerced labor is necessary when economic compulsion alone will not force workers to work for employers”
Why did chattel slavery arise in the British colonies as merchant capitalism was giving way to productive capitalism?
Plantation owners needed labor. The use of indentured servants had limitations as did use of Native Labor. Besides these sources of labor, there was no other labor market where plantation owners could hire workers. Labor had to be brought in from the outside. Obtaining labor from Africa required buying slaves. This investment in slaves as constant capital set up the dynamics of chattel slavery noted above. Physically coerced labor was necessary because there was no adequate labor market. Once the dynamic of chattel slavery started, the owners of slaves had a strong incentive to maintain it. To abolish it or restrict its advance would deprive the slave owners of their invested capital in human beings.
The contradictions between capitalism and chattel slavery are part of the explanation for the prevalence of wage labor under capitalism. Some Marxists explain this prevalence based only on class struggle. They believe the capitalists would like to enslave us as chattel slaves but are prevented by workers fighting back. That analysis is wrong about chattel slavery but is truer about coerced wage labor (see below)
In general, coerced labor is necessary when economic compulsion alone will not force workers to work for employers. In the British North American colonies, land was available at the expense of Natives. People could go off and become farmers on their own account. Creating a labor force required physical coercion. This is part of the basis of slavery even in ancient times. When civilizations were forming, much of humanity existed in pre-state societies. It was easier to live in areas outside of state control. To keep workers working for others, often physical coercion was necessary. Warfare was a major way of obtaining slaves.
Coerced Wage Labor
“Capitalists often tried to maintain legal controls over labor”
Chattel slavery is one form of physically coerced labor. Marx defined free wage labor as workers being free from owning the means of production and also free from being owned. However, free from being owned is not the same as being free to leave a job. Through the history of capitalism, there have been various forms of legal coercion of labor backed up by the power of the state: Indentured servitude; impressment of sailors; Stalinist and Apartheid labor books; military draft etc. The distinction between chattel slavery and coerced wage labor is important. The greatest flexibility for the capitalist is the ability to lay a worker off at will while still being able to compel them to work when needed. However, this physical compulsion as noted above requires extra expense. When economic compulsion works well enough, the expense of physical coercion is avoided.
Capitalists often tried to maintain legal controls over labor. What undermined these legal controls was not just class struggle by workers but the expense of these controls as well. Those Marxists who stress class struggle as the reason that capitalism is not dominated by physically coerced labor are partially correct. However, they are wrong to attribute the decline of chattel slavery to resistance by slaves alone. In the particular case of the U.S. South, resistance by slaves was vital. The South lost the Civil War as DuBois argued due to the general strike of slaves. However, this general strike was in the context of wage labor capitalists in the North waging war because they had conflicting economic interests with the slave owning capitalists of the South. Slave revolts from the 1600s through the 1850’s were important in undermining slavery but had not been enough to end it until the interests of Northern capitalists kicked in.
Although Southern slavery was capitalist, the conflict between South and North was based on the conflict between two different labor regimes. The structure of the different labor regimes created different economic interests in each ruling class. The contradictions between capitalism and chattel slavery are vital to understanding this conflict.
The bias of capitalism toward wage labor is shown by the rise of capitalism in Britain. The rising capitalist class created a wage market by depriving the potential working class of the means of subsistence. Peasants were driven off the land. When they became vagabonds, thieves and beggars, the state stepped in with coercive measures to turn them into a proletariat. The state created workhouses, branding of vagrants, the death penalty etc. This process forced people to work for others to survive. It often required extreme brutality. English labor law was called “Master and Servant”.
The use of force to create the capitalist wage labor relation is often ignored, especially by libertarians and other capitalist ideologists. However, the use of force was not aimed at the creation of chattel slavery! It was aimed at creating a “free” wage labor force. Once the coercion had reinforced economic conditions, less coercion was necessary. Workers were convinced that they could only survive by selling their labor power. Coercion was still necessary as a backup, but economic compulsion was the main engine of the continuation of wage labor.
This process was similarly carried out in other developing capitalist economies. Physical coercion was common especially at the beginning. This legal and physical coercion was overcome to the extent that it was by class struggle and by the entrenchment of economic compulsion.
