 Good morning. Good morning, Highline. How are you doing today? Well, thank you all for making it at 10 a.m. on Thursday to this amazing event. So my name is Jade Chan, and I'm the Programming and Promotions Leadership Advisor at the Center for Leadership and Service and Multicultural Affairs. And it is my pleasure to introduce Vanessa Na, our incredible Unity Week speaker this morning. So a proud daughter of hard-working Cambodian refugees, Vanessa Sovannika Na is an amazing, fierce Cambodian American educator and changemaker with a heart of gold. Vanessa Na is the Assistant Director and Project Associate for the National Institute for Transformation and Equity. She has always felt a deep commitment to addressing issues of access, equity, and fights for inclusion through actionable storytelling and narrative. As a scholar activist, her work centers students of color, Asian American and Pacific Islander students, Southeast Asian American students, intergenerational resilience, and the role of student activism in transforming education. Vanessa is currently studying her Ph.D. in Higher Education and Inquiry at Indiana University. Vanessa is a community organizer and is deeply invested and involved in organizations all over the U.S. She serves as the Board of Directors in Project AVA. She serves in advocacy chairs in APIKC, APAN, and many more. She works in the division of equity and inclusion at the University of Oregon as the public relations coordinator. She has presented at over 30 conferences on issues relating to social justice and social movements. Her side hustle is a graphic designer. Yes. So today she will be presenting on Not Your Wedge Asian American Student Activism and Transformational Resistance. Please show Vanessa some love. Thank you, Jade. And thank you to everyone else. It's a real honor to be here today with you all. I'm in the middle of finals week right now. So this is a nice break from sitting in front of my computer writing all those papers. So it's nice to be able to be around people instead of books. Although books are great, but sometimes it's a bit much. So Jade already did a quick introduction, but I figured introducing myself again is really important to setting the stage for this particular presentation. I want to be able to share my identities with you because I'm hoping that in doing so we can all start to share stories as well. She can see this is my dog. She's six months old. So one of my identities is a dog mom. Never thought that that would be an identity for me, but it's taught me a lot about responsibility and always having to get up at 5 a.m. So she's fed and can go outside and all those types of things. I really care about social justice. I'm a feminist. I'm a doctoral student, a woman of color, Asian American storyteller, daughter of refugees. And because the new Harry Potter game just came out yesterday, I already downloaded it, like spent two hours on it. I'm also a Ravenclaw. I'm going to do this really quickly. I did want to acknowledge that the land that we're meeting on today has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst indigenous peoples. And I think it's really important to do this in order to pay recognition to our history and our current engagement in settler colonialism. So I do want to say that they're 29 federally recognized Native American nations located throughout Washington state. And there are probably very many more. So again, again, recognizing that this land, it's an honor for us to be here and to remember the history of why we're here in the first place. So I did want to give everybody an opportunity to get to know other folks in the room. So I wanted to spend about five or six minutes to give you an opportunity to talk to the person next to you and just tell them the story of your name. Where did your name come from? What does your name mean? Is there a history to your name? Did someone find in a baby book? What is the history of your name? So give you about five minutes to turn to the person next to you and share that story. Or you can do it as a group. Alright, so I'm going to ask you to transition. If your partner hasn't shared the story of their name yet, please switch. I'll give you all about a minute to wrap up. Okay, so it sounds like a lot of great conversations are happening. And I apologize for interrupting, but I hope that you can continue to share these stories after the session as well and that you met some great people. I was wondering if there were maybe one or two pairs that wouldn't mind sharing with the consent of your partner, of course, the story of your names. Would you all like to go? One person seems very enthusiastic. Alright, could you introduce yourselves and then your names and then the stories? Hi, my name is Patrick. I'm an academic advisor here. My name is Patrick and my dad's name is not Patrick. It's actually Paterno. So when they were going to name me, my dad goes, oh, we're going to name him Paterno, Paterno Jr. And real, real, real, this is real. My mom was like, no, your name is ugly. And so they named me Patrick instead. But my uncles, real uncles, not like family friends, some of them call me Junior. And I think that's pretty cool. So I let them call me Junior, but y'all can call me Pat. That is mine. Doris? Hi, everyone. So my name is Doris. I'm named after my mom, but Doris is actually not her name. She hated her real name. And so I ended up getting that name. But my middle name is actually Jolani, which was my dad's favorite teacher, but she hated her. So they kind of won with both. So I ended up getting the first name because of her and then getting my middle name to even it out with my dad. Thank you for sharing. Are there other folks who would like to share? Of course, please share. Hi, my name is Marlena. So my name came about. My mom and her sisters love the American soap opera, The Age of Our Lives. And their favorite character