ELAINE GUARNIERI-NUNN: Good evening. I am Elaine Guarnieri-Nunn, Executive Director of the San Francisco Bay Area office of Facing History and Ourselves. I am so pleased to welcome all of you tonight to the first in a series of Community Conversations, George Takei, Standing Up to Racism, Then and Now.
Before we get started, I'd like to run through some important items to make tonight's event run smoothly. We are live tweeting tonight from the handle @FacingHistory. We invite you to join us on social media and tweet about this event using the hashtag #FacingHistoryNow. If you have questions, you can use the Questions window to send them to our presenters. There will be a Q&A at the end of our conversation.
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You can also see at the bottom of your screen the Group Chat widget. We invite you to open up that and introduce yourself and let us know where you're joining from. Throughout the conversation tonight, you can share your experiences and interact with our team. Our chat has a 500-person limit, and we have a large group gathered here for this evening, so if you cannot get into the group chat during the live event, we encourage you to engage with us on Twitter.
This conversation also has live captions, which you will find at the bottom of your screen. Finally, please know that this presentation is being recorded and will be available for you to return to for on-demand viewing. Now, let's get to our program.
We are so fortunate to have George Takei with us tonight. George is a powerful voice confronting bias and hate, and with hate crimes against Asian Americans continuing to rise, tonight's conversation is urgently needed. Thank you for joining us.
For those who-- for those of you who are new to Facing History and Ourselves, we use the lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. By studying pivotal moments in the past, such as the Holocaust, or decisive victories in the civil rights movement, students learn that history is the product of choices. Facing History students understand the power of their own choices and how to make better ones, and that those choices can make change. Let's hear the voices of some of those students who are making and Facing History right now.
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SPEAKER: Right now, history is repeating itself.
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So many of us don't know what to do, but Facing History does. We train teachers and educate students to confront history, take action, and defend democracy.
KOBI JOHNSSON: If David Starr Jordan was here today, I might have been labeled feeble-minded because of my race. Maybe I would have even been sterilized. How could they name a school after somebody like that? Some say we're taking their memories away by changing the names of their schools, but we're not erasing history, we're facing it.
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ANNAYS: Before Facing History, I was outspoken, but I didn't know how to use my voice. Facing History gave me the tools to speak up for what I believe in. In my community, our lives and our schools are at risk every single day. We can all be upstanders.
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DAVID: Without Facing History, I don't think I would have cared any less, but the framework of seeing a problem and doing something about it: that's Facing History.
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SPEAKER: Protest without preparation, education without empathy won't change the world. Our work isn't just about history, it's about history in the making. Will we be able to face ourselves if we do nothing? Together, we can face history now.
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ELAINE GUARNIERI-NUNN: And now, it is my pleasure to introduce Roger Brooks, CEO and President of Facing History.
ROGER BROOKS: Good evening, everybody. I'm Roger Brooks, President and CEO of Facing History and Ourselves. I'm thrilled to welcome you all to the first in a series of Community Conversations. I'm looking forward to an engaging evening.
This is the first time we've ever done a Community Conversation in an online format, but in light of the global public health emergency, we thought it important to find a way to remain connected to our community and our supporters. Most important, we think it's critical to continue to support our educators. All of them are now trying to teach things in an unprecedented time with untested tools and limited guidance. We have over 100,000 educators in our network, and they reach millions of students every year.
We were able to respond immediately with resources to meet their needs in building the virtual classroom. For instance, our earliest educator resource on the COVID-19 outbreak was cited in The New York Times Learning Network, and our resources have been viewed more than 50,000 times. We've heard deep appreciation from many educators that Facing History was ready to support them in a moment when education was morphing into the unknown. We've built and expanded our online learning platforms over the course of many years so that even in the midst of this stay-at-home moment, we can find innovative ways to meet the needs of the virtual classroom. That's the core of Facing History, a learning community that stands up, using lessons from history to challenge teachers and their students in the most complex of times.
It's now my distinct pleasure to introduce tonight's guest, a man who has been standing up for right over the course of his life and career, Mr. George Takei. George is one of the heroes of my youth. Think first in his role in the original Star Trek series, in which he played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the Starship Enterprise, but his story goes far beyond that.
