Author: Steven

  • UCLA researchers say Japanese-Americans’ healthier golden years could be a model for other seniors UCLA Newsroom University of California, Los Angeles 2015-04-29 Venetia Lai Nearly 1 in 4 Japanese-Americans are 65 and older — nearly twice the proportion of seniors in the overall U.S. population. The facts that they are likelier to live longer than…

  • Three Unmissable Books That Can Help Us Honor Our Past Pacific Citizen: The National Newspaper of the JACL 2015-04-30 Ryan Kenji Kuramitsu, JACL MDC Youth Representative ‘It was books,” wrote social critic James Baldwin, “that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people…

  • From Chains to Chiles: An Elite Afro-Indigenous Couple in Colonial Mexico, 1641–1688 Ethnohistory Volume 62, Number 2, April 2015 pages 361-384 DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2854356 Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Assistant Professor of History University of Rochester This article explores the life of an elite Afro-indigenous couple in the city of Puebla de los Ángeles during the seventeenth…

  • Lopsided Afro Mixed Humans ~ Reflections on occupying a space of inbetweenness. Persistently grappling with identity. 2015-05-04 Brian Kamanzi Cape Town, South Africa Self Determination. I never realised how practical those words would become for my life until I started to explore the world beyond the safety of my University. Work spaces where the politics…

  • Ancient DNA Tells a New Human Story The Wall Street Journal 2015-05-01 Matt Ridley Armed with old bones and new DNA sequencing technology, scientists are getting a much better understanding of the prehistory of the human species, writes Matt Ridley Imagine what it must have been like to look through the first telescopes or the…

  • Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black. Canadaland 2015-04-30 Kyrell Grant Writers need to stop policing his blackness It feels ridiculous to have to say this: Drake is black. Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black. He…

  • TCK TALENT: Neil Aitken, Computer Gaming Whiz Kid Turned Award-Winning Poet The Displaced Nation 2015-04-29 Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang Neil Aitken (photo supplied) Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang is back with her column featuring interviews with Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) who work in creative fields. Lisa herself is a prime example. A Guatemalan-American of Chinese-Spanish-Irish-French-German-English descent, she…

  • In Ferguson, Obama missed his chance to transcend race The Orlando Sentinal Orlando, Florida 2015-04-29 Charles Michael Byrd, Guest Columnist Pundits habitually wonder what happened to the post-racial America they believed Barack Obama’s election would herald. The president, however, has never indicated his willingness to lead the country out of the race-consciousness wilderness. Many thought…

  • The Forgotten Supervillain of Antebellum Tennessee Narratively: Human Stories, Boldy Told. 2015-04-28 Betsy Phillips (Photo Source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isaac-franklin-by-wb-cooper.jpg) In a brutal business defined by cruelty, Isaac Franklin was perhaps the worst slave trader in all of cotton country—and the richest man in the south. Yet today his heinous crimes are long forgotten. The people of Nashville…

  • One-Dropping and Multi-Dropping: Embracing Contradictions of the Racialized Self (A Personal Journey) Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar. Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies California State University, Fullerton My exploration of my mixed race identity began in my early 20’s after an incident I…