AUSTIN, TEXAS. — Austin, Texas is known as a liberal haven in a famously red state. The city should be the ideal place for any progressive Texas voter participating in local elections.  But Thanh Bui, a 28-year-old community outreach manager with left-leaning political views, has struggled to identify with candidates in her city. Bui does not recall if she is a registered Democrat, but when she votes, she tends to vote for Democratic candidates because they better support government assistance programs, which include the food stamps her family depended on during her childhood. On the whol ..read more

About a year ago, I stood before the faculty and students of my psychology graduate program and declared, “Before I move on, I want to first acknowledge my own positionality as a Filipino American with an immigrant background who attended a private, predominantly white high school, as this very much informs my approach to my work”. Positionality statements such as this one have recently become a popular practice in the academic community. Positionality refers to the unique configuration of our different social identities (i.e. race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and many more ..read more

He had a horse and a pistol. He also had a house that was so big that when British soldiers raided it, apparently they got lost and couldn’t find a way out. At least that’s what my father’s eldest cousin, whom I call Tauji, says. My great-grandfather had enough love for his people and his country that he didn’t fear the British. Family lore says that when the British used to do blackouts in our village he would stand in front of the soldiers and demand that they cut off their own power, too. I was in India in November of 2019, visiting my grandfather in the nursing home where he lay sick. My s ..read more

The recent SCOTUS decisions to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions in favor of a so-called “colorblind” approach was hardly surprising. The right-wing majority has long promoted the lie that affirmative action discounts a person’s skills and potential and focuses only on racial identity as the deciding factor in college admissions. In reality, their preferred “colorblind” approach effectively ignores the role that race plays in shaping an applicant’s qualifications. But now that this has become the law of the land, advocates are readying themselves for how this decision will aff ..read more

An expansive, desolate wilderness. A lone, gleaming mansion on a hill. A family arrives at their palatial new abode, but spends more time casting haunted, far-off looks into the distance than luxuriating in the fineries that surround them.  From the beginning, A Great Divide has the key elements of a gothic tale – the kind rife with displacement, dark secrets, ominous surroundings, and the pursuit of love amid it all. But as it turns out, there actually isn’t much mystery to the story. The narrative focuses on a new-in-town Korean American family, and each of their struggles—both internal ..read more

Every spring I relive the fever dream of the college admissions cycle. “Didn’t you hear?” My mom will tell me of one of her students or an Auntie’s kid. Someone had gotten into Yale.  As the eldest daughter of two immigrants, I felt their anxiety around a quality education –  further multiplied by the fact that both my parents were math teachers. And for my senior year of high school, it seemed my entire future was hinged upon our standardized test scores and the number of Advanced Placement classes we were taking. It wasn’t just in my family; all the  Asian American students li ..read more

In the Vietnamese language, most words have only one syllable. Thus, although English-language speakers usually refer to the country using the multi-syllabic variant “Vietnam,” actual Vietnamese people refer to it as “Việt Nam,” a two-part compound that roughly translates to “Southern folk.” As a matter of personal preference, I configure it as “Viet Nam,” which more closely honors the way that I learned it and the way that my forebears would have favored. Sometimes I think about the fact that Robert Aaron Long carried out the 2021 Atlanta spa shooting on the fifty-third anniversary of the inf ..read more

I am from district Nha Be in Vietnam, just a bit outside of Saigon.  I immigrated to Minnesota with my two older brothers when I was 8 years old. My oldest brother arrived as a refugee with nothing and worked as a waiter to save up money for my parents’ plane tickets. In my family’s first house in Saint Paul, Minnesota, we rented out the top floor with an attic room, where I spent most of my time doing homework and chatting with my father. On chilly autumn days, I would sit there breathing in the smell of his cigarette and coffee, working on my homework, and listening to stories about Vie ..read more

In a powerful new study, NAPAWF (in partnership with Ibis Reproductive Health) reports that AANHPI women overwhelmingly support reproductive choice, but that sexual and reproductive health education on the safety and accessibility of abortion care options remains inaccessible to most AANHPI women. “With bans and restrictions to abortion care increasing across the country, AANHPI communities need more culturally sophisticated and language-appropriate information on sexual and reproductive health issues, and specifically about abortion.” “Medication abortion among AANHPIs: Knowledge, access, an ..read more

It’s Pride Month once again, but in the last year, things have become more grim for the LGBTQ+ community here in the US, and elsewhere in the world as well. Books depicting the existence of queer people have come under the attack of concerned parents and legislators hell-bent on “defending” heteronormalcy; drag queen story hours are getting banned; trans youths’ access to gender-affirming care has become the center of a monstrous moral panic. Overseas, the increasingly natalist Chinese government has forced the shutdown of queer community spaces both in the real world and the digital realm; an ..read more