Blog / Our America

On Running. . .

November 5, 2021 - By Floyd Cheung

(The African American Cultural Center in Brunswick, Georgia. Photo by Bubba73)

Editor’s Note: With this exploration of the tension between privilege and vulnerability, we renew our collaboration with the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. In September 2020, a panel of local scholars responded to the current violence and racism in the US by connecting APA histories and struggles with those of other communities. Only by building alliances can such violence be stopped.

On Running Through an Unfamiliar Neighborhood the Day After Ahmaud Arbery’s...

Triage

October 28, 2021 - By J. Malcolm Garcia

Some names have been changed for privacy

After Kabul fell to the Taliban, I knew I could do little for my friends and colleagues, Hamid, Faiz, and Aman. Various NGOs and veterans' groups organized Dunkirk-like efforts online to extract Afghans, and their staff insisted they could still help. Time and again these organizations asked me to complete immigration forms for them, the same forms I had already submitted at the behest of other groups. But now, more than two months after Kabul fell, I receive few encouraging messages; those that do come in have mostly devolved into chest thumping, rote insistence that “the mission will continue.” I hoped it would. Yet I have concluded that, despite their best efforts and through no...

A Shade of Recognition

September 26, 2021 - By Peter I. Rose

(Photo: A bus stop in San Juan, PR; CC BY-SA 4.0)

On NPR the other day there was a story about sunny, hot, and sticky Los Angeles and the utter lack of shade trees in Watts and other Black and Latino neighborhoods in contrast to their profusion in nearby Beverly Hills and other upscale areas. Hearing this report brought back a vivid memory of an experience I had in Puerto Rico sixty years ago.

A very junior professor of sociology and anthropology in my third or fourth year of teaching, I was thrilled to get a consulting gig with the Social Science section of the Department of Health in San Juan. My boss was to be Ed Suchman, a former teacher of mine for whom I had also worked when I...

How to Talk to Your Parents About Politics: Part 2

September 3, 2021 - By Dominique Fong

Photo Credit: Marcela McGreal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Young Asian Americans describe how they’re coming to terms with political differences at the dinner table and in society

Tip #2: Understand the impact of traumas of the past

Johnny Trinh, a 23-year-old from Westminster, a southern Californian city with the country’s largest population of Vietnamese Americans, started to see how his parents' flight from the Vietnam War shaped who they are and made them cling to certain conservative messages. At first, he felt like they had no common ground, but over time, his criticism of their views softened. He became less quick to judge, and more eager to preserve what he could of...

How to Talk to Your Parents About Politics: Part 1

September 2, 2021 - By Dominique Fong

Photo Credit: Marcela McGreal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Young Asian Americans describe how they’re coming to terms with political differences at the dinner table and in society

When Jamie Gee joined a Black Lives Matter protest last year, the crowd marched peacefully through downtown Oakland until it got to the city’s Chinatown district, where Gee saw some people smashing windows and spraying graffiti on the walls of Chinese businesses.

“That was upsetting,” Gee said. “I could see they were actively hurting my community.” Soon after the protest, Gee, a 34-year-old middle school teacher who is Chinese...