Conclusion
“Workers should be optimistic that we can overcome physically coerced labor and ultimately capitalism altogether”
Understanding the relationship of capitalism to slavery and other forms of physically coerced labor is important in the struggle against capitalism. Rebellion by remaining chattel slaves can be an important part of the fight against capitalism. However, the major agent for transformation will be the waged working class both free and physically coerced. Class struggle has allowed workers to largely free themselves from physical coercion that capitalism liked to employ. Class struggle and working-class organization can go further and abolish exploitation altogether.
Marxists who deny that coerced labor including chattel slavery can be part of capitalism discredit Marxist analysis. It is clear that capitalism has often used coercive labor relations and in many cases today still does. Marxists must be able to account for that.
To define capitalism as exclusively based on “ free” wage labor excludes much of the history of capitalism and even much of the current world economy. Apologists for Stalinism have used the lack of a private capitalist labor market as a reason that Stalinism was not capitalist. They have used this as a justification of Stalinism as an advance over private capitalism, rather than the State Capitalism that it was.
On the other hand, analysts who deny capitalism’s preference for wage labor sometimes ignore the most strategically important part of the world working class. Instead they focus on other sources of capitalist wealth and more marginal populations as central to anti-capitalism.
Marxists need to integrate the fight against exploitation of wage workers with the struggle against the special oppression of those in and out of the waged working class. A working class dominated by racism, sexism etc. will never overthrow capitalism.
Capitalism might end up destroying the ecological basis of human civilization, but it is unlikely to create widespread chattel slavery. The contradictions between capitalism and chattel slavery ensure that. Revolutionaries need to organize to overcome chattel slavery, physically coerced wage labor and ecomically compelled wage labor as well.
The primary source of capitalist wealth is exploitation of wage labor. This should be the primary focus of organizing against capitalism.
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Marxists have debated the connection of slavery to capitalism since Marx. Some see it as a pre-capitalist holdover. Others see slavery as…
A Racist Purge Almost Destroyed My Family. Another One Is Coming.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/opinion/immigration-trump-ww2-japanese-internment.html
By Timothy Soseki Kudo
Mr. Kudo is an author and a Marine veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Jan. 18, 2025
Koji Kudo, ID badge #4441-G. His head is shaved, likely by one of my aunts, with the old manual hair clippers that he used to complain cut into his scalp. He’s barely 53 inches tall — 4-foot-4 — according to the height chart behind him. The badge is sealed in orange plastic and fastened by a metal bolt attached to a safety pin for display during his incarceration. Koji, the boy who 37 years later would become my father, is 10 years old just then, an American-born citizen. He has already been imprisoned by his government for more than a year.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a “day of infamy” that brought war to America. People of Japanese ancestry soon found their loyalty questioned, despite many of them having lived in the United States for their entire lives. A few months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 beginning the incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast — more than two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens — as well as roughly 15,000 people of Italian and German descent. Within about four years, my father and his siblings had lost their birthright citizenship and been deported to Japan.
America is now poised to allow a new version of the same profound injustice that nearly destroyed my family to happen again. Donald Trump has vowed that upon returning to the presidency on Monday, he will move immediately to begin rounding up as many as 20 million immigrants — including U.S. citizens born here and granted birthright citizenship — and deport them. If he achieves his goal, approximately one in 16 people living in America could be imprisoned and deported during the next four years. The time between President Roosevelt’s executive order and the first arrival to the Manzanar War Relocation Center was 30 days. If Mr. Trump issues his own order on Day 1, as he’s vowed, the first people could enter detention camps by February.
ImageA collage of eight black-and-white photographs of the author’s family vacations.
Kudo family photographs taken before World War II. Credit…Timothy Soseki Kudo
Long before becoming president, Roosevelt had promoted anti-Asian and eugenicist views. In a 1925 newspaper column, he wrote, “Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of 10, the most unfortunate results.”
The eugenicist movement achieved a major victory when President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924, which led to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol and established strict immigration quotas that sought to preserve the country’s existing racial composition by prioritizing immigration from Northern and Western European countries while cutting off Asian immigration almost entirely.
My grandfather had come here in 1906 and found work as a farm laborer as part of the issei, or first generation of migrants, who arrived on the West Coast from Japan at the turn of the century. By the time of Roosevelt’s executive order, my grandfather had lived in America for about 36 years, married and had six children (my father was the youngest), and used the savings he’d built up to start a flower and cactus nursery in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. In March 1942 Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the senior military commander responsible for the system of internal incarceration, issued proclamations ordering an 8 p.m. curfew and travel restrictions for people of Japanese descent, as well as the confiscation of shortwave radios, weapons and cameras in their possession — probably including the one my family used to record their life before the war.