In his childhood, George and his family were wrongfully imprisoned in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II, and his utmost heroism is a lifetime in which he's become one of our country's leading figures in the fight for social justice, LGBTQ rights, and marriage equality. What you're going to hear in just a few moments, George is a powerful voice on issues ranging from politics to pop culture. Thank you, George, for being in conversation with us tonight.
I'm going to turn the mic over to my Facing History colleague Laura Tavares. And I'll sign and close off as I've been doing since about March 6, stay healthy and spread calm. Laura?
LAURA TAVARES: Thank you, Roger. Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us tonight. I'm Laura Tavares, Program Director of Facing History's headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, and it is so thrilling to look at the chat and see how many of you are joining us from all over the country. I saw people introducing themselves in Honolulu, in Minnesota, in Cape Cod, in Berkeley, all over Canada, and beyond.
And I want to say a special welcome to all the many students who are here. I saw students joining us from New York City, from Chicago, and many other schools. We are really happy that you can be here for tonight's conversation.
So as we begin our conversation with George Takei tonight, I'd like to first take a moment for us to root ourselves in the history that shaped his early life by watching a brief film clip. We're going to watch a two-minute excerpt of Abby Ginzberg's documentary called And Then They Came for Us, which introduces the forced incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in government internment camps during World War II. And if you'd like to learn more about this history, you can watch the full film on Facing History's website. For now, let's just watch the clip.
Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate, on behalf of--
GEORGE TAKEI: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a great man who did great things during the Depression to get us out of that, signed Executive Order 9066. This nation was swept up in war hysteria, racism, and the failure of political leadership.
SPEAKER 2: I remember we start to gather anything that was Japanesey, like magazines, records, pictures, anything, and we start to burn them.
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SPEAKER 3: The media was a primary disseminator of stereotypes of not just Japanese, but Asians more broadly.
SPEAKER 4: Fanatically convinced that the Japanese family was especially created for one single purpose, to crush, to conquer, and to rule like gods over all the other people of the Earth.
SPEAKER 3: One of the major themes prior to World War II within the media was the Yellow Peril, that is Asians posing as a threat to Western civilization and Christianity.
GEORGE TAKEI: We had been depicted in terms of stereotypes, rather unattractive stereotypes. Comic buffoons, the silent servant, the vicious villain. The soil was tilled, so to speak.
LAURA TAVARES: So George Takei, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation tonight. This history that we've just been introduced to in this film is your history. It's your memory. And so I'd like to begin our conversation by asking you about your story as you lived it. Please tell us a little bit about your family's experience of the Japanese American internment camps.
GEORGE TAKEI: Well, when I was five years old, I was categorized as an enemy alien by my own country, the United States of America. But I wasn't an enemy, I was a five-year-old kid. And I wasn't an alien, I was an American born in Los Angeles to a mother who was born in Sacramento, California.
My father was born in Japan, but he was brought to San Francisco when he was a young boy, and he was reared and educated in San Francisco. So we're Americans, and yet, because we look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor, we were seen as the enemy and alien.
There was a war hysteria that swept across the country combined with racism, because we were at war with Germany and Italy, but Italian Americans and German Americans look like the rest of America. We look different. And so the President of the United States got swept up in that hysteria, the very same president who, in the 1930s, in the depth of the Depression, said, there is nothing to fear but fear itself, but he was swept up in the fear and hysteria, and he signed an Executive Order numbered 9066, which ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, even orphans-- orphanages were raided-- we were to be rounded up and put in barbed wire prison camps in ten of the most desolate places in the country.
I remember that day. It was a terrifying day. My brother and I were told to wait in the living room while our parents did some packing in the bedroom, and we were just gazing out the living room window when suddenly, we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them.
They stomped up the porch, and with their fists, began pounding on the front door. I was terrified. I thought the whole house was trembling. My father came out of the bedroom, answered the door, and literally, at gunpoint, we were ordered out of our home.
My father led us. He gave us pieces of luggage to carry, and my brother and I followed him out onto the driveway. We stood there waiting for our mother to come out, and when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. It is a memory that I have with terror, and I can never forget that.