is Marlena. So my dad, unfortunately, wasn't there for my birth. He was busy. So I was at the mercy of my mother and her sisters, and that's how my name came to be. Marlena. Thank you for sharing. So I wanted to do this activity because I believe that stories are integrated to every single aspect of our lives, even if it's something like our names, which we use every single day. When we share our names, we don't necessarily talk about the meaning behind them either. But our stories, our names do carry stories and they do have meaning in that they are important to who we are. I did want to share how I received my name. So my name is Vanessa Savonikina. My original name is Vanessa Tech. So when I was born, my mom had just come to the U.S. as a refugee and she started high school and she was bullied a lot for her name. So when I was born, she was like, okay, I got to give Vanessa a name that's easy for people to pronounce, that people won't make fun of. So she thought of one of the most American names that she could think of and it was Vanessa. As I got older, I didn't realize the reason why she did that. And once I got to college, I was actually really frustrated and angry that I didn't have a Cambodian name. So when I got married, my grandpa gifted me a Cambodian middle name and I also changed my last name to my mother's name instead of my partner's name because I really wanted to reclaim the identity back because it was taken forcefully for me, not for my mom, but by various systems of oppression that happened in the United States when they came. So when I was invited to this talk, thank you Jade, got a message over Facebook. It's great. I called my mom and I was trying to tell her that my liberal arts degree was being put to good use. I could write speeches, I could put together presentations. I'm sorry I wasn't making a ton of money because now I'm in education, but I could talk. And she was telling me that everything I actually know is from her and that she should have been invited to speak here instead. So next year, if you all need a speaker, she is the original, she's the OG. So I would recommend bringing her and she can tell you her stories too. So this slide, do people recognize the photos on this slide at all, some of them? So I wanted to provide a brief history of the Asian American movement and the movement we know today emerged from a deep legacy of multiracial and coalition building. In Seattle, for example, during the 1930s, there were successful campaigns against bills that would have made interracial marriage illegal in Washington state. And Japanese folks, Chinese folks and Filipino activists came together to prevent those bills from happening. So again, Asian American movement has existed for a very long time. But it wasn't until the 1960s that a lot of significant social movements really brought the Asian American activist movement to the front and center. So the Black Power movement and anti-Vietnam War movements, also known as the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from November 1955 to the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Asian Americans at this time really wanted self-determination and power for Asian Americans in the United States and for those in Asia to work together for rallies, demonstrations, leaflets, flyers and newsletters and newspapers that criticized this war for being particularly anti-Asian, amongst many other things. Demonstrating against the war together created alliances among various movement organizations and this enhanced the sense of Asian American identity as a shared multi-ethnic identity. So before we move into Vincent Chin, as all of this was happening, at Berkeley there was a graduate student named Yuchi Ikiawa who would go on to be a really influential historian and he coined the term Asian American. And it was this point that Asian American became a political identity instead of a racial category for Asian Americans. So as we shared the history of our names earlier, Asian Americans soon became this identity that carried a lot of history and a lot of stories with it as well. One of the really important events that happened during this time was Vincent Chin. Are folks familiar with Vincent Chin? You can raise your hand. Yeah, yeah. I didn't learn about Vincent Chin until college. To provide some insight, in 1982, just a week before his wedding, he was bludgeoned to death by two white auto workers and this has now become one of the most infamous hate crimes in Asian American history. The two folks who were perpetrators of this were only sentenced to three years of probation and one is now happily living in Nevada with no fines, no one is talking about them and the family of Vincent Chin is still looking for justice as well. They were fined $3,000 and that was it. So $3,000 for our life is apparently what Asian American lives are worth. So Vincent Chin was only one of the very important events that happened in Asian American history and you'll see along the walls there are a bunch of sheets of papers with dates and I wanted to give you all an opportunity to become familiar with some of the big moments in our Asian American history as well. So I'm going to let us spend the next maybe 10 minutes for you all to get up, move around a little bit since it's early and to go ahead around the left side and the right side of the room. There are a few on the door right there too for you to go ahead and read independently some of these events. So let's give you all 10 minutes and I'll bring you all back. I'll give you all just a few more minutes. The events on each side are different as well. So if you haven't had a chance to transition from one side to the other, feel free to do that. Okay, so I'll give everyone about another minute to finish up what they're reading and then heading back to their seats. So this PowerPoint is a crowdsourced PowerPoint. It was put together