Eventually, a forced removal order was given. My family whittled their possessions down to the bags they could carry and one trunk. My grandfather lost his nursery, his house and his belongings without due process, and my father was forced to give up the family dog he loved. Many Japanese small-business owners ended up getting pennies on the dollar in fire sales, or sold property to neighbors who promised to return it after the war only to renege.
How could this happen?
Roosevelt’s government acted with a popular mandate, and was aided by mayors and governors. An American Institute of Public Opinion poll conducted in March 1942 found that 93 percent of Americans supported the incarceration of Japanese noncitizens, while 59 percent supported the forced relocation of citizens.
But even in this dire situation, some Japanese Americans resisted.
Legal challenges were first filed by Minoru Yasui, an Oregon lawyer and Army reserve officer who had been turned away when he reported for duty after Pearl Harbor and was later refused enlistment nine times; and by Gordon Hirabayashi, a conscientious objector. Both defied the curfew order in acts of civil disobedience.
They were followed by Fred Korematsu, who refused an order to report for forced relocation so he could remain with his Italian American girlfriend in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Mitsuye Endo, a California Department of Motor Vehicles employee fired along with every state employee of Japanese ancestry, who filed a habeas corpus petition challenging her incarceration in the camps. It would be more than two years before the last of their cases reached the Supreme Court.
My father was 9 when he arrived at Manzanar and often described it to me like a summer camp. He talked about sleeping in cabins without privacy, the dust, the wind and the weather, but little of the psychological or spiritual ramifications his parents and older siblings must have done their best to conceal from him.
Resistance to the incarceration at Manzanar soon led to a prison uprising that the Army put down by shooting 11 prisoners, killing two. Afterward, internees were forced to complete a questionnaire to identify and segregate those who were disloyal to America. Those who answered no to Questions 27 and 28 — which asked whether respondents would serve in the military on combat duty “wherever ordered” and required them to swear “unqualified allegiance to the United States of America” — earned the moniker “no-no boys.”
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A photograph of the photo page of the author’s father’s passport.
Credit…Timothy Soseki Kudo
There were a variety of reasons for the detainees to answer no-no: the confusing nature of the questions, the fear that those who answered yes would be immediately drafted and the desire to protest a government that had denied them their basic human rights. Whatever my grandfather’s reasoning for doing so, my family was transferred to the maximum-security prison Tule Lake, which, according to Densho, a digital historical archive of the Japanese American incarceration, had 28 guard towers, 1,000 soldiers, armored vehicles and tanks.
In 1943, Yasui and Hirabayashi’s court cases challenging a military curfew based on ethnicity reached the Supreme Court, which sided with the government. On Dec. 18, 1944, the court decided the cases of Korematsu and Endo, which challenged the incarceration order itself. In a 6-3 decision, the court sided against Korematsu, allowing the exclusion of Americans of Japanese descent from the West Coast. But in Endo’s case, the court recognized the right of “loyal” citizens to due process, marking the beginning of the end for Roosevelt’s policy. Some were allowed to leave the camps, but those who remained at Tule Lake continued to face indefinite imprisonment.
Because the government couldn’t legally deport citizens except in cases of treason, Congress passed the Denaturalization Act of 1944, which provided a legal pathway for the removal of naturalized citizenship. Families like mine faced an impossible choice: accept deportation and receive your freedom, or refuse and remain incarcerated indefinitely.
In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender and putting an end to the war, but my family wasn’t released until Dec. 29. My grandfather, having lost everything and embittered by a nation that had turned its back on him, agreed to face deportation, so that he and his children could be released. After more than three years incarcerated without cause or due process, my family left the United States on a military transport ship, the General Gordon. Only 81 days later, Tule Lake became the final American concentration camp to close.
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A typewritten letter.
A letter from the American counsel general in Japan to Koji Kudo in 1947.Credit…Timothy Soseki Kudo
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A typewritten notice.
A notice about the rules governing citizenship rules that accompanied the letter.Credit…Timothy Soseki Kudo
My father and his siblings were among 5,589 American Nisei, orsecond-generation members, who lost their birthright citizenship and were forced to return to a war-devastated Japan that most of them had never known. My dad spoke little of his time in Kumamoto other than to tell me all he had to eat were sweet potatoes, which he detested for the rest of his life, and which my grandfather distilled into shochu that he began drinking too much of.
