Month: November 2018

Victoria Huynh (class of 2021) attended the AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) Women’s Lead #ImReady Conference in Berkeley on November 3rd.  She reported:

“I found myself amidst self-identified AAPI women and girls having traversed the nation to be within a space that we’ve rarely had before. Through my internship with Reappropriate.com under activist Dr. Jenn Fang, I worked with AAPI Women Lead’s Communications Associate’s & Youth Leader Celine Jusuf, co-founders Dr. Connie Wun and Jenny Wun, and my editor Dr. Fang to promote through social media for the conference while taking notes and engaging with speakers and participants as to construct an article for the conference and the #ImReady movement itself. Remembering the efforts of queer, disabled women of color, particularly Tarana Burke who began the #MeToo movement, #ImReady is more than a single event, but the iterative (re)Centering of Asian American and Pacific Islander women everywhere and the violence they face, so as to engage in solidarity with misrepresented and underrepresented communities.

It was more than humbling, it was self-enabling; We were claiming cultural sovereignty and owning our womxnhood… ”

Read the rest of Victoria’s story here

On Oct 31, Jessica Graham, Assistant Professor at the University of California San Diego, visited Soka University to present “Black Internationalism in Brazil in the 1930s.”  Speaking to a packed room, Dr. Graham explored striking contrasts and continuities with contemporary Brazil and thus was particularly engaging only a week after the election Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s controversial President-elect.  One fascinating continuity is the way that politics and race frame the other.  In the 1930s, the battle between the (fascist) integralistas and communists helped reconfigure conceptions of race and build international bridges.   Likewise, race played an important role in recent Bolsonaro’s election, with most Brazilians who identify as “black” voting against Bolsonaro.  Five Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students attended, all wearing the yellow and green of Brazil’s flag.  Dr. Graham’s last slide was of Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro Councilperson who was assassinated in 2014.  Franco was vocal advocate of Brazil’s own “Black Lives Matter” movement.