We were taken from our home to the horse stables of Santa Anita racetrack and we were assigned a smelly horse stall to live in while the camps were being built. And so that was the beginning of a chapter of American history that I lived through from the age of five to eight years old, the duration of the war. There were relentless outrages that followed that.
Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-American young people, like all young Americans, rushed to the recruitment centers to volunteer to serve in the US military. This was an act of patriotism, which was answered with a slap on the face. They were denied military service and categorized as enemy aliens and they were imprisoned.
But a year into imprisonment, the government realized that there was a wartime manpower shortage, and here were all these young people that they could have had but had been categorized as enemy alien. They wanted to draft us. How to justify drafting enemy aliens out of a barbed wire concentration camp to serve in the US military.
Their solution was as outrageous and as cruel as the imprisonment itself. It was a series of questions, but two questions turned all ten camps into turmoil. Everyone over the age of 17 had to respond to that questionnaire. Question 27 asked, and I'm paraphrasing, it essentially asked, will you bear arms to defend the United States of America?
My parents were being asked to bear arms, to abandon their children and bear arms to defend the nation that was imprisoning their children. It was outrageous. They answered no to that.
The next question, which was the other key question asked-- and it was one sentence with two conflicting ideas, it asked, will you swear your loyalty to the United States of America and forswear your loyalty to the Emperor of Japan? We didn't have the loyalty to the emperor. They presumed, just because of our faces, that we had a loyalty to the emperor. So if you answered no, meaning we don't have a loyalty to the emperor, that no applied to the first part of the very same sentence, will you swear your loyalty to the United States. If you answered yes, meaning I do swear my loyalty to the United States, that applied to the second part of the same sentence, meant that you were confessing that you had been loyal to the emperor, and were now prepared to forswear it and reswear your loyalty to the United States.
It was an ignorantly put together loyalty questionnaire. My parents answered no to both, and because of that, they were categorized as disloyal, and we had to be segregated from an already segregated all Japanese American prison camp into a high-security camp called the segregation camp, which had three layers of barbed wire fences and half a dozen tanks patrolling the perimeter to goad and to terrorize the people that were there. Those tanks belonged on a battlefield, not intimidating innocent people who had been goaded into outrage and placed in that camp.
The other part of that story is there were young people that were so determined to prove their loyalty to the United States that they bit the bullet, swallowed the ugly taste, and answered yes to those offensive questions, and they were drafted, or some even volunteered to go from behind those barbed wire fences and serve in the US military. They were put into a segregated, all-Japanese American unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and sent to the European battlefields to fight where they were used literally like cannon fodder, but they fought with incredible, unbelievable courage, and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any other unit in the European theater, and they returned to the United States after the war as the single most decorated unit of that war. They were heroes, and they helped change some of the laws that were discriminatory against Asian Americans.
But there was another group of young people, and I consider them just as heroic as those that fought on the European battlefields. They said, I am an American, and I will fight for my country, but I will fight as an American. If I can report to my hometown draft board with my family back home, I would be like any American. I would fight for something that I have a vested interest in.
I will fight as an American, but I will not go as an internee, leaving my family in imprisonment to put on the same uniform as that of the sentries in those towers guarding over my family. I will fight as an American, which is a genuine Americans stance. It was a courageous stance.
And for that, they were tried for draft evasion and found guilty and transferred from an internment camp into Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where they fought on a different battlefield behind those concrete walls of a federal penitentiary. They were insulted, assaulted, but they stood firm, and many of them knew judo, and they taught a thing or two to those people. They stood strong as principled Americans, and I consider them heroic Americans in many ways--
LAURA TAVARES: Thank you George.
GEORGE TAKEI: --in more heroic ways than those that fought on those battlefields.
LAURA TAVARES: You know, this is so-- hearing you tell this story is a reminder of how layered and complex it is. And I know you've explored it in documentaries, you explored it in theatrical pieces, and recently, you published a memoir in a sort of comic book form called They Called Us Enemy, which many Facing History students are reading, and I think it's a really appealing way for young people to learn this history. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what do you hope young people, in particular, will learn from reading your story?