One day my grandfather took him to the seashore to ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I told him I wanted to become a doctor,” my father would recall to me, before describing his father’s shame over the life he’d condemned his children to.
Recognizing that a dream born in America could be fulfilled only there, my grandfather began fighting to reclaim my father’s citizenship. Wayne M. Collins, the civil rights attorney who had represented Korematsu and Endo before the Supreme Court, went on to challenge citizenship renunciations. By the time my father, then age 15, applied to reclaim his birthright citizenship, a process had been created.
On Dec. 8, 1947, my father became an American citizen once more when he received a letter signed by U. Alexis Johnson from the U.S. Consular Service at Yokohama — he saved it for the rest of his life. Soon after, he received a passport, which was stamped upon his entry in San Francisco on March 3, 1948. But the family friend who was supposed to meet him at the port never arrived. He was homeless until child services placed him with a white foster family where he learned to smoke cigarettes and drive a stick shift.
In 1958, my grandparents returned to the United States along with the last of my father’s siblings. That year, my dad became the first in our family to graduate from college, an education funded by the G.I. Bill after his Army service during the Korean War, and was accepted into the medical school that would become the University of California, Irvine. Four years later, my father took the Hippocratic oath at the school’s white coat ceremony with my grandparents watching from the audience.
As my father put distance between himself and Tule Lake, so did the country. Intelligence reports later revealed that Japanese Americans did not pose a credible security threat to the United States. In 1983, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported that the internment program was a “grave injustice” driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology to surviving victims.
In 1990, the U.S. government awarded $20,000 to each of the 82,250 survivors. But the damage done to my family, as to so many families that had been incarcerated, would never be repaired. Despite my father’s professional success, his experience at the hands of the government would create a lasting injury that he would self-medicate with alcohol, like his own father, until he died of liver cancer at the age of 66.
The parallels between then and now are impossible to ignore. Mr. Trump has exploited the fear and anger surging through the country after an uncontrolled epidemic and an economy devastated by a major recession to scapegoat a group of people who’d come here in search of nothing more than the American dream. As in the 1940s, complicit state and local government officials are already signaling a willingness to help him.
If Mr. Trump carries out his plans, they would surely result in violations of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that those born or naturalized in the United States are citizens; that their rights and immunities as citizens cannot be restricted; and that the state cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
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A group of people posing for a picture at a cemetery.
A photo of the Kudo family taken in 1986, when the author, seated far left, was 5 years old. His father, Koji, stands behind him. Credit…Timothy Soseki Kudo
But we know from that same history that injustices like this can be resisted. And now we must. To confront the Trump government without compromise, we must raise what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “coalition of conscience.” Elected leaders must oppose the assault on constitutional rights they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. Mayors and governors of sanctuary cities must unite in opposition, file legal challenges, and refuse to allow local law enforcement, administrative and logistical resources from being used to carry out this immoral policy. And we must fight state by state in every single election for every single office until we have turned back the tide of cruelty sweeping across America.
Individuals will need to engage in protest and nonviolent civil disobedience. We must pressure John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch to join their liberal colleagues on the Supreme Court when the first test case of the new deportation order reaches them. Both have repudiated the court’s decision in Korematsu, with Chief Justice Roberts writing, “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”
Nearly a century of thought about World War II and the rise of fascism has warned us of this moment. As the scholar of totalitarianism Timothy Snyder writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Instead, let us now follow the example set by those who resisted. The example set by people like Yasui, Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Endo, Wayne M. Collins, “no-no boys” like my grandfather, my aunts and uncle and my father, who along with more than a hundred thousand others inside the camps engaged in the everyday act of defiance known simply as survival. They passed on their stories so that when the time came, we would know what to do to preserve the miracle that is an America where all children are born equal in the eyes of the law.
Timothy Soseki Kudo, a sansei (third-generation Japanese American), is a Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan working on a novel.
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Opinion | A Racist Purge Almost Destroyed My Family. Another One Is Coming.
www.nytimes.com
If Trump issues his own order on Day 1, as he’s vowed, the first people could enter detention camps by February.
With Their Lives Upended, They Practiced the Art of Resilience
“Pictures of Belonging” traces the careers of three female artists who flourished despite the U.S. government’s imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/arts/design/japanese-artists-smithsonian-show.html
A painting of three figures huddled against each other against a wind storm. In the background a desert is dotted with barracks.