by a lot of folks on the Internet. So if you want a copy of this, feel free to contact Jade maybe and I'm happy to share that presentation with you as well since it was a community effort. I wanted to see if there were any observations that folks made in the room. Were there events that stuck out, ones that you were surprised by? I really appreciated that there were online events as well as the in-person political historical ones that the online ones really show that there's a lot of way to have something happen within that atmosphere and I think it's really relevant to folks who are in college right now as well. So thank you for including those. Thank you for that. Yeah, that's a good intro to what the presentation will then go into very soon. Other observations? You don't necessarily have to walk up or should they walk up to the microphone? Yes, you should walk up to the microphone. I thought it was interesting to see like after seeing the slides with, I can't remember, I think it said like Asian peril supports black power or something and then seeing the event where the Asian American cop killed an armed black man and how that kind of just like caused so much commotion and like not a lot of people know about, you know, supporting black power but more people know about the injustice rather than the justice that was fought in unity. So yeah. That's a good point. I wanted to do this activity because I wanted to show how one, we're usually only given one story of our history and two, a lot of events happen simultaneously at the same time. So as you were looking around, it's likely that you didn't see very much that had to do with my family's history. My family's history and my diasporic history started in 1982. Here are events from, pictures from our wedding, my partner and I's wedding. We did a Cambodian ceremony. You can see my family there and I just think that it's interesting but probably not coincidental that there was so much civil rights movements happening in the United States at the same time that my family had a catalyst that would change their lives forever. So I wanted to share that my story begins and ends with my community without them I wouldn't know history and I wouldn't know the movement that I'm a part of and have the responsibility to also continue. All of the events that are placed around the room today are intimately connected not just to each other but also to us and also this present moment. A lot of us are here because of these movements. In order for us to imagine a future that's diverse, multiple and filled with possibilities, we have to also recognize and complicate the past that has been shared with us and the past that we have been told is true. And more often than not we're only given again one version of this past. For myself and my community in particular, talking story is one of the ways that we preserve those movements. Storytelling is important to me because it's allowed me to preserve my own roots and it's allowed me to share our experiences in ways that are real and authentic. Stories give us the ability to challenge what we learn in our history books and also gives us the power to advocate for visibility and representation. Stories also give us the right to write our own histories and they can move systems and transform institutions. Storytellings are also resistance and stories can also start revolutions. So I want you to imagine this. On April 17th, 1975, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. Like many Khmer Americans, my family came to the U.S. as refugees from Cambodia in 1982. My grandparents reflect back on this day and talk about how the Khmer Rouge scoured the entire city and told everyone that they needed to evacuate because the United States was going to begin dropping their bombs on the city. Greeting the citizens with smiles, they expressed that safety was their priority and all those living within the city should evacuate to the countryside. They promised that the invasion would be over soon and that they'd be able to return to the city. But it'd be four years of terror before any lucky survivors would be able to return to the remains of their homes. My family at this point had no choice but to abandon all of their belongings and at that precise moment their entire lives. It has to be recognized that history is often written by its victors. Growing up, much of my narrative of the Khmer Rouge were small excerpts in my history book that were written by American historians and in many ways America was painted as a safe haven for refugees and although I'm not denying that, as I shared earlier the story of my name it felt as though my family had to trade in one form of cultural genocide for another. It was Washington's intention in the early 1970s to strengthen the Khmer Republic and help defeat the revolutionary Khmer Rouge movement. However, it's also heavily argued that the American intervention widened the war and also served as a catalyst for driving Cambodia into conflict. Despite the fact that military strikes against locations in a neutral country and the violation of international laws and treaties, it was soon decided that the areas needed to be bombed in order to clean out the communist sanctuaries. Codenamed Operation Menu, on March 18, 1969, the U.S. Strategic Air Command began bombing eastern Cambodia under the Nixon administration. The primary goal was to destroy supply lines and camps used by the North Vietnamese to wage attacks into the south. In 1969, the secret missions more than doubled and over 1,000 missions were initiated. In the same 14th month period, as you saw in this map, 3,600 B-52 raids were conducted against targets in Cambodia, so you'll see everything in red was an area of bombings. The bombings were kept secret, not only from the public, but also within the Air Force Command. And the first bombing raids were called breakfast. Later raids that were deeper