New Racecar Report in honor of my birthday today! I’m a couple of chapters into The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, by Ellen D. Wu. Ever wondered why the infamously racist Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, aka less than 30 years before I was born, […]
Earlier this week was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, formerly known as Columbus Day. But even though that “holiday” is over, guess what? Every single day, I’m still living and working on lands stolen from the Tongva people. So it seemed only appropriate to continue listening to the audiobook of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United […]
Hi friends, thought I’d try something new. You know I always try to share my learning with you from the books and conferences that are major milestones in my racial justice journey — but there are also so many smaller steps along the way, so many valuable articles and resources that help me try to […]
In tribute to Toni Morrison who passed away this week, I am finally sharing a story I’ve been trying to tell for a year — about how reading Beloved last summer unlocked a part of me that had been deliberately locked away for 30 years.
Greetings from midair. Today I’m flying to visit my mom in Florida. She’s a snowbird these days, living not far from where we would visit my grandparents and various other aged relatives every winter, not to mention a certain Mouse. So I used to think I knew something about the state. “Florida is IN the […]
I have so much to learn. I’ve spent decades reading voraciously, even compulsively… sneaking out of bed to huddle by the nightlight devouring the Chronicles of Narnia (sorry, Mom), getting my B.A. in Russian history and literature, becoming mildly obsessed with the personal narratives of South Pole explorers, reading Harry Potter side-by-side in English and […]
My aunt still teases me about the first time she met me, before she got engaged to my uncle. Apparently, three-year-old me arrived at a family party in Boston, in the depths of winter, in a full-on hissy fit because my mother forgot my patent leather party shoes so I was doomed to wear ugly […]
60-second video review: Spike Lee’s movie BlackkKlansman brilliantly calls white women and Jewish people (hey, those are me!) into the struggle against white supremacy. P.S. apologies for the background noise, but it does sometimes rain in L.A.!
I just finished the audiobook of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. I wanted to change up my racial justice commute time, because honestly sometimes it’s hard to feel like I want to immerse myself in a nonfiction book that’s gonna hit me with fact after fact after fact of the history and current […]
What I just learned about race here in my car while listening to The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist: slave-grown cotton in Massachusetts and the truth about zombies.