1 - For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall. From NY Times, an article describing how class differences are leading to greater gaps at college level for students. This is of course complicated by racial links, as more people of color are poorer than whites.
3 - LGBTQ People from India. "Often QPOC get ignored in favour of white people during conversations about gender and sexuality, so I guess this is my attempt to try and push for greater visibility of lesser known people of colour in the LGBTQ movement in other parts of the world and try to debunk the notion that LGBTQ movement is primarily a white one."
4 - Things not to say to Asians. Seriously. We're tired of this shit.
The affirmative action case in the US: I haven't read many articles on it yet, but man oh man. If they overturn affirmative action on the basis that "we don't need it anymore" or "it's unfair to white kids", I think I might throw up. There is still such a huge achievement gap between African American and Hispanic students with white or East Asian students and guess what, a lot of that is attributed to socioeconomic class. It's not because different ethnicities are inherently better or worse, it's that they don't have the same opportunities as white kids. Sorry, white girl who appealed to the Supreme Court about this, but I'm willing to bet that your job opportunities NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO TO SCHOOL will ALMOST ALWAYS be better than the Hispanic, African, Southeast Asian, or Native American kid. That's the white privilege kicking in. Poor whites might lose out on this, true, but I'm still pretty certain that their chances of success are still better than poor minorities if said minorities weren't offered that spot in the university. Racism is inherent in the system and we HAVE to fight this by giving our kids as many opportunities in education as we can. Affirmative action isn't perfect, but damnnit, it's still necessary.
Ruby Veridiano nurtures young women of color to challenge the fashion world and what it means to be beautiful, especially for Asian Americans. Amazing workshops!! I wish I could participate!
PSY is the Korean pop star who wrote the song Gangnam Style that mainstream US has caught on. Very interesting article about how Asian pop stars are having trouble breaking into mainstream US music (hint, it's because of the Asian stereotypes/caricatures in American society).
3 - ChristianMuslim
Check out this music video for "ChristianMuslim," written, recorded and performed by Jason Chu and Rah Zemos. It's a really cool hand-drawn stop-motion animation piece speaking out against violence and bloodshed between people who "believe that we're all God's children".
Essay by Kathy Zhang '11 on the Patriarchy in US society and how stereotyping of Asians as feminine and non-sexual came from the need to suppress the minorities to uphold the dominance of white supremacy. An excellent read.
This is one of my favorite TED talks. It's SO, SO important to teach kids now where their food comes from, especially with supermarkets everywhere and agriculture becoming less and less a tangible idea for kids growing up in the cities. It's not just about the feel-good urban agriculture of community gardens or farmers market, it's about knowing what goes into growing food and learning how to be self sufficient. If this generation of kids can't tell what the basic vegetable names are, society has a pretty huge problem on their hands once the current generation of farmers are gone. Everyone's gotta eat and someone has to grow the food.
Ever wondered what the point of doing art was, what benefits there are to participating in the arts, or how you might get involved? You've come to watch the right video!
I've been involved in a year long community arts project with the Centre of Multicultural Youth. The artist in residency project started off as focused on the very broad topics of building relationships between young people of color and art organizations, developing best practice models for art organizations, and ways to encourage families and young people to participate in art. Over a series of brainstorming sessions and discussions, we spoke a lot about of the role of art, identity and labeling, addressing social issues with art, skills developed during the process of art, challenges art practioners and organizations face, and more. Eventually, we narrowed down our focus to getting families and young people involved in the arts through examining why art is important. We interviewed a bunch of people over Nov 2011-Jan 2012 (including me!!) and came up with the short documentary video below. I'll shut up now and let you watch the video because it is AWESOME and speaks for itself.
The long term intention is to build on this short video and develop a feature length documentary on the many issues touched upon in this video. But for now, the goal is to get the word out to as many people as we can about this video. We're planning on distributing it to as many families and young people as we can. But they won't be our only target audience - it's important for city councils, community organizers, youth workers, and funding bodies to watch this video too. If you can forward it to your networks and get them to watch it, it will really help!
Professor, political scientist, author, Nation columnist, MSNBC host, and rising "nerdland" icon Melissa Harris-Perry addresses the members of the Class of 2012 and an international audience of their families and friends at Wellesley College's 134th Commencement Exercises on Friday, May 25, 2012. Some good words of advice for the women who will redefine success in the world.
This news on the anti-Asian violence in Philadelphia makes me so frustrated at the glossing over of racist violence by explanations of the marginalized black minority who are resentful of other minorities. Seriously?! There are so many problems with that argument.
Just because you had been wronged by other people does not give you the right to hurt others. That goes for ANY situation. Do onto others as you would like them to do onto you. Basic KINDERGARTEN principles.
The long history of injustice against the Africa American community is valid and it certainly can contribute towards the culture and perspective within the community, but it doesn’t mean that you can just wave that around like some magic excuse for everything. You have to treat this group of students as individual perpetrators of violence because that’s what it was.
The attitude of the superintendent ("These problems are long-standing and go beyond the school and into the community") pretty much puts the blame and responsibility away from the school administration and onto the shoulders of the community, which isn’t right. Schools have just as much responsibility, if not more because of how many years are spent in school, to properly EDUCATE the kids on what’s right and what’s wrong, including racism.
The comments about the difference between the perspective of African American students and Asian immigrant students have some truth to them, but I think the "model minority" stereotype of the hard-working academic Asian student tends to be of the East Asian background. There are plenty of Southeastern Asians from refugee backgrounds who probably don’t fit all too well with that "optimistic outlook" of America as the land of limitless opportunity. That being said though, I do think that to succeed, marginalized people of every sort need to step out of the self destructive cycle of race and learn to "grab a helping hand [rather than] pull others down". It doesn’t do anyone any good to just sit and complain or lash out against others who have it "better". There are always going to be barriers and obstacles, but unless you take them on with determination, optimism, and willingness to work hard, you won’t get far.
I must laud the activists who got the Asian students to boycott and stand up for the injustice. There are times when you just power through it and times when you have to fight, and it was definitely a time to fight. I really am disappointed by the superintendent’s silence on all this racist violence. What happened to educators taking a role in shaping the kids’ future? What kind of example is this setting for the kids?