in Cambodia were referred to as lunch. Eventually the raids reached beyond dinner into snacks and dessert. So you can see how this is a fitting metaphor for the consumption of an entire country, essentially. Before the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965, each country in the world had a certain number of people they could send to the U.S. to immigrate, so you might have seen that information on the slides around the walls. And based on 2% of the total number of people of that nationality, that was already in the United States, so they would take the folks that were already in the United States, take 2% of that, and that number was then the amount of folks who could then immigrate to the United States. And, of course, as we know, that history usually favors certain types of communities. This act heavily favored northern European countries, which made up around 86% of the immigrants at this time. However, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was a landmark reform that lifted these quotas and then paved the way for the United States Refugee Act of 1980, which is what brought me here to this space. It was created to provide a permanent and systematic procedure for the admission of refugees to the U.S., and this act raised a limitation from about 17,000 refugees to 50,000 refugees, and this was around the time that my family was able to come here. However, I wasn't taught any of this as I was growing up. My family didn't want to talk about this, and I never got to have a conversation with them until I talked about how I wanted to go back to Cambodia. In my undergrad, I was lucky enough to be able to study abroad. Study abroad is a weird term, because I felt like I was going home in a lot of ways, and my mom told me no, that I couldn't go to Cambodia, and that's when we had to have our first conversation about why she was scared, right? I think that she had to endure a lot of trauma and had to survive through so much to be here in the United States. It didn't make sense to her why I would want to go back to something like that. I share a lot about my mom, because I think there's so much to be said to have a parent who fell asleep to the sound of bullets and explosions, and she's still loving and caring and makes everything from nothing. This is a poem. I broke the ocean in half to be here, only to meet nothing that wants you, and this really resonates with me, because my mom came here and my family came here because they had no choice and they gave everything up, and they did so much to forget that history because they faced so much alienation here in the United States that people didn't want them. So, even though she literally did break the ocean in half to be here, there was no one that would accept her. I share this quote because I think for those of us who might not be able-bodied or heterosexual or white or male and Christian or a citizen of the United States, we're intimately familiar with the fact that history is written by its victors, and that much of the narratives we read about our histories, particularly Cambodian history, are really small excerpts in history books, right? They would talk about all this stuff happening in the Vietnam War, and then I would feel lucky if there was a sentence that even said Cambodia on it. And it wasn't until much later that I realized that people were writing chapters and entire books about what. I am actually curious, too, for those of you who read community-based work, who are interested in history, how many times you've actually read about your communities in your history books. Have you read about your communities? Can you raise your hands? Were they more than a page? Keep your hands up. You don't know? Yeah, so that was my experience, too. And I think that this can be a really subtle and dangerous way of making our communities really invisible. And it was because of this that I began understanding the importance of writing and speaking my truths to the world because I believe that if we don't, who will? As I went through school, I didn't think out any other Cambodian students because I didn't have access to my history. I internalized a lot of isms and only wanted to belong. And as a result, gave up lots of myself in order to belong in those spaces. And it's only probably in the past few years that I've begun to finally accept and respect my family's journey. And I wanted to start learning Cambodian and speaking Khmeri. Khmeri was my first language. But as I went to school, I was taught to only speak in English. And when I finally got the chance to go to Cambodia, I was able to take intensive Khmeri classes so that I can now kind of read, kind of write, and speak it conversationally. I also got a tattoo, which my mom was not happy about when I was in Cambodia. My grandpa had written family for me before I went to Cambodia. And I decided I wanted it tattooed on my neck because my family is always with me. And even if I can't see them, I know they always have my back. My mom was like, whatever. That doesn't matter to me. You still have something on your neck. But as long as I think it's special. Funny story is that about two weeks later, I found out my siblings had also got tattoos on their necks. But we didn't tell each other. Oh, no worries. And then we randomly found out that we all got tattoos behind my mom's back. And it was all in the same location. Different tattoos, but all on the back of our necks. So something happened there. We were communicating with each other somehow. I wanted to share this particular picture and this story about how I got to go and learn Cambodian because I think there's a lot of intimacy and speaking the language of your ancestors. For the people in the room who might speak another language or multiple language, you probably know this. It's an intimacy I didn't understand when I was younger. Growing up, my mom would call me goan or child