Tag Archives: national question

Coal Mining Curbed on the Black Mesa, Paving Way for Navajo Green Economy

A shorter version of this post first appeared on RaceWire. The indigenous environmental justice movement celebrated a victory, early January 2010, when a judge ruled that Peabody Energy cannot expand its coal mining operations on the Black Mesa in northern Arizona.  Former president Bush Jr. approved a permit for Peabody in the twilight of his outgoing [...]
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Ethnic Studies Beyond the Academy

First published on apaforprogress.org. Forty years ago, the students of SF State joined in solidarity with the Third World in demanding inclusion in institutions of knowledge.  For too long, the histories of people of color have been deliberately omitted from official narratives.  Stories transmitted through oral tradition within families but never recorded in the texts that [...]
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Communities of Possibilities

This was first published on RaceWire. The concept of community is an ever-shifting one. It first becomes applied to movements for social change after World War II, when a dissatisfied social worker Saul Alinksy shifted his efforts into organizing urban communities, based on geographic proximity. He was the first recognizable community organizer that developed a model beyond [...]
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Green Jobs for Navajo Youth

Nikke Alex, the youth organizer for the Navajo Green Jobs and the Black Mesa Water Coalition, talked with us for a few minutes while she was at the Navajo Nation Council Chamber in Window Rock, Arizona, celebrating the historic passage of the first green jobs legislation in American Indian country. The green jobs act establishes a [...]
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Racializing Uighurs: The Story of Internal Colonialism in China

China extends 3,400 miles from the west to the east and falls into five different time zones. Yet, the country operates on a single standard of time, eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, all year round based on the time zone for Beijing, the country’s capital. A single Chinese time zone is as much [...]
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Ronald Takaki, Rest in Peace

via hapihour.org According to numerous individuals, Prof. Ron Takaki passed away this week. Share your thoughts on Ron’s legacy on Facebook. We’ve lost a giant in the Asian American community. Join with me in wishing his family and friends our condolences. Considered the father of multicultural studies, Ron was a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University [...]
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Happy Birthday, Yuri Kochiyama

Born on May 19, 1921, Yuri grew up in a white middle class suburb of San Pedro, California. Her life was irreparably changed when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She and her family were forcibly removed from their homes and interned at detention camps setup for Japanese Americans during World War II. There, Yuri connected the [...]
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The Chinese Self and Tibetan Other

I have been trying to understand Tibet. Specifically, the Tibetan struggle for self-determination. There’s the national question within China and the story China tells herself. Then, there’s the world stage and the narratives spun by the media, woven according to the ideological bias of its audience. I will write more about the story [...]
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  • About

    Yvonne lives in Berkeley, California with her partner and their four-legged family. During the day, she works at a racial justice think tank, crunching numbers to eradicate white supremacy. At night and sometimes weekends, she sits at her computer, trying to make sense of the world.

    These are the fruits of her attempts. Apologies in advance if they are sometimes sour, not always sweet, unripe or not fully ready to launch. Yvonne is working on her craft of writing and playing with using all five senses.

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