Shoot Promos on Race, Class, Gender, Etc

"To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence." - Eckhart Tolie 3/11/2022. I'm meeting with Zachary at a coffee shop in Lakewood to select the photos from my photoshoot on 3/8. I assumed that I was only going to limit it to 20 but my best friend assured me that I wouldn't be able to resist going with the package of 30 photos. Sure enough as we went through the 150 or so photos he showed me, we kept whittling it down until we couldn't whittle it past 30. I called Piper and put her own speaker so she could tell me "I told you so", which I enjoyed giving her the opportunity to do so. Zachary and I would meet 4 weeks later so I could pick up a beautiful box with my 30 photos enlarged in 11x14 prints. I would also receive the digital copies of my photos. When he asked me what I intended to do with the photos, I shared that I intended to start a blog series and tell a story or anecdote wit...

"A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Music is such a time capsule so we will romanticize the music from our formative years as the "golden age". I will resist the urge to be old man yelling at cloud and say that the music of the 80's and 90's is far superior to the music of Gen-Z, signaling that I'm officially washed. One of the formative songs of my adolescence was 1995's "I Wish" by Skee-Lo, the very definition of a one-hit wonder. While rap music can often characterized by braggadocios hyper-masculinity, this track was a humorous, self-deprecating lament on personal shortcomings. "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her...". Even though Skee-Lo was a black man from Los Angeles via Chicago, "I Wish" was for me the quintessential Korean American male anthem, as a 5'9" Korean male...

  "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...

  "Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation." - Kathryn Harrison One of my earliest coping mechanisms were to create facades, not because I'm a sociopath who lacks empathy. Quite the opposite; I created facades because I have empathy and inherited the people pleasing trait from my parents. I became whatever version of myself that I felt people wanted, in order for them to feel safe and valued. While I may have used a different toolbox than a sociopath, my facades were still a form of manipulation to get people to like me more.  Why do we create facades? If you're a person of color, woman, LGBTQ+, or non-Protestant, something we're all familiar with is  code switching,  a survival tool we adopt to assimilate in predominantly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Prote...

  "I stepped into the shadows, telling myself not to be afraid. Yet I knew I would either find something worth living for or I would stay dead". - Zachary Kouko For much of my adult life I have been a supporting character in my own story. Working for and under accomplished, powerful women. Working in non-profit, first in multi-cultural education and now in domestic violence. The wingman to female friends who lit up every room they walked into with their beauty, style, grace, and larger than life personalities. I felt comfortable in their shadows, this was their show and it didn't have to be about me.  That's not to say that I've been silent. Often times I was hiding front and center. I was a Managing Director and MC for professional development workshops. I emerged as a Site Administrator at my current job and often serve as a mouthpiece for my boss. I use my platform and intersectional privilege to amplify marginalized voices, whether it's anti-racism, women...