The college radio station is where I learned to be me. Maybe that’s because the radio audience doesn’t really see me. I was just a voice. Just like on the page or screen, the words are my voice through you. So you don’t instantly reject them. They could be your thoughts. But listening to me is like me actually getting inside your ear. It’s more passively invasive. And then it all works on your imagination.
I’m thinking about this because I’m still in touch with my alma mater, mostly through the radio station. (The humor organization too, but the radio station most recently). Five years ago this year was the 75th anniversary of the radio station. This year, they didn’t do anything about the 80th because most of the folks who cared about it enough to celebrate were dead or dying.
One person I met at the 75th reunion of the radio station was a fellow name Clark Johnsen. I sat in front of him at the Science Center lecture hall for an alumni discussion group. He saw me raising my hand and not being recognized. And then he saw me sit down, quietly. I kept raising it and sitting down, when failing to be recognized. Clark, whom I never met before, saw me in this repetitive loop— seeing me raise my hand and failing to be recognized then sitting down. Then he finally did something about it.
He gave me a nudge. Maybe it was more like a shove.
“Speak,” he said.
Then I did.
I made my point. Something about the history of the radio station and how the Civil Rights Act wasn’t passed until 1964, and how Asian Americans were held to ridiculous racist quotas until the Immigration Act of 1965, and that kept Asian numbers artificially low, and how considering all that, it’s not surprising why there were such little diversity at this gathering of alumni.
