Inspired by pad krapao
PSA to make sure your dad doesn't use a marker to fill out his mail-in ballot (true story 🤦🏻♀️). Again no prompt, but if you have any good book recommendations, send them our way!
Also, if you enjoy reading this, please share it with your friends (or whoever you think may also like it!)
<3 Melinda and Jamie
News
🐦 According to a study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, in the 12 hours after Trump's first tweet about his COVID-19 diagnosis, "there was an 85 percent increase in anti-Asian language and conspiracy theories" on Twitter. The data was gathered using ADL's Online Hate Index (OHI), which uses machine learning to analyze hate speech on social media, and the analysis was done on over 2.7 million tweets "between 8 p.m. UTC on Oct. 2 through 9 p.m. UTC on Oct. 5."
🗳️ In a study on 6 years of voting for CA state assembly, Professor Sara Sadhwani found that "overall Asian American turnout is boosted when another Asian American is on the ballot, regardless of political party." Indians had the highest mobilization rate among all the ethnic groups she studied. So, Kamala Harris being on VP candidate might generate more voter participation from the Asian community. According to AAPI Data, support for Kamala went up 11% before the 2016 primary (senate race) when Asian American voters in CA were told that Kamala is half Asian American.
Source: AAJC
🔵 In Nov. 2016, I remember watching the TV in my Freshman year dorm's common room at Penn... Trump won by 44,000 votes in Pennsylvania. But the Asian American vote could swing the state back to blue. According to APIAVote, there are ~500K AAPIs in PA, with about 250K eligible to vote (4% of the electorate). The President of APIAVote noted that candidates need to dedicate more outreach efforts to the AAPI community, as they are becoming a sizable constituency.
The president of Chalo Vote, which aims to increase civic engagement among South Asians in PA, says that for AAPI communities, there's a "lack of awareness of how politics can affect our everyday lives, lack of familiarity with the system, and lack of trust in the political system." Of course, language poses a barrier especially to older folks and more recent immigrants. (Also did anyone else know that the Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Trainings exist in 13 AAPI languages...)
📜 US Justice Department sues Yale over discrimination against Asian American applicants. A previous suit was filed against Harvard earlier this year.
😪
Culture
Ok sooo... Clearly we don't try to keep politics out of this newsletter, so for the past few days, I've been hearing about the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Of course, there is quite a bit of information there to talk about alone, but it got me thinking back to our very first newsletter where we covered a bit of Asian American history. In the og culture section, we briefly mentioned some notable court cases, including People v. Hall, In re Ah Yup, US v. Bhagat Singh Thind, and Takao Ozawa v. US, and Korematsu v. US. I remembered that there was a case Oyama v. California that we came across during our research for that piece but didn't include, but I looked into it a bit, and mAN WILD.
In 1934, Kajiro Oyama, a Japanese immigrant who was not eligible for citizenship under the Nationality Acts and Ozawa, had purchased 6 acres of land in Chula Vista, CA under his son's name as a guardian. In 1942, they were removed from their land in California to internment camps in Utah. Come 1945 (one year after Korematsu upheld internment), Kajiro and Fred, his 16 year old US-born son, wanted to transfer parcel to avoid state seizure (because the land had not been "occupied" since the Oyamas were forbidden to return).
Source: San Diego Tribune (The Oyama family)
Background, California's Alien Land Laws, in effect since 1913, prohibited the ownership of land for Japanese and other Asian immigrants "ineligible for citizenship". Without the ability to own property, first-generation immigrants often were forced to "lease land, join with white partners in corporations to hold the land or place title in the name of their [second gen] children, who were citizens" (Robinson). For years, parents were able to circumvent the law by holding the land in trust for their citizen children, but the Japanese internment changed the situation.
Cases against land transfers between parent and child were brought to court with the argument that even if ownership was legal for the citizens, the transfer from non-citizen to citizen violated the ALA. The Oyamas filed suit against the Alien Land Act with the help of the Japanese American Citizens League and the ACLU.
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision in favor of the Oyamas. They could keep the land, for denying the right to property denied Fred's equal protection and "privileges as an American citizen". The majority opinion concerned the rights of American citizens primarily (though noteworthy is the lack of discussion on non-citizen's property rights), but concurring opinions were filed on the premise that race-based discrimination was also unconstitutional. While it did not strike the Alien Land Act down, it set the stage for repeal in 1952.
Source: ACLU
Rarely discussed, Oyama v. California was also important because it "paved an important path towards fulfilling the promise of equality in property ownership enshrined in Shelley v. Kraemer", in which the court ruled to strike down racially restrictive housing covenants under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment (Villazor).
I'm not surprised that I didn't know about this case, but dang... there's a lot to unpack there. On a more timely note, I'm always struck by how history overlaps, and something that got me was that both Biden and Trump were alive when this case was argued in front of the Supreme Court. A lot of the AAPI communities that I'm a part of tend to perceive this type of thing in the "past", but really... it's not that far off from where we are now, and I think it would be good to remember that.
