Like the Olympics, it happens every four years. But you won’t see a lot of spandex at the convention of minority journalists called Unity, happening this week in Las Vegas.
You won’t see a lot of black journalists either.
Unless they’re gay.
For the first time, the National Association of Black J...
Get a good look. On Monday, the Joker appeared.
James Holmes, the alleged gunman at the Aurora Batman viewing, made his first appearance in court and through the media, the world stage.
He was silent, except for his red-dyed hair, and a flurry of facial expressions in response to a judge’s reading...
What’s up New York? In two weeks, the most marketable and best known Asian Americans in the country–hoop star Jeremy Lin and TV anchor Ann Curry–are given the boot from their Big Apple perch and we’re not supposed to take it personally as an affront to our sense of diversity?
It’s insanity.
That’s...
It’s one thing to celebrate patriotism and freedom on July Fourth. But by July 13th, patriotism has all the currency of your fireworks’ spent gunpowder. When the boom, the beer, and watermelon are gone, for most of us, our Fourth of July thoughts go back to being taken for granted.
If that’s not th...
After 30 years, the killer of Asian American icon Vincent Chin told me in an exclusive interview that the murder known as a hate crime, wasn’t about race, nor does he ever even remember hitting Chin with a baseball bat.
Incredible as that sounds, there is one thing Ronald Ebens is clear about.
Ebe...
Call it a cosmic coincidence that Rodney King–a victim of the most infamous police beating caught on video tape–died on Sunday. His death comes just a few months after the 20th anniversary of one of the main outcomes of his case–the six-day people’s uprising in Los Angeles, one the worst race riots ...
While Sunday will be for us dads, I always do a pre-Father’s Day on June 14 to remember my own late father.
June 14, 1978, was the day my Dad and I had our best moment ever: We took in a day game at Candlestick and the Giants won!
My dad had an immigrant’s passion for baseball. He loved the game a...
In 2009, Manny Pacquiao came into AT&T Park like a rock star to throw out the first pitch at a Giants game. It had to be San Francisco’s first all-Filipino battery with Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum, himself half-Filipino, behind the plate. When I had the chance to talk to Pacquiao afterwards, I was ...
Oy vey! Did you hear the one about how Asian Americans are the new Jews?
The idea has actually been kicking around for a few years now but has resurfaced in the preliminary stages leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing later this year in Fisher v. University of Texas, the latest threat to a...
That off-again, on-again morning meeting in San Jose between President Obama and a roundtable of Asian American business leaders represents the stark undemocratic reality of today’s politics.
Not only is it closed to the media, but the participants’ names are part of an exclusive list that hasn’t e...
“I disenchanted both sides,” said New Jersey Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman, as he wound up the sentencing hearing of Dharun Ravi, the 20-year-old Rutgers student who was convicted of bias intimidation for spying on his roommate Tyler Clementi.
Whether you were looking for a harsh and extreme se...
It’s cap and gown time, and along with it come thoughts that threaten to break apart Asian America. You’ll notice it when you are at your child’s commencement this graduation season (my Jillian, the rock star, gets her B.S. in Geology this week at San Francisco State, where the graduation speaker is...
The Asian American community has an umbrella problem. And maybe President Obama is the one to fix it.
If Toni Morrison can call Bill Clinton “America’s first black president” in 1998, then surely we can dub Barack Obama our nation’s “first Asian American president.”
Has there been another presiden...
As the weekend began, I had the good pleasure of talking to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee in a social setting (the Asian Law Caucus 40th anniversary dinner). I’ll say this for the Mayor. He’s far more charming and charismatic than the mainstream’s portrayal of him as some milk-toast bureaucrat.
Still,...
I guess U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. thought racial profiling just wasn’t sexy enough for the Supreme Court.
Or maybe it was too obvious.
And then I suppose when you get to the high court, you want to impress the justices with the finer points of constitutional law, which leads you t...
Here’s a trend I call “false hope” for xenophobes: What if all the foreign-born and their offspring actually pick up and go home?
Well, it’s not quite happening in such massive numbers that the Tea Party will choke on its good cheer. But it is happening enough to notice. I’m not talking about peopl...
Modern racism has evolved with the eruption of D.C. Councilman Marion Barry.
Can one still say overtly racist things about Asian Americans and get away with it?
Sure you can. And Barry’s exhibit A.
As he celebrated yet another landslide primary victory with supporters last week, Barry’s made a fe...
Next time a stupid disc jockey makes a joke about an Asian American’s accent or when someone goes to the buck-tooth “ah-so” route to describe an Asian immigrant, please don’t laugh and say, “Where’s your sense of humor, bud?”
Instead, remember our Asian American of the moment, One L. Goh.
Goh is t...
My dear mother hated broccoli. She was healthy without it. She lived among the hipsters in San Francisco’s SOMA district, only her perch was the senior housing at Clementina Towers. Mom never had much money. But boy, did she have health care.
“My health is my wealth,” she was fond of saying, and wh...
After the Dharun Ravi verdict, suddenly I’m nostalgic for the days when a noose was a noose, a hood was a hood, and a hate crime was a hate crime.
Was there ever a doubt in that grand old formula? Add one person of color. One protected minority. Voila. Justice.
We know how to fight all that.
But ...
