Category: Blog

Categories
Blog

The Bamboo Ceiling in the Tech Sector Is a Story About Race

Recent reports indicating a lack of racial and gender diversity at major tech companies like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, among others, have rekindled discussion among Asian Americans about a phenomenon known as the bamboo ceiling. The bamboo ceiling is the Asian equivalent of the glass ceiling, that invisible yet all too consequential barrier that prevents women from rising to executive positions in public and private sector employment.

The reason for all the talk is that, while African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are underrepresented in tech sector employment, Asian Americans aren’t. In fact, we’re over-represented.

Asian Americans … Read more “The Bamboo Ceiling in the Tech Sector Is a Story About Race”

Categories
Blog

The Racial Justice Movement Needs a Model Minority Mutiny

 

It had cost me twelve years of my time,
to realize what a nickel and dime,
hustler I had really been,
while the real hustlers are ripping off billions,
from the unsuspecting millions,
who are programmed to think they can win. 

– Lightnin Rod, Hustlers Convention, 1973

Hip hop emerged in spite of the brutal logic of capitalism, out of centuries-old traditions, to insist upon and amplify black voices and black political consciousness. But as Brittney Cooper, Questlove, and Jeff Chang have recently pointed out, it has been exploited to the point that black cool now serves as transnational currency … Read more “The Racial Justice Movement Needs a Model Minority Mutiny”

Categories
Blog

State Power and Police Violence in Ferguson

In my last post, I recalled an incident that occurred decades ago in Hawai’i. In that incident, I was assaulted by police officers on my 18th birthday. I assume I was targeted because I lived in a small town where I had developed a reputation as a trouble-maker. I opened the door to violence by resisting arrest by asserting my rights.

The cops involved in this incident were white, and they were acting on a description of a perpetrator that was so loose as to invite the kind of harassment I faced: “young, black hair, brown eyes, some kind of … Read more “State Power and Police Violence in Ferguson”

Categories
Blog

Calling for a Model Minority Mutiny: #fergusonoctober

Your silence will not protect you – Audre Lorde

The almost daily news reports of police brutality toward African Americans, and the #fergusonoctober mobilization had me thinking about my 18th birthday. I know that probably sounds pretty random, but bear with me.

My 18th birthday presents included a case of beer split among friends (18 was still the legal drinking age in Hawai’i in that year), and a beat down at the hands of police officers who stopped me on my walk home from the party. The beating I took was so brutal that I was physically unable to speak … Read more “Calling for a Model Minority Mutiny: #fergusonoctober”

Categories
Blog

Welcome to the Hunger Games: Ferguson, Gentrification, and Power

I wrote a post about Ferguson earlier in the week that got me thinking of The Hunger Games. Not the movies. I mean the books. You can call them “Young Adult” if you like, but I loved those books. And now, I feel like the author, Suzanne Collins, may be a prophet.

Play along with me for a minute. The Hunger Games is set in a dystopian future land called Panem. The center of Panem is a wealthy capitol city surrounded in concentric circles by 12 districts, each poorer and browner than the last. In order to maintain order, … Read more “Welcome to the Hunger Games: Ferguson, Gentrification, and Power”

Categories
Blog

What Goes Down in Ferguson is an Asian American Concern – In Fact, It’s a 99% Issue

Precariat: A social class defined by the shared experience of precarity, a condition of existence without predictability or stability, particularly as pertains to employment and economic security

What the news media has euphemistically referred to as the “situation” in Ferguson, Missouri is driving home a point that too many of us have managed to miss before Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The Black body count resulting from police actions against unarmed African Americans is mounting. To view the situation as merely tragic (if, indeed, one can rightly put “merely” and “tragic” together) is to downplay the broad scope of … Read more “What Goes Down in Ferguson is an Asian American Concern – In Fact, It’s a 99% Issue”

Categories
Blog

Fox’s “Cashin’ In” Cashes In on Japanese Internment

Yeah, you read that headline right. Over the weekend, Eric Bolling, the host of Fox News’ Cashin’ In went to Michelle Malkin-land and justified criminal profiling of Muslims based upon the notion that sending pretty near every Japanese American on the U.S. mainland (120,000+ people) and not a few in Hawai’i to prison camps in WWII contributed to the success of the U.S. war effort. According to Bolling, “we know how to find terrorists among us: profile, profile, profile.”

Doubling down on that sentiment, panelist Jonathan Hoenig said:

…Let’s take a trip down memory lane here: the last … Read more “Fox’s “Cashin’ In” Cashes In on Japanese Internment”

Categories
Blog

13 Years After 9/11: A Reflection on Resilience

 I came of age in post 9/11 America like many other people around the United States. On September 11, 2001, I was working as a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, and living close enough to the Pentagon that the smoke burning from the building was visible from my apartment balcony in Arlington, Virginia for days. It’s safe to say that I felt, as so many did around the nation, that everything changed on September 11, 2001.

For me, the months that followed were a call to action. Like others of South Asian, Arab, … Read more “13 Years After 9/11: A Reflection on Resilience”

Categories
Blog

The Prophet of Ferguson

…The truth is that this country does not know what to do with its black population now that the blacks are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred like cattle; and they especially do not know what to do with young black men…It is not accidental that the jails and the army and the needle claim so many, but there are still too many prancing about for the public comfort. Americans will, of course, deny, with horror, that they are dreaming of anything like “the final solution” – those Americans, that … Read more “The Prophet of Ferguson”

Categories
Blog

Book Review: Giovanni’s Room

Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins…

I was reminded of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room when it appeared on my favorite independent bookseller’s list of 25 Books to Read Before You Die. I’d read Giovanni’s Room years ago, along … Read more “Book Review: Giovanni’s Room”