Sources (+ whatever we hyperlinked):
Robinson, Greg. Oyama v. California. (2020, October 5). Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:57, October 13, 2020, from https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Oyama v. California.
Villazor, R. C. (2010). Rediscovering Oyama v. California: at the intersection of property, race, and citizenship. Washington University Law Review, 87(5), 979+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A238426230/AONE?u=upenn_main&sid=AONE&xid=8aa984df
Small Feelings
I dropped a class and I feel bad about it because it was a class I really wanted to stay in ugh. I feel really guilty about this because there's this little voice in my head saying that I should have just been able to suck up the workload and take it, but with everything going on I was consistently staying up until 2am, which is just not sustainable. I know I made the right choice, but there's definitely a part of me that is really shitting on myself being "weak" or "unproductive". (aww no it's ok it's your senior year that's totally fine, also the state of this country is already like so draining...)
I had a few moments during work where I felt like I wasn't being supported enough... like I'm still the new grad, I don't think I should lead this launch if I've only been here for 1.5 months?! I mean I can go "figure things out", but my rotational program didn't make it seem like I'd lead something so soon... the previous person on the product has way more context than me, but she handed over the responsibilities to me without telling me... eh it's fine. overall there's so much to dig into, and virtual onboarding is still overwhelming. otherwise, I genuinely think I'm doing well at work.. I could be doing "more" but idk I'm already quite busy, and it's hard to find the additional energy when it's not in the office...
✨ S P O T L I G H T ✨
Source: politico.com, by M. Scott Mahaskey
Saikat Chakrabarti
Activist, Former Chief of Staff to AOC, Former Software Engineer
It's AOC's birthday as I write this, so I guess that helped me choose who to spotlight this time! Saikat Chakrabarti was the chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez until last year, but he definitely did not start off in politics.
Saikat grew up in Forth Worth, Texas in a Bengali-American immigrant family. The now 34-year-old got a computer science degree at Harvard, then worked at a hedge fund (Bridgewater Associates lol). He switched into the tech world, starting as the 3rd engineer at Stripe, the payment processor, and co-founding Mockingbird, a website/app-building tool. After ~6 years, he got disillusioned by tech (though he made millions from it) and joined Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2015. He didn't have a master plan to move from tech to politics - it was more "a series of exploratory steps" according to his friend.
In 2017, he co-founded Brand New Congress with the mission to launch "progressive candidates in congressional races"—one of them was AOC. In 2019, he left AOC's campaign to be President of New Consensus to promote the Green New Deal. But apparently, there was some suspicion around why he left... The same year, he was on POLITICO Playbook's Power List of 2019.
He seems to be "building a generational movement... to produce not just congressional wins, but broad cultural change backed up by a movement, outriders, and cultural icons," according to this Atlantic article. Interesting...
oh lmaoooooo he aLSO has a substack - https://buildingthedream.substack.com/
Chef's Specials
🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day was this past Sunday, and we wanted to share this article on how Asian languages literally don't have the vocabulary for "LGBTQ" - phrases/words may be euphemisms, slurs, or simply nonexistent. 😕 Using only English words "reinforce[s] this idea that queerness is a Western idea," Amina Mohammad says. But fortunately, communities are creating terms to "positively reflect LGBTQ people." ❤️ ←bruh rt
💸 Forbes just published America's Self-Made Women of 2020, and we have Thai Lee (CEO of IT provider SHI International; $3.2B net worth), Eren Ozmen (President of Sierra Nevada Corporation; $1.2B net worth), Jayshree Ullal (President/CEO of Arista Networks; $1.2B net worth), Peggy Cherng (co-CEO of Panda Express; $1.1B net worth), Neerja Sethi (Co-Founder of Syntel Inc; $1B net worth), Neha Narkhede (Co-Founder and former CTO of Confluent; $600M net worth), and more.
🎙️ I listen to Today, Explained almost every day and only today I looked up what Sean Rameswaram looks like (he has a good voice and makes podcast ads bearable). i think a “podcast bubble” is so funny lmao like whO? is there a newsletter bubble?? (probably)
🍤 I recently rediscovered how much I like shrimp-flavored chips...
Events
Wednesday, Oct 14, 6pm ET (in 30 min!):Join the last event of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucaus's AAPI bus tour at the Pennsylvania AAPI Early Vote Rally w/ "Andrew Yang, Ai-jen Poo, Congressman Ted Lieu, Congressman Mark Takano, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, Congressman Andy Kim, Dr. Nina Ahmad, Philadelphia City Councilmember Helen Gym, and PA AAPI Co-Chairs Anna Perng and Brad Baldia".
Wednesday, Oct. 14, 7pm ET: National Honors: Muslims Making Change by Muslim Advocates (Joe Biden is talking at this, along with a lot of really cool speakers) - get your free ticket!
Saturday, Oct. 17, 4-5pm ET: Book talk: "Chinatown Pretty features beautiful portraits and heartwarming stories of trend-setting seniors across six Chinatowns located in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Vancouver."
Election Day, November 3rd:Sign up to staff your local polling place!