Miné Okubo, “Wind and Dust,” 1943, opaque watercolor on paperboard.Credit…The Miné Okubo Charitable Corporation, via Smithsonian American Art Museum
Aruna D’Souza.png
By Aruna D’Souza
Jan. 16, 2025
One of the indelible images in “Pictures of Belonging,” an exhibition of work by three female artists whose careers were impeded — but not snuffed out — by the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, is Miné Okubo’s “Wind and Dust” from 1943. In it, a family shield their faces, and each other, from a sandstorm, huddled in a tight mass of interlocking bodies. Behind them, the desert is punctuated by barracks, a landscape of depressing sameness. You get the sense that these vulnerable figures are being battered not just by the weather, but by the world itself.
The watercolor was made at Topaz, in Utah, one the camps that Okubo was transferred to during the war. (They were referred to at the time by government officials as “concentration camps” or the more euphemistic “internment camps”; more recently, some historians have used the term “incarceration camps.”)
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066on Feb. 19, 1942, on the heels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from coastal areas, ostensibly for reasons of national security. They were forced to abandon their homes and possessions or sell them for a pittance, and to relocate to makeshift facilities in harsh conditions. About two-thirds of them were, like Okubo, American citizens.
“Pictures of Belonging,” organized by the curator and scholar ShiPu Wang in conjunction with the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., brings almost 100 works by Okubo, Hisako Hibi and Miki Hayakawa back into the frame of American art. Back into the frame, because these three women — Okubo, a second-generation Japanese American, and Hibi and Hayakawa, first-generation immigrants — were all acclaimed artists in a remarkably multicultural San Francisco art world before the war. Hibi and Okubo were incarcerated; Hayakawa’s parents were, too, but Hayakawa relocated to New Mexico to avoid that fate.
“Pictures of Belonging” documents the work of three female artists whose careers were deeply affected by prison camps in the United States during World War II.Credit…via Smithsonian American Art Museum; Photo by Albert Ting
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An oil painting showing a man lying down amid a potted plant and a basket of fruit. .jpeg
Miki Hayakawa, “One Afternoon,” circa 1935, oil on canvas.Credit…Miki Hayawaka; via New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe and Smithsonian American Art Museum
Hayakawa became well known for her sensitive portraits, including a suite of paintings from the early 1930s featuring a handsome man presumed to be her boyfriend at the time. They show him playing a ukulele, looking pensive with his head resting on his hand, sawing wood and lying on the floor, each canvas rendered in a style that indicates she was looking at European modernists, including Picasso and other cubists.
A City of Murals: For 40 years, Mural Arts Philadelphia has been nurturing art and artists who have left their marks throughout the city.
Like Hibi, with whom she was friends, she had studied at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). The place was remarkably diverse in the 1920s and ’30s, as demonstrated by a pair of paintings on view: Hayakawa’s 1926 portrait of an African American man in a cobalt suit against a red background, and another, smaller canvas by a Chinese American artist, Yun Gee, depicting Hayakawa painting the very same portrait. When Hayakawa’s work was featured in a big retrospective at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Institute just shy of her 30th birthday, she was called a genius by the San Francisco Examiner’s art critic — who was himself an immigrant from India.
This milieu was all the more amazing considering it was happening during the decades of Asian exclusion, marked by laws that restricted Asian immigration, prevented Asian immigrants already in the United States from becoming citizens and barred immigrants and citizens alike from owning property. (Some of these laws were only fully lifted in 1965.)
An oil painting of a vase of flowers in front of a window looking out on a cityscape. .jpeg
Miki Hayakawa, “From My Window,” 1935, oil on canvas.Credit…Miki Hayawaka; via Smithsonian American Art Museum
Three prewar landscapes open the show: Hayakawa’s “From My Window” (1935), which looks past a vase of peonies to San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill; Okubo’s rustic “Ice House” (circa 1937); and Hibi’s Cézanne-esque vision of the California countryside, “Sprint #2, Hayward” (1940).
They stand in sharp contrast to a later grouping of paintings made by Hibi and Okubo after they arrived at the Tanforan Assembly Center in 1942, their first stop before being transferred to Topaz. (The Smithsonian curator Melissa Ho has done a terrific job with the installation, so that such resonances are clear.) At Tanforan, a former horse racing track, inmates were housed in stables, which they had to renovate themselves to make habitable — a fact alluded to in a 1943 gouache by Okubo, “The Camps Were Unfinished So the Evacuees Had to Prepare for Living There.”
