The views and opinions expressed on this site and blog posts (excluding comments on blog posts left by others) are entirely my own and do not represent those of any employer or organization with whom I am currently or previously have been associated.
Academic Version: Applying my personal experiences and academic research as a professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies to provide a more complete understanding of political, economic, and cultural issues and current events related to American race relations, and Asia/Asian America in particular.
Plain English: Trying to put my Ph.D. to good use.
When affirmative action was first implemented in the 1960s, Asian Americans generally benefited from it. In more recent years however, the consensus seems to be that affirmative action seems to hurt more Asian Americans than it helps. Now, a new study argues that it’s not really affirmative action that hurts Asian Americans, it’s actually just racial discrimination, pure and Read More →
You’ve probably heard of Michelle Wie already, the 16 year-old Korean American golf phenom whose ambition is to not just compete against other women golfers, but against the top male ones as well. But there’s a new name on the horizon — 15 year-old Tadd Fujikawa from Hawai’i, who unlike Michelle Wie, was able to qualify for the 2006 Men’s Read More →
Diversity Inc. Magazine has just released a survey that ranks the Top Ten Best Companies For Asian Americans to Work For, based on proportions of total employees who are Asian American, salaries, promotions, and executive representation and in their words, “a long-term commitment to this community and to recognizing, developing and promoting top Asian-American talent”:
Many sociologists — like me in fact — will tell you that demographic change is likely to lead to social/cultural change. One example is what’s happening in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, NYC — the opening of a health center designed to cater to the area’s Asian American population:
The $1 million clinic was carefully designed to cater to Sunset Read More →
Viet Nam is set to enter the World Trade Organization after signing a new trade agreement with the U.S. that will open up virtually all of Viet Nam’s economic sectors to the world:
Vietnamese and American trade officials signed the pact, which will open the Southeast Asian country’s markets in virtually every sector, in the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, Read More →
Almost five years after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, Arab Americans are still consistently encountering racial profiling as they travel, prompted by nothing more than their physical appearance and/or their Arabic names:
Getting through United States airports and border crossings has grown more difficult for everyone since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. But Muslim Americans say they are having a Read More →
Affirmative action has always been a controversial and divisive issue here in the U.S. But apparently, arguments about affirmative action have really heated up in India, centering around the government’s plans to increase educational quotas for India’s lower castes:
In spite of the disruption, the government has sworn that it will not back down, regardless of who resigns or how many Read More →
The following is a ‘guest post’ by Brintha Gardner:
What is an identity? According to the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of an identity is ‘the fact of being who a person is’. So where do Asian Americans stand?
From a decade of observation in India, I’ve noticed that some people try to be ‘different’. They are not always pleased with whom they Read More →
Two articles, one from the Washington Post and the other from the San Francisco Chronicle, describe how Asian American-owned small businesses in each respective metropolitan area have flourished in recent years:
The number of Asian-owned businesses surged in the Washington area from 1997 to 2002, as a diverse mix of entrepreneurs with broad global ties flocked to the region’s technology and government Read More →
Two separate articles describe the slowly emerging prominence of Asians and Asian Americans in mainstream American society — one in the field of professional sports and one relating to consumer advertising:
The presence of these [Asian & Asian American] players [in professional sports] is helping, slowly, to break the stereotypes, but obstacles remain. . . . One of the common stereotypes is Read More →
You might recall that Wen Ho Lee was a Taiwanese American nuclear scientist who was initially accused of spying for China and was subsequently detained and kept in solitary confinement for nine months until it became clear that the government had no case against him. He was finally released after pleading guilty to one count of mishandling sensitive documents.
I’ve written before how many Americans have reservations about the Chinese company Lenovo buying and taking over IBM’s personal computer business, including many government officials. This week, these anti-Chinese paranoids succeeded in getting the U.S. State Department to ban Lenovo computers from handling classified information:
The State Department, responding to fears that its security might be breached by a secretly placed Read More →