GEORGE TAKEI: Well, I particularly wanted to reach young people with this story. In 1994, I wrote my autobiography, but I wanted to reach young people, because they're going to be the voters of tomorrow, and hopefully, the movers and shakers of tomorrow. And it's so vitally important that they know the history of this country, and particularly, know the lessons that we can learn from those chapters where we failed the ideals of our democracy.
When I was a young teenager, I loved comic books, and I thought this would be a wonderful way to reach young people, and so we did it as a graphic memoir or a comic book memoir and told the story of my childhood imprisonment from the vantage point of an irresistibly adorable five-year-old me. I have, actually, fond memories of my imprisonment in the first camp we were sent to in the swamps of Arkansas, and so I shared some of that, the innocence of a child, and at the same time, I shared what I saw of the anguish and the outrage that my parents were sensing. And as I grew up as a teenager to learn about what they went through from their vantage point, as well as their-- my father was a particular believer in the strength of the ideals of our democracy, and I learned about our democracy from my father as a young teenager.
LAURA TAVARES: I have a question about that, George, because I do think of you as someone who is an upstander, and really, a model of the kind of informed and ethical engaged participant in our democracy that we hope Facing History students will be, but you're also someone who, as a Japanese-American, as a member of the LGBTQ community, you're part of groups that have not always enjoyed the benefits of citizenship and belonging in this country, and I wonder, how do you keep faith with a democracy that doesn't always live up to its promises?
GEORGE TAKEI: I learned about American democracy from the man who suffered the most, who felt the pain of the failure of democracy the most, but who firmly believed in the core ideals of our democracy. He said, ours is a people's democracy, and the strength of this people's democracy makes it great. But the weakness of this democracy is the fallibility of human beings, and even great people, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pulled a nation up from a crushing depression, was swept up by.
And so he said-- and he told me about American democracy, that it's a participatory democracy. But I was a passionate young teenager, and I kept coming back. Yeah, but it was wrong, Daddy. It was against our Constitution. It was against every ideal of our justice system.
And so he said one Sunday afternoon, let me show you how it's got to work, and he drove me downtown to downtown Los Angeles, and we went to the Adlai Stevenson for President campaign headquarters. I knew about him from his speeches that I heard on the radio. He was an eloquent speaker. And I knew about him from what my father told me.
But there I was in that headquarters with all these other people, young people, middle-aged people, and old people, passionately dedicated to getting this great man elected president of the United States, and I understood what a people's democracy needs. We need to be actively participating, actively engaged in that process, and I became active in electoral politics for the governor of the state of California, or US senator from California, or the mayor of Los Angeles, which eventuated in my serving on public commissions and boards. And so it is a participatory democracy, and we have to engage actively to keep it the vibrant democracy that it is.
LAURA TAVARES: Thank you. That's a powerful message, especially in an election year. So what we're talking about, this moment, we're also living in a moment when we see that, as Elaine mentioned earlier, Asians and Asian-Americans have been targets of bias, of bigotry, of violence amid the COVID-19 epidemic, And earlier, you used this phrase, the lessons of history, and I wonder how your personal story shapes your thinking about this moment that we're living through.
GEORGE TAKEI: Well, there's that often quoted phrase from George Santayana, those who can't remember history are condemned to repeating it. It is so important to know our history, particularly because it's a people's democracy. And as my father said, it's both the strength and the weakness, the fact that it's a people's democracy.
We have the capacity to do great things, and we have a history of that, but it's equally important for us to know when we faltered in history. And so we need to know the history of the civil rights movement, or the treatment of Native Americans, and certainly, for me, the treatment of Japanese-Americans during the war, innocent people who had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, being scapegoated. And because we still don't know that history, we're repeating it.
And under stressful circumstances-- and it's understandable. People have lost their jobs. Some people have sold their cars to get some extra money. People are desperate. And when you're hurting like that, you want to lash out, find some person that you can lash out at to personalize that, to find a scapegoat, and we happen to look like the place where the coronavirus started from, and so Asian-Americans-- and people can't tell the difference.