The camp wardens permitted the incarcerated people to establish art schools, including one at Topaz that was run by Hibi’s husband, the artist Matsusaburo George Hibi, and where she and Okubo taught. Hisako Hibi later recalled that “Caucasian friends” and support groups would keep them supplied with materials. Okubo also contributed to the Topaz Times, a newspaper published with her camp mates. The two women made hundreds of drawings and paintings while in the camps, creating a collective portrait of a community under duress.
Okubo took a diaristic approach, focusing on everyday life, as with “Sunday” (1943), depicting three older women clutching their bibles and pulling their coats close against the cold, on their way to Sunday services. She would later turn such observations into the earliest firsthand account of the experience of Japanese Americans during the period of incarceration, “Citizen 13660,” published in 1946, drawings for which are also on view.
And Okubo also made emotionally charged charcoal drawings. In one, children grasp at barbed wire, while another shows two women having a distressing conversation (both circa 1942-44); their style evokes Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” another work about the injustices of war.
Hibi’s images of the camps are, not surprisingly, somber, even depressing. Decades after her release, she spoke of the “fear, frustration and anxiety” she felt, and the humiliating conditions she had endured. “Tanforan Assembly Center” (1942) is a bird’s-eye view of the barracks, packed like sardines within the oval racetrack, hemmed in by dun-colored mountains beyond, entirely devoid of human life. The red skies of “Eastern Sky, 7:50 A.M.” (1945) and “Western Sky, Topaz, Utah” (1945) seem apocalyptic, like something out of an Edvard Munch fever dream.
While her graceful and colorful still lifes from the period seem far removed from the heaviness of the conditions in the camps, their flowers, fruit and vegetables were the product of her fellow inmates’ backbreaking labor in a landscape not at all conducive to farming.
Hayakawa showed her work actively in the 1940s and early ’50s at museums in New Mexico, but her career was cut short by her death in 1953 at age 53.
Even while Okubo was incarcerated, she continued to send work to exhibitions around the country, some of them organized by activists who opposed the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans. An editor at Fortune saw her work at one of these shows and invited her to contribute to the magazine; the job offer allowed her to leave the camp before the end of the war.
She supported herself as an illustrator in New York City. Eventually she devoted herself full time to her art; her painting style became playful, almost childlike, incorporating pictographs, bright colors and round-faced characters, as in “Boy, Rooster, Cat” (1964) and “Boy, Goat, Fruit” (before 1972). Her first solo exhibition was at the Oakland Museum in 1972.
Because Hibi and her family could not secure employment outside the West Coast — a condition the government set for release of those who were incarcerated — they were some of the last people to depart Topaz. They too moved to New York, where Hibi sustained her family by working as a seamstress, while continuing to paint. She and her husband were both diagnosed with cancer shortly after their release; he died in 1947, and she was left to raise their children.
She eventually moved back to San Francisco, in 1954, where she worked in a garment factory and then as a housekeeper to a socialite artist. The mood of her paintings seemed to lift in the California sun. Works like “Poems by Madame Takeko Kujo” — made in 1970, the year of her first solo exhibition — are done in a light-filled, lyrical, almost fully abstract style that incorporates delicate calligraphy.
That this exhibition exists at all is a small miracle, because much of the work made by these painters before 1942 is difficult to track down — Hibi and her husband entrusted their work with a friend when they had to leave their home, and it was eventually lost; much of Hayakawa’s disappeared into unrecorded private collections. But what the curator, ShiPu Wang, has managed to assemble is a revelation, not least because it’s an important reminder, as the incoming presidential administration talks of mass deportations of immigrants and the end of birthright citizenship, of an earlier moment in this country’s history — and of the artists who recorded it, and survived.
Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo
Through Aug. 17. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C.; 202-633-7970; americanart.si.edu.
A correction was made on Jan. 16, 2025: An earlier version of this article misidentified the artist who painted a 1926 portrait of an African American man in a cobalt suit. It was Miki Hayakawa, not Hisako Hibi. The article also misidentified the magazine that invited Miné Okubo to be a contributor. It was Fortune, not Forbes.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art and is the author of “Whitewalling: Art, Race & Politics in 3 Acts.” In 2021 she was awarded a Rabkin Prize for Art Journalism. More about Aruna D’Souza
With Their Lives Upended, They Practiced the Art of Resilience
www.nytimes.com
“Pictures of Belonging” traces the careers of three female artists who flourished despite the U.S. government’s imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Anonymous blogger exposes Imperial Japan's historical mistreatment of Korea
www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2025/01/177_389720.html
Posted : 2025-01-11 09:42Updated : 2025-01-12 11:17
This composite image shows pictures of the building that housed the Keijo Nippo as well as Maeil Sinbo, published in the Keijo Nippo Dec. 26, 1938. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
By Jon Dunbar
Korea was a colony of Japan for 36 years, from 1910 to the end of World War II in 1945. However, there is a distinct lack of information available about this period, especially in English. One emerging resource is Japanese-language newspapers of the era, published in Korea.
