5 Quotes & Sayings By Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, a Japanese American, was the first Japanese American woman to gain a Ph.D. from a major university. She was a highly respected educator at San Francisco State College (now California State University at San Francisco) where she founded the Center for Asian American Studies and held the position of Chair of the Department of Education. At the time her dissertation on "Japanese-Americans in the World War II Army" was awarded, Dr Read more

Houston had already published five books and articles on the subject. She was also instrumental in founding the Asian Pacific Heritage Month (APHM) in 1982.

1
Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
2
When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them tostop fighting? Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
3
That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
4
You cannot deport 110, 000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston