just letting our viewers know that we were invited you to come and join us today on a dialogue about our history as a first generation you define americans to the local area and how we have assimilated to generations that are still young here or are coming generations so it's part of that this interview is the first of this dialogue and we welcome you both for and thank you for joining us so i'll start off by asking you a little about yourself so if you could tell us what your your personal journey in the local community first professor scott well in seattle i came here in one nine hundred eighty five and this is the last university i taught it i started university of kentucky then the university of toledo then notre dame university and then here and i came out here to be chair of american ethnic studies that is asian american studies chicano latino studies african american studies and then to put together this this major the students could have a major and we took the courses for american american indians  studies which was in a separate department and combined it into a major for students who wanted to major in american i think studies and so and i did that for and stayed in the department for over maybe ten ten years and then i moved back to just doing sociology so i could write books and and do other kinds of research rather than be one thing i'm proud of myself and i don't say this to people all the time but i still remain anything there are people who get puzzle times when they hear me speak on how to make how come you have been in this country this long these many years and still don't mix english you know how to  went to college for one year and then came to the united states and started at seattle pacific university now i guess it is university and then shifted to the university of washington and then after having been graduated in sociology there  my intention was to go back home well i said ok now what do i do up to that time i had no intention of ever trying to learn about the culture about anything else outside my school my schooling now at this point i have to say to to sit down and think about what exactly why i'm now here what am i going to do engaged in all kinds of work i i did what whatever or my or my works and graduated there and came back to seattle and all this time i had a family to run i have to have had a big concern for my up and many more if you're up in started surfacing in seattle group meeting at certain places spending time evenings and so on and then maurice you can start coming in and you know how many there are in seattle area today today the funniest thing question no i have to say this when if you have just started dropping in coming in from time to time there are a couple of us who used to go to the airport expecting his yorkers to come and the pacific northwest authored by in a very insightful book i think those of us that will be lucky enough to read it i have to really get it i will be reading it will be informative because my history is not as long as you to hear obviously so i think it's good because  this is the way we capture history right because like dr atala said he spent a lot of years here there's no as far as i know there's no history of this document of that journey and it's good for us to know how we have of course it can be bought directly from the publisher publisher and then of course university of washington bookstore because it but the cheapest place amazon i was on dot com ok it's probably anything any institutions at all and they'd just be no restaurants no church no social groups other than informal ones that they used to have and they used to  space for themselves that kind of thing so it's about their early group of people who came and how they established the institutions like the church like the various businesses that they had like the other institutions like schools and clubs and so forth and of course it's about their struggles their successes and their failures because some people could adjust atala say he was like the loneliest person well that's a very common thing since that loneliness was a very common theme all the way through for these people because they were a small group of them and they were totally culturally alienated from the american culture the food was different the way people dressed the customs and courtesies and so forth words were different and so many of them emotionally broke down and then of course you had people who were able to survive the emotional stress and go and push forward and get married see this this was talks about this these people before they even got married to get married and had children and even how some of them got wealthy it is described in the book and they were not afraid to tell how they got wealthy you know like buying one house with two incomes and then buying a second house and living on one income to use one of the other income to buy a house and then read the house so now they had a second income they were using and they were also reading the new house that they bought right now they could buy another house and in seattle it was at a time when the value of houses kept going up so that think about it and in a ten year period you could be a millionaire in seattle because of of the house yes you see and they did the same thing with with businesses how they started there some of them started serving meals in their homes and then they were able to get a property just to have their own restaurants with their wives and other people cooking and so forth that kind of thing so it it develops the earliest institutions like the businesses like the churches like the clubs social clubs what happened when they started having children what were the conflicts between the parents and the children we were talking earlier about the fact that the children did not see a good reason for hanging on to the parent the values of the parents or the behaviors of the parents because they didn't fit in american society and of course the parents didn't see a good reason for the children to act like an americans because their values and their behavior to many of them was they were those things were profane they were not sacred you know they were actually profane and they thought that their children were being misled and many of them were they thought that their children were learning none ethiopian values and learning american values which were destructive not only to the children for example arms guns i mean you know this idea of having guns and using guns wasn't it ethiopian thing and you could see how they could  destructive in an immigrant community the same way with education because many of them came as adults young adults some as teenagers they would put them in school with elementary school children because they didn't give them a separate school if you didn't if you had just a one year of worth of english education you were put in the first grade with just little children i mean you know that was that was you know that that that was not acceptable and he felt like oppression being educated with with with children and  how this treated like little children you know so all of these things are developed in the book so that you can see how the community has has grown power has developed how topics and you think that you would like to share with us about your research or for history that you've documented either in books or in your works yes c or different kinds of radio messages or television or even from friends and relatives from from ethiopia tell me whatever happened whatever dog killed that i always loved to do from the beginning of my my education really from childhood doctors reading books i love to read books books are my life my companions today i live in an apartment so i live alone but i never say alone i have my books talk to my books and they talk to me so i ha who who are made