Quick Asian American Political Hits

January 16, 2008

Reappropriate, “a personal and political blog written by an Angry Asian American woman”, is fast becoming one of my daily reads in this election year. She had a great post on Monday on the exclusion of Asian Americans from the Las Vegas debates. Mike Vaswani, president of the Las Vegas Asian American Group, helped vocalize the issues in Nevada itself.

Reappropriate puts it fiercely here:

By excluding the concerns of Asian Americans (and indeed, Native Americans) from Tuesday’s Nevada Black and Brown Forum, we are perpetuating the invisibility of Asian Americans and other politically underrepresented minority groups from the debate. We risk playing Oppression Olympics by arguing that African Americans and Latinos are more deserving than Asian Americans or Native Americans of a specially-focused presidential debate, when race and racism affects us all so profoundly. And since the size of the Asian American population is statistically identical to the size of the African American population in Nevada, no good reason exists to perpetuate national ignorance of Asian American sociopolitical issues in a forum that supposedly caters to underprivileged racial minorities.

• Asian American activist Grace Lee Boggs addresses the question: Is Obama black enough?

• There's nothing like a little celebrity phone-banking to get the electorate flowing: Actress/Model Kelly Hu, Winner of Survivor: Cook's Islander Yul Kwon, and Deputy Secretary of Southern Nevada Chris Lee join local community members and volunteers in a final push, a day before the caucuses, phone banking on Friday, January 18th at Noon for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to attend Nevada this Saturday's Caucuses. (2475 Chandler Ave, Henderson, NV)

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Yul Kwon is considering a run for Congress, too.
thanks for posting that link to Boggs' writing, i hadn't seen it.