We're not a monolithic group, Asian Americans. We come from different cultures. Some have been here much longer generationally, and others are newer immigrants, but yet, they see us all as the same, and so they lash out at people that look like the Chinese when the Chinese had nothing to do with it.
They suffered it-- they were the first to suffer from this, and then we have a reckless, a completely pusillanimous president who continually used that phrase, Chinese virus. And he got blowback from it. It was so intense that he had to make a separate little commentary on his so-called press conference saying that Asian-Americans are good people. We shouldn't lash out at them.
But it was too late, he blew the dog whistle, and the haters are now acting on it, and Asian Americans are being subjected to that kind of outrage. They're spat on, they're coughed at, and a young boy in Texas was even stabbed. I have a playwright friend, distinguished playwright, Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, and this happened before all this began, but he was walking down the street in Brooklyn where he lives, and suddenly, he felt a pain in the back of his neck.
He was stabbed. And the sidewalk seemed to turn into a wavy ribbon. And he knew that there was a hospital two blocks away, and somehow managed to stagger to that hospital. He never saw who stabbed him. But this kind of scapegoating of Asian Americans is going on, prompted by this kind of irresponsible leadership in this country, a president repeating the word Chinese virus.
LAURA TAVARES: You're really reminding us, I think, of how much is at stake in this moment, and how we stand up for each other, and what we ask of our communities and our leaders. And I think your story is a really important memory for us to have as we think about how to respond. I'd like to turn now to some questions from our community.
There are so many people here who are eager to be in conversation with you. Many folks have already shared questions in the Q&A window at the bottom of the screen. If you haven't, please go ahead, and we'll try to take a few. But I'd like to start with a question from a student, one of many Facing History students who have been reading your memoir, George. This is a question from Anika Asthana, a student at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, California.
ANIKA ASTHANA: Hello, my name is Anika Asthana, and I'm a student at Notre Dame High School, as well as a member of our Facing History club. I recently read your book, They Call Us Enemy, and I thought that it was a phenomenal way of showcasing a political issue through a personal narrative. It could easily be tied to current events, and I felt like it really showed young people like myself about the importance of developing a personal narrative.
I wanted to ask about your work as an advocate. How did you turn all of the trauma that you faced in your childhood and the discrimination you faced throughout your later years into a platform for advocacy? Furthermore, how did you incorporate your identity and your love for education into your work? Basically, what I'm asking is, how did you manage to make the personal political, and what advice do you have for young advocates today? Thank you so much for your time, and thank you for answering my questions.
GEORGE TAKEI: Thank you for asking that question so eloquently. I owe my activism on all these issues-- I was active in the civil rights movement, in the peace movement during the Vietnam War because of a very special man that I had as my father. As I said a bit earlier, he was the one that went through the most painful parts of the internment experience, and yet, because he believes so firmly in the best ideals, the shining ideals of our democracy, that he wanted to impart that to to me.
And as I said, he took me down to downtown Los Angeles and Adlai Stevenson's campaign headquarters. And there, surrounded by all these other people who were so dedicated, giving every moment of their free time, and some even gave up their employment to work in the Stevenson campaign. And so I had my father's good guidance. But also, the guidance I got from the people I worked with in the campaign.
And for me, for a young teenager, idealistic teenager, it was inspiring and it was fun at the same time. And so I became active in the political arena. But it is so important that we understand that our democracy can be so fragile, as fragile as human fallibility.
And for the ideals to be alive, it requires our active participation. Young people, middle-aged people, and old people that I saw at that campaign headquarters, all of us, and it's going to be particularly important this year when we have a vitally important-- it could be a devastating election. I want it to be one where we can be proud of our democracy. And it's going to depend on so many of you all participating.
I didn't have the franchise. I was too young when I was first introduced to the Adlai Stevenson campaign. Finally, when he tried for the third time, I had the franchise. I was able to vote for him. But with no vote, I was volunteering. Because I understood the importance of our participation in our people's democracy.
LAURA TAVARES: You know, I was at a march a couple of years ago. And I saw a young woman, probably 13, 14 years old, carrying a sign that said too young to vote, but old enough to care. That sounds like you.
