Asian Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States. As a community, we come from countless countries, have a diversity of immigration stories, some recent and some dating back hundreds of years, and now have many different versions of an American life. So where does one begin in telling the story of Asians in America? For educator Vivian Wu Wong, the answer is clear: Asian American history is American history. Wu Wong is a designer of “Beyond Gold […]

While at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health a couple years ago, Dr. Yipeng Ge faced a dilemma – and the decision he would make would profoundly influence the following years of his life.Already outspoken on the genocide of indigenous people and racism in North America, Dr. Ge discovered the Palestine Program during graduate studies at Harvard. Also taking courses in the Kennedy School and Harvard Law, he then soon found out about Palestine Trek, or PalTrek. In […]

Civil rights attorney Mariam Aydah knows what it’s like to be singled out for being a Muslim while practicing — and studying ­— law. A few incidents stand out in particular. Once, while handling a case, she was mistaken for a client, even after co-counsel introduced her as one of the client’s lawyers. Another time, while in college, a professor who often associated Muslims with terrorists offhandedly rejected a paper she wrote that presented Islam in a positive light. And […]

Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi didn’t set out to be a civil rights hero. And she didn’t promote herself as one. But she played a key role in ending the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans – many of them U.S. citizens – during World War II. “Mitsuye was an ordinary person who was caught up in an extraordinary circumstance,” explains writer Frank Abe, who was part of a team who first told the personal story of Endo Tsutsumi in print, in the […]