Author: Soya Jung

Soya has been active in the progressive movement for over 30 years. During the 1990s she worked as a reporter at the International Examiner, communications and policy staff for the WA State House Democratic Caucus, and executive director of the Washington Alliance for Immigrant and Refugee Justice. She was the founding chair of the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition, which formed in 1996 to restore food and cash assistance for low-income immigrants and refugees in Washington State. During the 2000s she worked at the Social Justice Fund, a public foundation supporting progressive organizations in the Northwest, and consulted for various institutions like the Western States Center, the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, the Nonprofit Assistance Center, the City of Seattle, and the Washington State Budget & Policy Center.

At ChangeLab Soya has authored two research reports: "Left or Right of the Color Line: Asian Americans and the Racial Justice Movement" and "The Importance of Asian Americans? It’s Not What You Think", and co-authored the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit. She has convened numerous public events uniting scholars with social movement activists to explore race, gender, war/empire, and Asian American identity. Her writing has been published in Othering & Belonging: Expanding the Circle of Human Concern, and cited in places like the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, ColorLines, and The Guardian.

Categories
Blog

Asian American Reflections on Martin Luther King Day

Like many others, my Asian American story begins in war. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, my father was a young man studying in Seoul, and my mother a 13-year-old girl. They both largely insist that they experienced no suffering. Yet a different truth emerges from my mother’s references to using helmets of dead soldiers that littered the ground as cooking vessels, or my father’s stories of being arrested numerous times for his leftist political activity.

It was only in my 30s, when I began interviewing my parents, that I was able to begin piecing together their stories, … Read more “Asian American Reflections on Martin Luther King Day”

Categories
Blog

“How I Met Your Mother” is Part of a Bigger Problem

 

Like so many, I was dismayed to learn through this Twitterstorm of outrage about the latest yellow-face antics to show up in U.S. pop culture. It’s a long running, ugly pattern. The underrepresentation of Asian Americans in film and television is bad enough without white performers exploiting warped, racist ideas about Asian cultures. The show’s creators apologized, but it doesn’t erase the cumulative damage of historic anti-Asian racism

And TV and film are only the tip of the iceberg. Coverage of Asian Americans in U.S. political media is dismal too. ChangeLab started tackling this problem by analyzing mainstream … Read more ““How I Met Your Mother” is Part of a Bigger Problem”

Categories
Blog

A Word on Amy Chua

When I first saw the New York Post’s scathing review of Amy Chua’s new book, The Triple Package, the phrase “triple threat” immediately came to mind. Surely Chua’s PR hawks would’ve warned her off using the word “threat” to describe select, successful, largely immigrant “cultural groups.” After all, today’s white U.S. workers are rightfully anxious about the future, but wrongfully suspicious of “the other”– undocumented workers, Muslims, China as a whole, young black women who knock on the door asking for help… But I believe “threat” would’ve been a more honest word choice.

I haven’t read the book, nor am … Read more “A Word on Amy Chua”

Categories
Blog

About This Twitter Thingamajig… #NotYourAsianSidekick

The recent explosion of online conversation addressing Asian American feminism has been at turns exhilarating, frustrating, challenging, and affirming. #NotYourAsianSidekick went globally viral at lightning speed, shining a bright light on the stunning lack of space for Asian American feminist public discourse challenging all aspects of white supremacy, and the intense hunger for it.

Many things were spinning in my head as I stared at my phone late last night desperately trying to catch up with what had happened, what was happening. My head itself was spinning at the speed at which the conversation had expanded. Dang, how do people … Read more “About This Twitter Thingamajig… #NotYourAsianSidekick”

Categories
Blog

The NYPD: A “New Low” That’s Not So New

Recently news broke of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) unbridled, secret surveillance of Muslim communities and organizations, monitoring intimate aspects of people’s lives and designating entire mosques as terrorist organizations without evidence. I reacted to this with a familiar combination of rage and fatigue.

In an interview on Huffington Post, Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York expressed a similar lack of surprise, while calling these police practices a “new low.”

The NYPD’s approach to counterterrorism policing seems to start from a place that all Muslims are inherently suspect, raising serious civil rights and safety … Read more “The NYPD: A “New Low” That’s Not So New”

Categories
Blog

The Origins of “gook”

I was walking down the streets of downtown Seattle with a friend the other day when I heard the word “gook” directed at me for the first time in many years. A small group of young Black men were standing by the wall. As far as I could tell, one of them was on some confused, pseudo-Black nationalist diatribe while another was videotaping him. As we walked by, he shouted, “…Death to whitey! …And to all gooks too!”

After about half a stride, I looked back at him, and we made eye contact for one moment – one seemingly infinite … Read more “The Origins of “gook””

Categories
Blog

Racism is Like Cell Phones

 

I might’ve become one of those people who buy into the whitewashing hype that race no longer matters in America. Having grown up in the environment in which I did, if I ever commented on racism, people would typically dismiss it with, “Don’t be so touchy.” Racism was a thing of the past. The End. As I wrote in an earlier post, as a young person, I had few tools to understand my own racial oppression as anything more than a hangup that I needed to get over. If I hadn’t met the remarkable racial justice organizers that I … Read more “Racism is Like Cell Phones”

Categories
Blog

Where I Come From

White supremacy works best when we’re isolated from each other. When I ask people where their politics come from, it’s because I’m hoping to find something in common, those places of overlap in how our hearts and minds are constructed, and the political commitments rooted therein. As uncomfortable as it is, it’s in this spirit that I offer some of my back-story here. I hope others will do the same.

It should come as no surprise that as a kid, I was marked as different in the ways that many Asians growing up in white America experience;  name-calling, eyelid pulling, … Read more “Where I Come From”

Categories
Blog

What Is White Supremacy, Anyway?

This Saturday, ChangeLab and OneAmerica are hosting an event in Seattle called The Past, Present & Future of Multiracial Solidarity. In preparation, I thought I’d offer my take on how white supremacy works, and some thoughts on what solidarity requires of us.

Just to be clear, by white supremacy, I don’t mean the KKK. I mean the set of ideas and beliefs that creates and enforces whiteness as the dominant norm.

No one has taught me more about white supremacy than Andrea Smith. Her scholarship led me to see not a single system of racial oppression, but what she … Read more “What Is White Supremacy, Anyway?”

Categories
Blog

Neoliberals and Neocons: What’s the difference, and why should I care?

Too often in the world of social justice, we assume ours is the only movement at work. But there are always opposing movements, organizing and strategizing to advance right wing worldviews. When we don’t pay attention, we fail to see the power of these movements until it’s too late, in the “end-debates” of policy change when we’re in a defensive scramble.

In 1996 President Clinton enacted sweeping and punitive changes to welfare laws. In doing so, he fulfilled one of the core goals of the Contract With America. For those who don’t remember, that was the conservative agenda touted by … Read more “Neoliberals and Neocons: What’s the difference, and why should I care?”