When asked at one of his press events if he’d heard the assertion that Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was not eligible to serve, President Donald Trump replied with this: “But that’s a very serious, you’re saying that, they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country.”

Senator Harris is a Black and Asian American woman, born in Oakland, California, a citizen by birth of the United States. Her mother was an immigrant from India and her father an immigrant from Jamaica when they met as grad students at the University of California, Berkeley in…

What’s At Stake

Data shows that in 2018, turnout among women of color increased 37% from the 2014 midterms. That ushered in such diverse lawmakers as Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first woman of Palestinian descent in Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is Muslim, and Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland, the first Native American women in Congress. The numbers of African American, Latino, and Asian American women have also increased on Capitol Hill.

In the upcoming election cycle, besides the commander in chief, women of color votes could flip the Senate, yield another sweep of House Congressional races, as well as…

Through her essays in publications like Catapult, author and science journalist Angela Chen has been asking readers to question what we know about sex, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Chen identifies as asexual and frequently writes about that identity in her work, showing us that there is no right or wrong way to be asexual. In her debut book, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Chen tells us, “There is no one asexual (or ace) story and no book can capture all of ace experience.” …

We further the system of injustice against Black people through our actions, and in Thao’s case, our inaction.

On May 27, along with millions of other Americans, I watched the gut-wrenching footage of George Floyd losing consciousness as White officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck.

Those were the headlines: “White Officer Kills Black Man.” Headlines that we’ve heard countless times before. But until I watched the raw footage of the horrifying incident, I wasn’t aware that an Asian police officer stood by for nearly 10 minutes as Floyd slowly lost his life.

The footage was terrifying for…

As an Asian American teenage girl, I never saw myself in movies as the main character and rarely read books where Asian Americans were even mentioned. Asian American activist books? Even less.

I have always wanted to be better informed as a social activist, especially about issues facing Asian Americans. Asian American history is rarely taught in American K-12 classrooms. If it is, it mostly glosses over only the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and internment of Japanese Americans.

I also want to learn more to be a better ally. There is so much intersectionality in social activism, and as a…

The “model minority” myth that supposedly privileges Asians in the United States compared to other social and ethnic minorities has been exposed for what it is: a sham of thinly veiled tolerance that fell apart at the hint of a threat. The coronavirus pandemic has effectively revealed what Asian Americans have always inherently known: We are the “other.”

I am from a country that considers the coronavirus Chinese — a country that I do not currently live in nor identify with enough to return.

My story of how I came to the United States starts with my parents. My mom…

My mother was raised in a house surrounded by fruit trees. In the summer, the trees would grow thick with mangos, guavas, bananas — there were so many different kinds of fruit that when I asked her about them a few months ago, my mother simply laughed after failing to name them all. That house is no longer standing. Instead, 15 years after immigrating to the United States from Vietnam, my mother oversaw the construction of a new home for her family. The new house is not surrounded by fruit trees. But there’s plumbing, at least, and the walls aren’t…

The term “Asian American” used to be radical. It was coined in 1968 by Berkeley students empowered by the Black Panthers and anti-imperialists. The national grassroots group Asian American Political Alliance was one of the first attempts to create an activist coalition of people previously defined as “Oriental” or by individual ethnicities.

In the 50 years that have passed, Asian Americans have become the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, comprising more than 20 million people across dozens of ethnic groups. But what it actually means to be Asian American is less clear than ever, as disaggregated data shows deep…