An anonymous Japanese American blogger, who goes by the online handle "tpjv86b," has been translating this content into English as part of his Exposing Imperial Japan project.
"As I explored online resources, I noticed that there was hardly any comprehensive material available in English about this critical era," he told The Korea Times. "This period profoundly shaped modern Korea, yet much of its nuance and everyday realities remained obscured to English-speaking audiences."
The project began after tpjv86b discovered an extensive collection of old newspapers, including issues of the Keijo Nippo, or Gyeongseong Ilbo, dating from 1909 to 1944, hosted on the Internet Archive website. Published in Seoul, the Keijo Nippo was considered a de facto mouthpiece of the Japanese governor-general.
Through his website exposingimperialjapan.com, tpjv86b has been sharing his own translations with commentary of the articles.
"When I began reading through these newspapers, it felt like stepping into a time machine," tpjv86b, 44, said. "The pages were filled with stories and articles that vividly captured the day-to-day lives of Korean citizens under Japanese colonial rule. These were not just dry records of statistics or detached accounts of historical events — they were deeply personal, raw snapshots of life, including the propaganda that shaped public perception at the time. It had the power to bring history to life in a way few other resources could."
The topics he covers range from unsettlingly banal to outright horrifying.
"Korean Woman in Hanbok Detained by Imperial Police in 1944 Seoul for Wearing the 'Wrong' Clothing in Violation of Wartime Attire Regulations," is the title of one recent blog post, published Dec. 30. "Colonial regime called for intensified Imperialist training to make Koreans more ‘Japanese’ to address low morale, high turnover rates, and black market activities among Korean forced laborers in 1944 Japan," read the title of one post from Aug. 29.
A promotional image for the Keijo Nippo (Gyeongseong Ilbo) newspaper shows an illustration of the Korean Peninsula. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
"I felt a strong sense of urgency," tpjv86b said. "If these stories were not shared, they risked being forgotten as time passed."
He said his research has led to several surprising discoveries.
"For instance, I had no idea about the depth of the religious justifications used to enforce Japanese-Korean unification under State Shintoism. The colonial regime taught that Koreans were descendants of the Shinto god Susanoo, the younger brother of Amaterasu, the sun goddess and ancestor of the Japanese imperial family. This narrative framed Koreans as inherently Japanese, claiming that they had simply forgotten their true heritage and needed to be 'reawakened' to their Japanese identity. I had some awareness of ideological messaging, but I never knew it extended to such granular and deeply embedded beliefs," he said.
"Another shocking revelation was the level of humiliation embedded in the colonial propaganda. While I had known there was an element of humiliation, I did not realize the depth of it until I delved into the materials. Koreans were consistently portrayed as inferior — as children or younger brothers — who needed to look up to 'older brother' Japan for guidance and leadership … The sheer scale and intensity of this messaging were truly unsettling."
A comic strip titled “The New Age has Arrived” depicts a very condensed and accessible vehicle for the narrative Imperial Japan wanted to promote, published in the Xinshenbao newspaper Jan. 1, 1942. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
Initially, the source of the uploaded occupation-era newspapers was a mystery to tpjv86b, but eventually, someone claiming to be the original uploader made contact. He called this a "pivotal moment for my research," opening up access to an even greater collection of historical materials, which he said were "sourced from a proprietary, paid database, making them inaccessible to most people without specialized access."
"I am not at liberty to reveal this individual’s identity, but I can share that he is an academic affiliated with a Western university," tpjv86b said.
Both tpjv86b and the uploader at the Western university keep their true identities hidden.
"This is a deliberate choice made in light of the significant risks associated with releasing critical or negative information about Imperial Japan," tpjv86b said. "The historical realities of this period remain contentious, and addressing topics such as colonial rule, forced labor or comfort women often invites intense backlash from denialists and nationalist groups."
