Kamala Harris did THAT. She, a black and South Asian woman, sat on that stage for 90 minutes and reminded the nation, especially Mike Pence, that she deserves to be in the global political arena and to be the Vice President of the United States.

Kamala Harris sat through interruptions, mansplaining, and a moderator who failed (and didn’t try very hard) to keep Mike Pence in line. And as the debate continued, tweets like this skyrocketed in likes and retweets:

Yesterday, NBC Asian America published an article titled “Rep. Judy Chu: How to talk about China’s role in pandemic in racially sensitive way.” The article reports that Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif), chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, released a “toolkit” for fellow lawmakers to “push back on rising anti-Asian bias, offering suggestions on how to discuss China’s role in the pandemic.” …

Many social movements, non-profit organizations, and philanthropic endeavors frame their work from a deficit-based approach, especially when their work surrounds issues of identity and inequality. A deficit-based approach is focused on filling a need, fixing a problem, resourcing the underresourced. It asks the question “What is missing that we must go find?” Contrary to a deficit-based approach is an asset-based approach, which is focused on creating opportunity and leveraging the strengths of a community. It asks the question “What is present that we can build upon?”

For example, consider a non-profit organization that provides workshops and trainings in corporate settings…

A much-discussed issue in Silicon Valley is gentrification. The effects of the growing tech bubble on the Bay Area’s culture and more permanent populations have been the subject of academic analysis, popular news coverage, and casual conversation alike. I, like many others, have seen it play out in front of my own eyes.

I’ve written about the observations I’ve made about the divide between profitable downtown tech companies and the populations I work with (Title 1 middle schools in South San Francisco). A recent experience I had at work only affirmed those observations.

As I’ve mentioned before, the organization I…

On Thursday, January 2, 2020, Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was killed in an airstrike ordered by President Trump near Baghdad airport. The Pentagon confirmed the attack, writing that Soleimani was “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region” (NPR).

The timeline leading up to the fatal airstrike provides a fuzzy glimpse into the reasoning behind it. On Friday, December 27, militia group Kataib Hezbollah, which has ties to Iran, attacked the K1 military base near Kirkuk, Iraq, killing an American contractor and wounding several Iraqi and American personnel. Trump responded with a…

The Vietnamese-American ghost writer, blogger, and social media extraordinaire (give or take) from the popular Netflix series “Bojack Horseman,” whose final episodes will premiere at the end of January on the streaming platform, is one of two humans in the cast of primary characters in a show filled with anthropomorphic animals. And yet, despite her not being an animal, she is my spirit animal. And not only that, but she changed me for the better.

Diane Nguyen, like all of the major characters on the show, is well fleshed out. She is dynamic with distinguishable flaws and strengths that sometimes…

“Claire, why are there no black people who work here?”

I got this question last week from a 12-year-old African American girl who participates in the after school program I work for. We take our students on field trips to companies in their city, where they get to tour the company, meet some of the employees, and participate in a skill-building workshop facilitated by our program staff. In San Francisco, the vast majority of companies my organization partners with are tech companies, the most notable of which are Google, Facebook, and Salesforce.

My organization only works with Title 1 schools…

I went to Berkeley. That sentence alone already contains some implications about who I am as a person. Probably very progressive, probably angry about the various forms of injustice that plague our society, probably very self-righteous and opinionated and cares a lot about respecting people’s preferred pronouns. And I hereby admit: all those things are, in fact, true about me. I came from a very small, very conservative community in Arizona. So conservative that when I made the mistake of vocalizing my pro-choice viewpoints to my 9th grade classmates, one girl told me she hated me and could never respect…