who they are they work by reading books so that vantage of reading books communicating this to young and old is extremely important to me and i came up was after a low research and so so i came up with this book and that's one another thing some personal concerns regarding our community culturally and ethical situations that one could very well observe these days want by any means no matter what this is the mentality so i started to put this together and i came up with what god in you know time and patience time and patience if you have time if you give it time and patience you can do anything you can to get through any problem now this this this this i became aware of this during the last few years some there are some people who lie come up come up come across who keep saying what they have led through thousands of years the advantage of taking high patients and were able to do anything by time with time and patience so that you know i was just an audience all of these people were either just out of power or they were still in power when i was there in the early seventy's i went to ethiopia even though they said leslie was still in power  so you can see though that for actually all of my adult life i've been involved in doing research so i did research in africa i did my desart ation  coming out of india university in puerto rico and it was on social change and community family infertility about how puerto rico puerto rico was was moderniz and how they were moving the modernization of puerto rico was moving it from a traditional latino culture to a more egalitarian culture but of course that created all kinds of problems in the family because women wanted to be equal and the factories moved in and they hired women more than men and the men were still working in the fields that the women were now making money and the men wanted the money and the women said oh you have to talk to me first because before they did have to talk to the women they just told the women what to do you see so i had already studied that problem that i had that i had done research in argentina i  was fulbright scholar a professor and i taught and i taught in argentina and there i was looking at law and crime and comparing and the two different criminal justice systems so by the time i came to to seattle you know i and i did i tell you i had gone to china  transportation you know and everybody was wearing a mouse suit women and men were wearing now suits and but i saw the possibility that they were going to introduce capitalism and so i wanted to find out i started interviewing people to see how they thought and how they plan to make the transition from communism to capitalism if they introduce the market system you see so by the time i come here i really have all of this background and the reason why i did this book is i could see the ethiopians coming and i knew that this was a historical moment because here is the here is the historical moment after slavery the united states did not resettle any africans in the united states until the ethiopian skate and they had to pass special legislation to allow fifteen hundred ethiopians to come and it was that break that opening the door the door in america that began the the the resettlement of refugees from ethiopia and then of course after about five or six years they started resettled settling some others by nine hundred ninety five somalis were beginning to be brought it at a bigger number than ethiopians but from around one thousand eighty maybe eighty four or running eighty early eighty's they were almost all just ethiopians that were being resettled so i knew it was a historical moment that needed to be captured different culture and society history different in technology economics culture individual is you're responsible for yourself in america what the ethiopians didn't know anything about being responsible for for yourself if they worked in families you know they were depending on their family and so to tell an ethiopian he's here alone he have to survive on your own by your own intelligence by your own energy by your own whatever you have you have to survive a lot of them couldn't do it they didn't know how and they said they didn't know  they emotionally broke down you know so all of this was you can see the how good this is right you're saying all of this dynamic going on and i'm thinking somebody has to capture this and so for them my interest and so salomon introduced himself to me and we both decided since he's a historian we both decided to collaborate to capture this is stork a moment ethiopians coming historically as well as now it's now graphically and changing it graphically and in seattle and in america that's how it has just thing interesting reasons that you know ok because i've lived during a very important historical moment so this is an intersection of his biography going on all the time right in different parts of the world you know and i think that that will make an interesting story the intersection of biography and history and different parts of the world in which i was working or living i see   start working on one thing and then all of a sudden while i do that all of a sudden something triggers my mind and i pick that up and do research on ok so come back to one of the topics i want to explore with you both of you today was as you know we just passed a black history month in february both our historic february the black history month and march course the african american regressive first and second generation of those that are here now where black history more means for african americans people who are becoming african americans  because the world sometimes actually thinks that you have no culture or you have no history you know when they ask if some day someone ask a black person the other day how many generations can you so that that's the answer if we don't want our kids being stupid and acting stupid and not having a vision of where they've been and where they're going where hopeless and so black history month is to make children away or of their long long long ethnographic history in the world their contributions to culture their contributions to the culture of this society like i wrote a book called the black  revolt and it's about how blacks liberated themselves you know historically in the united states you know and we didn't just get liberated because they wanted us to be free you know we had to go through a whole kinds of devices to make white people decide they cannot keep this society going the way they were going you know there were over four hundred slave very few people know that you see and that's part of this long history of liberation and so black history is about teaching about all of these strategies  speak coalitions with other ethnic groups in order to you know get more political power which is what blacks are trying to do now to put maybe put somebody in office like obama who will  protect their interests so their whole series of these strategies like litigation legislation rebellion coalition and so forth and there in my book the blacker both of this all these of it they don't even know such a thing as that the fact that there was and i do a battle that that worn a very significant battle over a powerful group european white power not many people know about it so i want to share the so i can show some definite facts i want i and eighteen hundred italians were taken prisoners of war the significance of and moreover it's now universally recognized by political situation and the direction of our future closed the chapters of two protagonists standing with people determination one to colonize and dominate and the other equally to determine  to the history of black people in the euro you can the united states is even more my kind of fight by the fact that is being celebrated the closing of the black history month