He cited the cases of Uemura Takashi, a former journalist who was vilified by nationalists for writing two articles in 1991 about Kim Hak-sun, the first South Korean victim of wartime sex slavery to publicly share her story, and historian Paula Curtis who in 2021 triggered a ferocious online backlash from denialists merely for retweeting an article in The New Yorker about the debate over Japan's wartime sex slavery.
"These incidents illustrate the real-world dangers of engaging with these topics," tpjv86b said. "Scholars and individuals who explore the darker aspects of history often face not only public vilification but also professional and personal risks. My anonymity allows me to continue this work without jeopardizing my family or career and ensures that the focus remains on the history itself rather than on me as an individual. My goal is to shed light on these critical issues, and staying anonymous allows me to do so safely and effectively."
He added that Japanese society should not be seen as monolithic, and while the oppression and hardships of Korea under Japanese colonial rule are often considered an awkward and unpleasant topic in Japan, he believes there is a silent majority who do not take a pro-imperialist stance.
A promotional image for the Keijo Nippo (Gyeongseong Ilbo) newspaper shows an illustration of a rail map of the Korean Peninsula. Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
"While denialist voices in Japan can be quite vocal and assertive, I believe there is a silent majority who recognize that historical revisionism is ultimately a form of wishful propaganda. These individuals may not always speak out, but their awareness and quiet acknowledgment suggest a more nuanced perspective within the broader population. This gives me hope that dialogue and understanding can continue to grow, even in a context where these discussions remain sensitive and challenging," he said.
One personal detail that tpjv86b was willing to share about his own background was that he spent a year studying in Germany under an exchange program.
"That year abroad left a lasting impression on me, particularly in how Germans approach their history — a process they call 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung,' or coming to terms with the past," he said.
"In Germany, I witnessed a deeply introspective and transparent approach to confronting historical atrocities. Whether addressing Nazi-era crimes or the surveillance and oppression under the East German Stasi, Germans have sought to open archives, document oral histories, and make the past as accessible as possible. This level of accountability and willingness to examine even the most painful chapters in minute detail struck me as a mature and responsible way to deal with history. It inspired me to imagine a similar approach being adopted in Japan," he said. "My work on Exposing Imperial Japan is in part a reflection of these influences."
A promotional image for the Keijo Nippo (Gyeongseong Ilbo) newspaper / Courtesy of Exposing Imperial Japan
Although tpjv86b has visited Korea, he confessed a lack of understanding of Koreans' own perspectives and memories of the occupation era.
“As I am not Korean, my understanding of the Korean perspective is limited, and I would like to learn more about how this history is viewed from within Korea,” he said. "What I hope is that through the translated articles and materials, Koreans can gain a clearer picture of the structures that perpetuated oppression during this period. I hope the materials I provide can contribute to a nuanced and informed understanding of this complex history. I hope it can evolve into a more polished, collaborative resource curated by professional historians, with features like contextualized primary sources, analysis and multilingual content."
In the time since he started the project, the National Library of Korea has made high-quality scans of the Keijo Nippo available to the public. This comes after tpjv86b encouraged readers on his site to ask the staff at the National Library of Korea to add Keijo Nippo to its digital reading hall. While he didn't take credit for this development, he praised the library for it.
"The library’s decision to make this collection publicly available is a huge step forward in preserving and sharing historical records from the colonial period. I hope this inspires further efforts to fill in the gaps, such as locating and digitizing missing issues or improving scans where the pages are incomplete," he said.
Anonymous blogger exposes Imperial Japan's historical mistreatment of Korea
www.koreatimes.co.kr
Korea was a colony of Japan for 36 years, from 1910 to the end of World War II in 1945. However, there is a distinct lack of information available about this period, especially in English. One emergin…
Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says
The Justice Department’s conclusion follows an investigation of the 1921 atrocity in Oklahoma in which up to 300 Black residents were killed.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/us/tulsa-race-massacre-report.html
A black-and-white image showing a panoramic view of multiple city blocks in ruins.
By Audra D. S. Burch
Audra D.S. Burch writes about race and identity and spent time in Tulsa to report on the centennial of the 1921 race massacre.
Jan. 11, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.
The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.
“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”
No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”
The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.
Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.
The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.
The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.
According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.
The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.
The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.
In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.
In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.
Audra D. S. Burch is a national reporter, based in South Florida and Atlanta, writing about race and identity around the country. More about Audra D. S. Burch
Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says
www.nytimes.com
The Justice Department’s conclusion follows an investigation of the 1921 atrocity in Oklahoma in which up to 300 Black residents were killed.