in Khmer. And my grandparents would call me chow or grandchild. And I realize now that them referring to me as this affirmed their tenderness and love for me even when I was least receptive to feeling it. Even though I don't speak Khmer with complete confidence today, Khmer will always serve as a reminder of love to me. It makes sense because Khmer is a language that love was first expressed to me. It was a language spoken by those who nurtured me from birth. And when I see Khmer, it invokes a visceral sense of my family's love and invokes memories of how my family, long before I was even born, had a vision and hope for a more loving future. And it's because of them that I now practice radical love. Which then leads me into my social justice journey. So for those who might be familiar with some of my work, I use social media, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, all of those. Feel free to add me on any of them. I use them as a way to speak out and resist. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with Twitter and the use of hashtag activism as well. Do people recognize any of these? Have followed any of these before? Yes. They're awesome conversations. I highly recommend, if you have some time to go look at the thread as well, they're still up. I had an activity, but I think for the sake of time we might have to skip it. But I was actually curious if there were hashtag movements that you've seen or heard of or followed that aren't up here that other folks should check out. People want to share. Yeah. Hashtag am I next? Other hashtag movements people are following? There's a lot. Oscar's So White was one that was happening. Others? Yes. Hashtag representation matters. Hashtag representation matters. That's a good one too. So for those who are on Twitter and those not on Twitter, I think we can agree that the revolution itself is not going to be tweeted. Justice can't be accomplished solely by tools developed that are reliant on and profitable to corporate America. So things like Twitter, which makes a ton of money off of content that we create. However, we're also living lives across the divide of the offline and digital worlds. Social media platforms like Twitter excel in particular at creating these interpersonal connections across geographic distance for young people marginalized by race, by language, by gender and sexuality. Social media platforms have become a gathering place for conversations that are democratized. Everybody can tweet, everybody can be engaged in the conversation, and I think that's why hashtags are really powerful, which is why I also added some of the online movements into the timeline that you see around the room. I think that Asian-Americans in particular have the highest rate of connectivity than any other racial or ethnic group. So hashtag activism and these types of conversations have been particularly salient for the Asian-American community. I wanted to point out a few to you all if you're not familiar with them. So Not Your Wedge is the namesake of this particular talk. It emerged really recently, so in 2017, and was created because of a renewed attention to the issue of affirmative action. Essentially a group of very wealthy, elite, well-educated, usually foreign-born Chinese folks were saying that affirmative action was damaging to the Asian-American community because their students weren't getting admitted to Ivy Leagues. However, there was a contingent of 69% other Asian-Americans who support affirmative action and started the Not Your Wedge conversation. However, the media decided to pick up the other side of that conversation instead of this and talked about how there was divisiveness in the Asian-American community and that the Asian-American community does not support affirmative action. However, if you actually look at this conversation, you can see that most Asian-Americans do. Another one is Clean the Dream Act, which demands amnesty with no border militarization. Undocumented Asian-Americans between like 15 and 36 years old make up about 10% of the DACA-eligible population. The Calls for a Clean Dream Act have stressed the relief for undocumented youth that this relief should not be tied to border militarization and other punitive measures that criminalize parents and older undocumented immigrants. So Asian-Americans have been really integral in helping this movement move forward as well. And finally, one that is really dear to my heart is Not One More, which elevates the experience of refugee communities by rallying together against a new wave of deportation. So during the four years of the war that I shared earlier, there were all the refugees who came to the United States and now there's a movement to deport all of them back. Earlier this month, I think around April 6 or 7, 40 Cambodians in particular were deported back to Cambodia even though they had come to the U.S. expecting that it was a safe haven. So there's an entire movement to deport refugees back to Southeast Asia, which is really disheartening. I think that's why hashtag activism is particularly powerful because it's sometimes the first way for people to see that these conversations are happening and that these movements are even happening. And I agree that Twitter and social media are not perfect tools, but it doesn't mean that television and blogs and social media have no place within the toolkit of social justice activism as well. I think that when we use digital platforms to tell our stories, we push back against our own marginalization. And through blogging, we create vibrant interactions of previously unheard voices and individual participation in this discourse also can cause transformation and spark systemic change as well. I think that in order for us to have a more radical Asian America, we have to make sure that our bloggers and our hashtag activists and our scholars and our community organizers are actually working together and making sure that these types of stories are at the forefront. I think another thing that has caused a lot of conflict with hashtag activism in the Asian American community is that it becomes like an echo chamber where people are fighting and people are creating anti-hashtags and people are creating anonymous accounts to be trolls. I myself have been someone who's been targeted with harassment through social media, things like that. My address has been shared, pictures have been shared, all those types of things. And I think people hide behind anonymity. However, I definitely encourage folks who are interested in hashtag activism or even skeptical of it to realize that there is power in it. And the power in it is that you begin to have a conversation with yourself. And I think that self-transformation is sparked by this and it also helps you engage in a discourse with other folks where we can work together in this journey for consciousness. And I think that all of that can potentially just happen with the hashtag. Let me see what our time is. I think we have time for this activity. So if you all can take a few minutes to turn to the person next to you, maybe someone different as well if you're sitting with folks who you've been sitting with, to talk about how you personally would define activism. Because activism can take lots of different forms and lots of different shapes. But I want a sense of what folks think about activism in this particular room. So how would you define activism with someone next to you? So I'm going to bring everybody back together. I'm sitting now because I realize that maybe heels were a mistake. So, yes, never. That's true. They look cute. So I'm going to rest them for a little bit. So I wanted to see if some folks were interested in sharing what they were discussing in their peers. When I was in my group, we shared that activism is defending people even might not show the same appearance or reflection of you. I remember reading about the Martin Luther King Jr. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. March, and people flew from not only different states but within the United States, but different countries to come march with him and walk with him. So activism isn't just helping like yourself, but it's helping people who don't even look like you, act like you, talk like you, who have no similar similarities with you. And what was your name? Vanilla. What was it? Vanilla. Vanilla? Awesome. Thank you, Vanilla. I'd also like to share what they were discussing in their peers or groups. So I was talking about, in my opinion, I take the root word of activism, which is being active. And I think true activism is like what you see in the prime time of the civil rights movements, where it wasn't just behind a phone screen, retweeting, and typing messages to people, it's more so being in your face, being loud, being, you know, I don't want to say belligerent, but I'm kind of a radical person. So to get your point across, so I think activism is like the key part of being, of activism. I don't know. Yeah. I was just, yeah. I was saying, I think that the most impact was made during like the civil rights time because everyone wasn't behind a screen and everyone wasn't, I mean, times of change and people are like afraid to be out because of the risk of getting killed, but I think true activism takes sacrifice. And if it's something you're passionate about, to that extent, like myself, I would be willing to lay my life on the line for black and brown bodies. So I think that's true activism. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Chilisa. Thank you, Chilisa. So I personally love this question because I don't have an Asian American studies or ethnic studies background that wasn't available to me at my particular institution. So my journey to activism has been a lot about getting to know people, getting to know communities and building relationships and asking myself this question as well. I had no idea an Asian American movement even existed until maybe when I got to graduate school that there was a ton of literature and history on this. But even before then, was engaging community organizing and activism because, again, I think it takes a lot of different shapes and forms. This picture to provide some insight is the Southeast Asian American March for Equity. It took place at the first ever Moving Mountain Summit in Washington, D.C. First time that I had ever seen this many Southeast Asian Americans come together to talk about equity together. And it was an amazing space to speak with other activists, other social justice-minded folks who cared about Southeast Asian Americans in the community. And I share this because this is the type of picture we usually see when we think about activism. So marches and protests and people carrying banners and signs and that's very, very legitimate. But I also wanted to share that we don't always have to get loud by protesting and raising funds. But we can also get loud by critically thinking and engaging in different conversations by building community with one another and by considering ways college students should impact the world. I believe that understanding systemic oppression and the various types of isms so sexism, racism, ableism, all of that are really difficult conversations to have, but at the end of the day they do humanize us because by understanding how we're dehumanized we can find our humanity again. When I started having these conversations with myself I soon realized that social justice actually means being closer to your community and not above your community. As a PhD student myself I hear all these things about how we're going to go in and save the community and how academics are going to save the world and that's not true at all. I think that there are a lot of issues in the academic space where we think we're above our communities