Shoot Promos on Race, Class, Gender, Etc

  "Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place." - Paul Coelho The model minority was introduced by Sociologist William Peterson in 1966 to describe the success of Japanese Americans ability to achieve success that other minority groups didn't. It was a concept adopted by Ronald Reagan and the right wing to characterize AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) as smart, wealthy, and compliant compared to the "welfare queens" of the Black & Brown communities, ignoring the fact that if it wasn't for the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, the vast majority of AAPI immigrants wouldn't be here. Because most of us arrived after 1965, Asians collectively didn't experience Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and lynching. Racism was largely a Black/White problem; the "Americ...

On March 16, 2021 a domestic terrorist killed 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian women, in Atlanta. Let's not mince words here, this was not a "sexual addiction" or the result of a "bad day". This was a targeted attack on Asian women. But this isn't an isolated incident. Hate crimes against all AAPI people have risen, especially after former President Trump referred COVID-19 as the "China Virus" and "Kung Flu" with many pundits, politicians, and people co-opting those derogatory terms.  From the onset of COVID-19 and we were ordered to wear masks and quarantine, I have seen the micro-aggressions directed toward Asian Americans. The glares from people at AAPI, communicating "this is your fault", "you brought this on us" . The way that people would walk on the other side of the street, profiling AAPI as automatic careers of the disease, the same way Black folk are profiled "walking while Black". Some may not be fam...