Mitsuye Yamada > Quotes

“As a child of immigrant parents, as a woman of color in a white society and as a woman in a patriarchal society, what is personal to me IS political.”
― Mitsuye Yamada

“We need to raise our voices a little more, even as they say to us, ‘This is so uncharacteristic of you.’ Invisibility is not a natural state for anyone.”
― Mitsuye Yamada

“I had supposed that I was practicing passive resistance while being stereotyped, but it was so passive no one noticed I was resisting; it was so much my expected role that it ultimately rendered me invisible. When the Asian American woman is lulled into believing that people perceive her as being different from other Asian women (the submissive, subservient, ready-to-please, easy-to-get-along-with-Asian woman), she is kept comfortably content with the state of things. She becomes ineffectual in the milieu in which she moves. The seemingly middle class woman and the apolitical Asian woman constituted a double invisibility.”
― Mitsuye Yamada

“We must remember that one of the most insidious ways of keeping women and minorities powerless is to let them only talk about harmless and inconsequential subjects, or let them speak freely and not listen to them with serious intent... To finally recognize our own invisibility is to finally be on the path toward visibility. Invisibility is not a natural state for anyone.”
― Mitsuye Yamada, Invisibility Is An Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman