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Showing posts from March, 2016

Race Gives Me Poetry

This blog post was originally written for and posted in Unbound . Racism kills. It dehumanizes us all, telling some of us we are less than human and rendering others of us incapable of having a decent conversation about it. It takes our best intentions and misshapes them beyond recognition; no matter what we do or what we mean to do, we move and breathe and live within laws and a cultural reality that is racist. But the one good thing racism has given me is Asian America. Asian America is a social construct, not a biological one. It is a legal category I fall into by virtue of nothing more than my mother’s ancestors. No person from Asia shows up in the U.S. and automatically feels linked to people from other Asian countries. Asian American identity isn’t about rice, although I’ve joked about this before. People of many races eat rice, and even rice within Asian American communities has great diversity. It isn’t about any food or flavor, really, which means any dish or dressing