when really our communities are at the forefront of the work that we do. I think that learning new concepts like social justice, like oppression, etc. should enable us to make space for our community and not move us away from our community. It's also reminded me that some of the most powerful change agents are folks who are doing the everyday work to get by. These folks are the ones who really get recognized and they're the ones who actually do the most for our community. So people who work in the school system custodians, seamstresses, waiters, waitresses, local business owners, immigrant and poor families who are trying to find ways to make ends meet. These people often show us what social justice looks like before we even learn the language for it. So if our movements aren't reaching these folks, then our movements don't matter. I think I have to wrap up soon. So I wanted to provide some concluding thoughts. We have to remember that it's for these people and our future communities that we have to continue to fight for justice. There are so many families, peers and strangers that we may not even know yet who are feeling as though they don't matter because their various identities are being constantly under assault. From identifying as queer to being trans, from being black in a police state to being undocumented, this assault isn't going to end until we stop it. This attack can be as obvious as a racial slur, or it can be as insidious as our own policies and procedures. We have a responsibility to stop it personally and systematically and we need to promote restorative justice and healing practices that embrace everyone. And as I shared earlier, I think all of us need to practice radical love because when we love our communities, we expect our communities to be better and we hold them accountable to be better. I wanted to share just some final things as people think about their social justice journey and how to build coalitions. So understanding that storytelling is important. We've been able to build relationships in this room because of storytelling. There is kind of a universal truth to struggle. All of us are in struggles. Those struggles may not be similar and some of them may be similar, but I think that the struggle can bind us together in a movement for justice. There are a lot of layers that change needs to occur for liberation to be possible. So we need people to be marching. We need people to be creating hashtags. We need people to also be folks who are willing to provide childcare for those who are going out in the streets, providing food, nurturing people who are choosing to protest. We need those to happen in all forms and always in order for liberation to happen. And finally, progress and victories are possible and that we have to continue to keep track and know the history of our wins as well. I think that when so much is going on and so much hurt is happening in the world, it can seem very overwhelming and sometimes it even seems like we're going backwards, but we do have wins and our communities are resilient and our communities will be heard and our communities will be seen as well. So I don't think I have a slide on this, but Dr. Oyan Poon, who is a really great higher education scholar, often ends her talks with this particular statement that says do we care about justice or do we care about just us? So as some folks have shared in the room, it's not about people who look like you and have the same struggles as you because that would be just about us. This is actually about justice. So as long as one single community is oppressed, that oppresses all of us and therefore our liberation is intertwined. So my time is up, so I wanted to say thank you and I also wanted to open it up for Q&A, right? Cool, awesome. So thank you all for being here. So I just wanted to say thank you so much on behalf of the Unity Week Committee and on behalf of Highline College. So can we please give another round of applause to Vanessa Sovanica Na. Yes. Thank you so much for sharing your truth with us and then also sharing the truth of your community and also having us share our names and our histories with each other as well. Yes. Alright, so with that we can start the Q&A so we, if you have any questions we would like to ask if you could come up to the mic and ask the questions because we are doing live captioning. Yes. Thank you. If you don't have questions, that's okay too. So I formulated my question but in terms of, so I identify as Filipino well actually I am Filipino but so there's always the talk of the token Asian of when people say Asian they always think Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese not even Vietnamese Chinese, Korean or Japanese and then Southeast Asians are left out and we're not considered part of that population and like it's not because we don't face the same problems but it's the same and then that also is I think I'd like you to just expand on the affirmative action hashtag and how that is helping or what we can do to like help with that aspect of the community because we're essentially in terms of when we're fighting for our rights and social justice and when we say Asian-American activism people just think of that side of the Asian-American diaspora and not the Southeast Asian side What was your name again? My name is Jeremy Jeremy? I think that question, the answer to that question can go on for days without a solution I think what you're bringing up was my frustration with getting involved in Asian-American activism in the first place so I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado there wasn't a large Asian-American population there and for some reason I found Asian-American activism in the Midwest there was like a conference that came to my university and then I got recruited to go to a Midwest Asian-American student conference and that's when I realized that there were other