GEORGE TAKEI: Absolutely. Adlai Stevenson-- you know, both the strength and the weakness of our democracy is the fact that it's a people's democracy. He was so eloquent and he knew how to put ideas into succinct phrases.
LAURA TAVARES: You know, hearing you talk about your dad, too, I'm thinking about a lot of families that are listening to tonight's webinar. And I hope that parents are hearing this idea of how influential they can be in their young people's, their children's own civic education. So we also have a question from someone who is a friend of Facing History and also a friend of yours, I know, Karen Korematsu, whose father Fred Korematsu was an upstander who fought the US government's incarceration of Japanese Americans and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. So here's Karen's question.
KAREN KOREMATSU: Hello, everyone. First of all, my thanks to Facing History and Ourselves for inviting me to participate in this significant conversation about racism and xenophobia with my dear friend and fellow advocate, George Takei. George is truly an upstander who leads by example. And his commitment to social justice is nonstop, whether it is promoting census participation, fighting for LGBTQ rights, or being a keynote for Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution on January 30th.
George epitomizes what my father said-- stand up for what is right. In that regard, this is my question to George. It takes a great deal of courage to stand up for what you believe in. When people are feeling a mixture of fear and hopelessness, what words of wisdom would you provide during a time where people are paralyzed by fear?
GEORGE TAKEI: Karen, you are a chip off the Korematsu block. You are an activist today, like your father was, challenging the internment all the way up to the Supreme Court. And thank you for your activism. It's much appreciated, and particularly now, when once again, Asian-Americans are so threatened and so challenged.
And you ask about-- now what was the question that you asked?
LAURA TAVARES: About how we respond at a time characterized by so much fear?
GEORGE TAKEI: It is a fearful time right now, being Asian American. And it's at times like this that we need to have that thing called courage. I think it was Franklin Roosevelt who said courage is not the absence of fear. It is the assessment that something else is more important than fear.
And yes, it is a fearsome time. But we can't let the haters, those people that look for scapegoats, to have their way. It's times like this that we have to be the strongest in order to make our democracy really true. So it's counting on a lot of us and it's that thing that-- I quote from Roosevelt quite a bit, both the good and the bad.
But he said courage is the assessment that there is something more important than fear. Yes, there's fear. But we've got to rise above it.
LAURA TAVARES: Thank you. So we're going to take-- there are so many amazing questions that folks have asked in the chat. And I wish that we could talk about all of them. But I'm going to ask you one as we finish our conversation.
One of our participants asked, what change would you ultimately like to see? What would make you feel like your lifelong mission has been accomplished?
GEORGE TAKEI: Well, I'm going to quote from someone else. And I'm paraphrasing him. But it was President Barack Obama who said change won't come if you wait for that certain person or a better time. Change comes when we become that change. We are the change that we are waiting for. It's we who have to decide that we are going to do something about this challenge that we have.
And sometimes it takes guts to say I'm going to do that. It's a little scary, but it's important. And it's making the ideals about democracy possible. And those ideals are very fragile. And it takes those of us who have the courage, the absence of fear, to do something about it. We all have that in us.
LAURA TAVARES: Thank you. This has been such a rich and really galvanizing conversation that I just feel lucky to have been a part of. When you talk about courage, George, one of the people I think of, one of the groups I think of is teachers, who especially now are doing such incredibly courageous work. And so we're going to hear now from a Facing History teacher, Erin DeSilva, an educator who teaches at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, California. Erin?
ERIN DESILVA: Hi. Good evening. And thank you, George, for your words that really resonate with why I teach. And why I teach is really to help the world become a better place.
I've been teaching for 20 years. And I work at Notre Dame High School. And I'm proud to have Anika as one of my students. I've been a Facing History teacher for more than half of my career, when Notre Dame first started a program called Education for Justice and Leadership, which is focused on four core values that we hope to instill in our students-- personal responsibility, stewardship, solidarity, and advocacy-- in the hopes that we have students who become upstanders who are committed to social justice.
Today our global community's in crisis. Our local communities are struggling to meet so many needs. And I have had to do a lot of soul searching to think about what is my role as a teacher during this time, especially when we can't see our students in person on a campus. And I've really seen it through a teacher's eyes, but also through a parent's eyes.
