by Renata Sago of Word In Black News

In 2019, not long after she graduated from the University of Southern California,  Michelle Hanabusa was questioning her identity. 

Years earlier, a debilitating injury ended her career as a competitive figure skater headed for the Olympics. In college, she used her time rehabilitating herself to switch majors to graphic design. Now, she was working in the corporate world, and had begun thinking about the slings and arrows of racism she felt in the white world: day-to-day microaggressions and straight-up bigotry about her Japanese-Okinawan heritage. She had to make a change. 

A conversation with Mike Murase — a legendary Japanese-American civil rights activist and family friend whose work was influenced by the Black Panther Party and Black Student Union protests in California during the 1960s — changed the trajectory of Hanabusa’s life.

During their talk, she says, Murase showed her a photo he took for Gidra, a fledgling magazine in 1971, decades before Habanusa was born: 10 young Asian American women, college students arranged in a tableau. The woman at the center of the frame looks directly at the camera with a deadpan expression, her middle finger raised. 

The defiant gesture, Hanabusa says, “just really resonated with me.”

“How Do We Become Better Allies?”

What ensued was Habanusa’s journey of self-discovery and healing, a path that led to the intersection of the Black and Asian American communities in Los Angeles, her hometown. It took her away from the corporate world to her present work as a fashion designer, activist and founder of Uprisers — a storytelling website and clothing line  that helps strengthen and uplift the Black-Asian American alliance.

Habanusa’s mission to rid the world of racism, she says, centers on two fundamental questions about that alliance: “How do we work together? How do we become better allies? And it’s not just this community and that community; it’s ‘How do we really really work together?’” 

Inspired by the parallel movements for Black and Asian rights in California in the 1960s and 1970s, Hanabusa sees UPRISERS as a contemporary voice of meaningful action for Japanese Americans, Black Americans, and other marginalized communities in Los Angeles. 

“I wanted to find my own identity and regain my own emotions and family history that I really didn’t know about and so that personal history became kind of like this catalyst of being really inspired,” says Hanabusa.

From Competitive Skating to Fighting Racism

Hanabusa never thought she would go into fashion or activism. From a young age, she wanted to be a competitive figure skater after seeing Michelle Kwan, an Olympic champion skater whom she admired because they’re both Asian and share the same name. But a career-ending hip injury that left her bedridden also forced her to pivot.

“I decided to pursue college, study graphic design, and do the whole 9-5 corporate life,” she says. “It’s the career path I thought would make my parents and descendants of immigrants proud — a stable salary, benefits, etc.”

Having lost her identity as a competitive skater, however, Kwan, then a USC undergrad, also began to reflect on her life as an Asian American growing up in mostly-white communities. 

 She connected with Murase, who helped guide her along that journey, began working in a fashion house and eventually left to start her own endeavor. 

Early in its launch, UPRISERS began documenting Los Angeles’ first flower market, the Southern California Flower Market. It opened in 1912 and has evolved into an international hub for growers. UPRISERS captured the story of Mamo, one of the last standing Japanese American flower growers at the market, before he passed away. 

But she also has worked to get Los Angeles’ Black and Asian American communities talking to one another — a rift exposed by the Rodney King disturbances in 1992.

What started as Black residents angry at LAPD officers for mercilessly beating King quickly swept in resentment toward the Korean immigrant community. Black residents felt that the Korean merchants who did business in Black communities were extracting wealth from the community without engaging with their customers — or the community. 

News coverage of the riot inflamed Black-Asian tensions, obscuring a time when Black and Asian Americans in California worked in solidarity against racism. Years of dialogue between the two groups led to a better understanding of one another, but “we still have a long way to go,” Hanabusa says. 

“Racism is a Virus”

In their chats, Murase has “shared many stories from his organizing and activism work in the 60’s to the present, inspired by the civil rights movement,” Hanabusa says. “We learned from elders about the work and conversations and efforts towards rewriting narratives that continue to pit people of color against each other. Today, I feel we are still continuing this fight.” 

While the Uprisers website features blogs and storytelling along the Asian/Black racial divide, Hanabusa’s designs have become a partial revenue source for her activism. For example, Hanabusa’s #RacismIsAVirus T-shirt, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, sold well. 

“Some of our past collections were in collaboration with (Black) creators like Asia Jackson to artists like MILCK,” an Asian-American musician, Hanabusa says. Those partnerships, she says, “leads to sharing our experiences, learning from organizations and individuals who have been doing the work for decades, and engaging in dialogue and calling for solidarity between Black and Asian communities.”

UPRISERS plans to travel to 10 U.S. cities before the end of this year to document a wide range of immigration stories from Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Eastern Europeans, as well as adoptees raised in the United States who are still learning about their roots in Asia. For Hanabusa, the more diverse and grounded the arrangement of stories, the better. Like a bouquet of flowers, which is what “Hanabusa” — her last name — actually means. 

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