As a second generation Vietnamese American who came to America as a baby, I was considered an “illegal alien” until I was 12 years old. All my older siblings had reached age 18 and were able to acquire citizenship through tests, and my younger brother had been born…

Negar Tehrani’s opinion piece in this past Wednesday’s Daily Bruin addressed a question I’ve wondered about too.  Why don’t applications provide a box to check for “Middle Eastern”?  Currently Middle Eastern Americans check off  “other” or white” for lack of better alternative. At UCLA, the Iranian American, Arabic…

Last Tuesday at a conference between the House Elections Committee and Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans, Betty Brown, a Texas Republican, said that voters of Asian descent should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.” Her comment prompted numerous politicians…

When I was an exchange student in Hong Kong two years ago, I learned that in Asia, some people (usually the older generation) assume that to be “American” is to be white. In Hong Kong, I chatted with some elderly Chinese and told them I was an exchange student from the…

Two university professors at Florida State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a decrease in racial prejudice that occurred during the Nov. 4 election. They call this the Obama Effect. A series of studies and experiments done with 300 non-black (white, Asian or Hispanic) students, designed to…

Last quarter Pacific Ties published “No English, No Help,” which reported that many immigrants are not adequately prepared to respond to natural disasters, mainly because they are not sufficiently fluent in English. Consequently, they suffer a worse fate in the aftermath of such disasters. In a similar vein,…