And here's what I've come to realize. My responsibility during this time is to create community, even though we can't see our students every day, to build safe learning communities where students can lean into each other, have conversations about things that matter, and make sense of the world around us. I also am committed to making my students find how to become more human, how to really care about one another, become compassionate, empathetic, kind, to be the bridges that our world needs in order to create more understanding and collective responsibility during this crisis.
And finally, I really want my students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers who are empowered rather than debilitated during this time. Because one day, our world is going to get back to a place where we start to heal, to rebuild, to rethink how we are going to work as a global community. And it's a time for our students to see this as a moment for innovation and reimagining, to make our world more just and equitable.
So this really feels daunting as a teacher. I think that when I first came into education, I was very idealistic and wanted to just make the world a better place. And now 20 years later, I realize that it is really the time where teachers have to rise up to help our students become the generation we all need: to step into leadership, to make good, sound decisions for our community.
And this feels really overwhelming. But organizations like Facing History have really helped us teachers stay connected. Just a couple of weeks ago, I Zoomed with two other Facing History teachers, one in Oakland, one in Los Angeles.
And we leaned on each other. And we shared our wins and losses that we've been feeling. And it really helped me feel re-energized and connected, because Facing History provides us so many tools and supports to keep doing this work virtually and to keep inspired and keep committed to our students.
So I know a lot of organizations have been really making sacrifices during this time. But I'm really thankful for Facing History to continue and its continued support of teachers. Because at some point, our world will be ready to rebuild and to heal, and we want our teachers and our students to be able to work together to do that. So thank you very much. Thank you, George. And thank you, Facing History.
ELAINE GUARNIERI-NUNN: Erin, thank you so much for sharing your story and bringing the voices of your students into this conversation. There are thousands of teachers across the US and around the world who, like Erin, are helping to empower their students to stand up to bigotry and hatred. Facing History serves more than 100,000 teachers who, in turn, reach more than a million students. But we have so much more to do to reach all students.
And particularly now, there are thousands of students who graduate high school each year without learning how to use their voice or stand up for what is right. Facing History can change that. We are so lucky to have so many of our community online with us tonight-- teachers, students, parents, and donors. Thank you to so many of you who have already given to Facing History.
But now is the time for all of us to come together to have a greater impact. While we are seeing some communities rally together during this crisis, we are also witnessing a rise in hatred and bias. And our children are seeing it, too.
Because of the nature of our work at this critical time, we are asking you tonight to stretch, if you can, whatever you can do, big or small, makes a difference. And you can participate knowing that your investment makes real and lasting change for students and schools. At the bottom of your screen, you will see a button with a hand and a heart. Simply click that button to make a donation.
If you can give $25, you are helping to bring stories of survivors and witnesses to history into schools to inspire young people. For those who can give more, a gift of $1,000 helps two teachers attend a Facing History course. Imagine, one Facing History workshop can change the way a teacher engages with 100 students a day for the rest of his or her career. That is a powerful return on investment. We simply cannot afford another generation of young people who are not equipped to speak up and participate in our democracy.
I would like to thank George Takei, Laura Tavares, Karen Korematsu, Erin DeSilva, and Anika Asthana for being part of tonight's conversation. Thank you to all of our donors, volunteer leaders, and corporate sponsors across the country for their incredible generosity. And thank you to my Facing History colleagues for their tireless efforts to make tonight possible. And I am now going to ask George to close out the evening.
GEORGE TAKEI: Well, I join all the people that you've been thanking-- thank Facing History. Because indeed, we are facing history today in these fraught circumstances. And we are facing ourselves. It's a challenge to us.
And to this organization called Facing History and Ourselves, I see you as the conscience of America, to remind us of our past, to shine a light on our present, and to enlighten our way to building the future of our United States. Thank you for all that you're doing.
ELAINE GUARNIERI-NUNN: Thank you, George. And thank you for joining us, everyone. If you enjoyed tonight's discussion and would like to join us for other events in the series, including the next one with Dr. Jelani Cobb on April 28, please register at the link that just opened in your browser. Thank you and goodnight.
