Affirmative action policies have been adopted by universities across the country for at least four decades, in the hopes of ensuring a diverse campus by creating an equal playing field. The motivation…
Olympic Discrimination: Asian Americans and Media
Yellow Snow: Pyeongchang 2018 The color of sunshine on a warm day, the lemons in my backyard garden, the iridescent gleam of a gold Olympic medal, and also, the shade of my skin. As an Asian American …
Racial Inequalities Permeate the Legal Marijuana Market
The date April 20th seems to be a holiday at the University of California, Berkeley and various other college campuses throughout the state. Walking through campus on this unofficial holiday will lead…
Wanted: Young, White, and Angry
My friend was killed by a neo-nazi. It’s a strange thing to type out, but it’s true. Even stranger, though, are the details: killed by a former classmate of ours. He picked my friend up in his car, dr…
Barred from the Ballot Box: Felon Disenfranchisement in America
Six million American adults are legally ineligible to vote, members of a group whose ranks have roughly quintupled over the past 40 years. In Kentucky and Tennessee, this group now comprises more than…
Why Asian Americans Don’t Vote: A Theoretical Perspective
I recently watched the new Jackie Chan movie called, The Foreigner, which is basically a Chinese Taken (highly recommended, by the way). But what stood out to me was the title. The only reason this ti…
The United States… And Territories: America’s Paradise Lost
On October 13, one news headline stood out among the rest: “Trump says he spoke to U.S. Virgin Islands’ ‘president’ — which is him.” “Must’ve been a one-sided conversation,” one Twit…
Knock Knock, It’s Your Old Neighbor, White Supremacy
It’s hard to start an article that talks about Nazis. Nazis. In my short lifetime, I would hear “Nazi” in a history or government class. When I entered college, I heard it from freshmen in political s…
Lost in Transit: Sub-Saharan Migrants in Libya
Kalilu Drammeh, an 18-year-old Gambian Muslim, was not welcome in Libya. His skin color distinguished him from the Libyan population, as well as from the Arab and Berber refugees from elsewhere in the…
Racism Today versus Racism after 9/11
After the September 11 attacks in New York, the level of hate crimes against people who appeared Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim rose to extremely high levels. According to FBI data, there were 93 rep…
Mauritania: A Place of Continuing Slavery
Moulkheir Mint Yarba tends goats in the Sahara Desert and works long hours in the sun for little to no pay. Yarba constantly fears the prospect of rape and on one day, upon returning home, she found t…
A Dance with the Devl(in): Insight to the Fracturing of the Berkeley College Republicans and How It’s Still Dangerous
Note: The views in this article are those of the author alone, and do not represent the views of any organization in any official capacity. Even to outsiders, it is hard to miss the drama surrounding …
Blood for Trees: The Plight of Uncontacted Tribes in Brazil
Last month, around the Jandiatuba river in the Amazonas region of Western Brazil, a small cohort of illegal gold miners happened upon a group of indigenous people, members of one of many uncontacted t…
#OscarsSoWhite: The Call for Racial Diversity in Hollywood
Lack of racial diversity in Hollywood made headlines last year when the 2015 Academy Awards (AKA the Oscars) featured nominations for twenty white actors and zero minority actors in its acting categor…
“Leapfrogging”: Can developing countries truly skip over fossil fuel reliance in favor of renewable energies?
There is a popular argument that progress and growth are not possible without reliance on fossil fuel-powered energy. Examples abide to support this claim: almost every industrialized country is (rel…
A Coded Political Mantra
According to Malcolm X, “Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year.” Since the outlaw of slavery, racial discrimination taken on many different forms, from physical abuse, to le…
Bringing Down the House
If the Greek fraternity system is molding the leaders of tomorrow, then tomorrow is going to look an awful lot like the past. Modern American society has been at war with backwards “isms”, including e…
Backseat Solidarity
…we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter”, then we miss the…