Gratitudes

This project would not be possible without the following people.  Of course I cannot thank every individual.  Even those that have been my detractors have given me inspiration.

First, I want to honor and give my strongest acknowledgement to my professors in my academic education and in spiritual training:

The late Dan Soloff at Antioch University Seattle and Therese Saliba at Antioch University Seattle and Evergreen College in Washington State, who first encouraged me to attend Graduate school and give to the world my mind and history.  They were the first to encourage and inspire with care and fire.

And most recently and most intensely and importantly: Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro, who were at the time of my education–professors of Postcolonial Social Cultural Anthropology who admonished and trained students to think with and through the fires of difference and dominance/resistance dynamics in the best traditions of postcolonial thought, post-structural strategies and feminist neo-Marxist recognitions with the best of third-world activist thinkers;

My Zen teachers: the late Philip Kapleau Roshi and his successor Bodhin Kjolhede (at the time he was a Sensei) and Thich Nhat Hahn and Robert Aitken Roshi.

Next, I would like to acknowledge those who have sustained me in body and inspiration throughout the years, watching over me like parents, caretakers, with assistance of all kinds:  Ryan Whitney, Rick Leonard, Leonard Rifas, Carolyn Lee, Karen Maeda Allman –all friends in Seattle.  Pei Wu, Amanda McBride, Alejandro Urruzmendi and Heidi Rhodes, Gloria Vasquez, Charles Cuahtemoc, Brett Malone, “Marpesia, ” Crystal Whitis — all of whom are in San Francisco.

I would also like to give gratitudes to thinker/writer/poet/change-agents from whom I have learned and shifted in order to forge my thoughts/creations into the world, who have inspired me deeply.  The following is just a tiny fraction of the names that have influenced my thinking:  James Baldwin; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; Trinh Minh-Ha; Gloria Anzaldua; Barbara Jane Reyes; Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida; Grace Cho; Avery F. Gordon; Eduardo Galeano; Judith Butler; John G. Russell; Paul Gilroy; Aimee Cesaire; Frantz Fanon; Edward Said; Hanna Arendt; Ōnishi Junko; Albert Memmi; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King Jr.; Ann Laura Stoler; Partha Chatterjee; Yukiko Koshiro; John W. Dower; Terese Svoboda; Rainer Maria Rilke; Agha Shahid Ali; John Dower; Matsuo Basho and other revolutionary haiku poets; Rumi; Michael Cullen Green; Eriko Ikehara; Mitzi Uehara Carter; Sabrena Taylor, and many more.

I want to thank Richard Clark for his continued support and help with technical/art elements of my project, James Evans for his care as a friend and who scanned my family photos into digital form.

I thank Duncan Williams of the Mugen Project for giving me some work when I really needed, and introduced me to the “new” kind of Hapa event.

I thank Eriko Ikehara and Mitzi Uehara Carter for their new and yet eternal strength and friendship as fellow Black-Asians and who bring their Black-Okinawan identities and knowledges to bare in everything they do, pushing me to push them as fellow comrades in the terrain of multiple Black Pacific diasporic identities.

I thank Stephen Shigematsu Murphy, Velina Hasu Houston, Christine Iijima Hall for struggling to be the first in the English speaking world to forge the mixed-Japanese identities into the academic world of racialization and the politics of identity.

I want to acknowledge and honor my father Fredrick Douglas Cloyd the First.  He, rising from his impoverished roots, rose through military ranks and given the best he could, to be humanist and fair, to think and be an individual.  In whatever he has done, this he has believed in and carried out, and most of all, passed on to me.

And in the foremost:  I honor my mother – Kakinami Kiyoko (Emiko / Anna) Cloyd. To her I most strongly dedicate this entire project.  Her life, largely invisible to the world, has been to leave a legacy through which we can begin to discuss healing and a reckoning, placed in larger worlds with other sites for the same.