by Guest Contributor Jenn, originally published at Reappropriate
[October 14th] was a very big day for America’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In conjunction with a Diwali celebration, President Obama signed an executive order that reestablished an advisory committee and a White House initiative on Asian American and Pacific Islanders. The advisory committee was first [...]

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
For a review of Part 1, click here
No way around it: Latino In America was a failure.
At the very least, Thursday’s conclusion, “Chasing The Dream,” seemed equal parts melodrama and bait-and-switch, with the broadcast component weakened by a lack of questions that undercut even its’ more compelling segments.
For instance, [...]

by Guest Contributor Kiana, originally posted at ProperTalks and Postourgie

Sundance’s Brick City is the only reality TV show worth watching this week. The street soldiers, sheroes and heroes of Newark New Jersey along with Mayor Cory Booker are all attempting to renew Newark’s urban landscape but they are up against the city’s infamous reputation, [...]

by Guest Contributor Bao Phi, originally published at Your Voices/The Star Tribune

UP IN ARMS: A Night of Hip Hop and Spoken Word to Honor Fong Lee and End Police Brutality
Saturday, October 3rd, 8 p.m. (doors at 7:30)
Kagin Commons at Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105
Featuring performances by Magnetic North (NY), Nomi of Power [...]

by Special Correspondent Fatemeh Fakhraie
At the airport bookstore, I immediately overlooked Bruce Willis’ and Emma Hemings’ smoldering stares on the cover of this month’s W. My attention went directly to the top left: “Meet the Neighbors: the Persian Conquest of Beverly Hills.”
Knowing the history of glossies and their historic portrayal of racial ethnicities more as [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published at Comment is Free

For Canada’s First Nations communities, being denied our basic and fundamental human rights is, sadly, not at all a surprise. So after last week’s report that the Canadian government had postponed the delivery of much-needed alcohol-based hand sanitisers to reserve communities with massive outbreaks of [...]

by Guest Contributor (and regular commenter) Jha

Steampunk! Variously described as an aesthetic, a genre within scifi/fantasy that sprouted from cyberpunk, and a subculture vaguely related to the goth counter-culture. Like many other things with vague origins and a tenuous identity that overlaps with others, it is hard to pin down what steampunk is.
The only that [...]

by Latoya Peterson

These are the notes for “ Desi Webs: South Asian America, Online Cultures, and the Politics of Race.” The notes are from a paper by Madhavi Mallapragada, presented at the Texas A & M University Race and Ethnic Studies Institute’s Symposium exploring Race, Ethnicity and (New) Media.
Resist identifying South Asians as a knowable [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published at Rabble

Ed. Note: Jessica wrote this in response to Canadian border patrol agents being armed in Akwesasne. This article gives a summary of the situation:

A respected security and anti-terrorism expert says Canada’s federal government should stand by its guns and ignore threats from Mohawk militants in [...]

by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse
Since I’ve been living in Brazil, I have suffered from memory loss. On occasion, I simply forget that I am black.
Let me explain . . .
I was born in the United States, in the South to be exact, during the early 1980s, to a mother with very fair skin who, along [...]

by Latoya Peterson
I came across an interesting piece on Boing Boing where the author is trying to reconcile his gentrified reality.
In “Your Money or Your Life: A Lesson on the Front Stoop,” Douglas Rushkoff recounts being mugged in his neighborhood. The experience jarred him for a variety of reasons:

In the meantime, I posted a [...]

by Guest Contributor Krista, originally published at Muslim Lookout

Be prepared for some major eye-rolling in this article from the Calgary Herald. In it, Mahfooz Kanwar praises Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (see here for why this is a bad idea), and berates Canadians that he perceives as not having “assimilated” enough. A Muslim originally [...]

by Guest Contributor Geo, originally published at Prometheus Brown
A little over a decade ago, this documentary changed my life.
It was the first time I had seen or heard about Manong Al Robles, longtime community organizer, activist, writer — a pillar in the Fil-Am and API community in San Francisco. He not only narrates this [...]

by Guest Contributor Geo, originally published at Prometheus Brown

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee
My inbox was abuzz yesterday with news of the Pope’s admission that he was “sorrowful” for what happened to residential school survivors; which came as a result of the much anticipated visit to the Vatican by a delegation from the Assembly of First Nations here in Canada.
Sorrowful. But not sorry. Is [...]