Asian-American students who cared about social justice and activism so I was super excited I was like these are my people and then because I recognize that I'm very East Asian passing and very light-skinned I would be in rooms with other Asian-American student activists and I would hear them say horrible things about my community because they didn't know I was in the room so they would talk about Cambodian-Americans in a very deficit lens like oh Cambodian-Americans don't care about coming to this conference because they're too involved in gangs or drugs and they're not in school and they would say these there and then it was at that point I realized that the Asian-American movement although powerful has also left a lot of us out and I've made it one of my personal commitments to be in those East Asian-American centric spaces to talk about Southeast Asian-Americans and South Asians and Pacific Islanders because they're also often left out of the conversation for affirmative action in particular I always have challenges with this because I feel like yes affirmative action is important to the Asian-American community and Southeast Asian-American community in addition to other communities of color however I think that there's a lot of injustice done when Southeast Asian-Americans are only brought up when affirmative action is happening right like the Asian-American community doesn't talk about us unless it affects the entire Asian-American community people are talking about affirmative action but they're not talking about the deportation of Cambodian-Americans and I think that that's a larger issue so I feel like before we can even coalition build with other communities of color our Asian-American community has a lot of work to do internally because I think that there are certain groups within the Asian-American Pacific Islander umbrella that are already invisible even to each other and it's a lot of work for one person to do and no one person should be doing that work but going into these Asian-American spaces that are supposed to be socially just and even those that aren't and letting them know that like Southeast Asian-American Pacific Islander South Asians are here and we're listening and our histories and our stories are just important too so I make it really apparent now when I'm in spaces that I identify as Ka'ai because I don't want to hear those things again and I don't want people to think that it's okay so I hope that answered your question I think we have a lot of internal work to do before we can even make changes happen with other communities of color any other questions? I'm sorry Thank you for coming to all this way to come speak to us today Vanessa I'm just curious on how you all your siblings found out that you all had a tattoo if y'all were covering them up if you could just tell that story Yes So it was a really hot day in Colorado and my mom being like a lot of immigrant moms wanted to save money by not turning on our air conditioning so I had my hair up and my sister had her hair up and we both went into the kitchen at the same time and I saw her tattoo first and was like wait when did you get that and she had already had it for a year at this point and I had mine for two years at this point because my hair is always down and I showed her mine and while that conversation was happening my mom came downstairs so she found out both of us had tattoos at the same time and she was curious about tattoos and her feelings on tattoos and she didn't care that mine was in Cambodian or anything like that and my brother heard the commotion he came downstairs saw our tattoos because he didn't know we had these tattoos either and showed us his and my brother is younger than us so my mom kind of gave up at that point because she was like all three of my kids haven't listened to me so there's no reason for me to be a part of this conversation anymore and my brother doesn't so I don't know how he was able to hide his because he also lived at home for a really long time yeah so all of us kept our tattoos hidden for a year plus from her yeah Hi Vanessa thank you you mentioned earlier that you were a feminist I wanted to know how has being a feminist shaped your work today is a relevant question because I'm taking a feminist theory class right now at Indiana University and the class is really interesting because it's about feminism and the ways it has excluded like women of color too so it's talked about the history of feminism as being created by white women and what that means and I had a lot of conflicts with identifying especially because of that because I didn't know any other Asian American feminists I didn't know people who called themselves Asian American feminists and the folks that had outwardly called themselves feminists at least in my communities were ones that didn't pay attention to my community so I was like how am I supposed to be a feminist if I don't see them enacting the type of equity that I think feminists shouldn't act but then as I got to college and finally met Asian American feminists for the first time and also through the internet there was a group called Asian American Feminists United which doesn't exist anymore but there was 5,000 people in that group and they just had conversations about what feminism meant to the Asian American community and that's how I started to embrace my identity there was one time where after I had done a ton of reading on like Grace Lee Boggs and all these amazing Asian American feminists that I went home and talked to my mom and started dropping all of these really academic words like mom do you know about intersectionality or feminism or oppression and privilege and I was explaining all these things to her and she gave me a really blink look and she asked me do you think you're smarter than me now now that you've gone off to college do you think you're smarter than me now and that's when it hit me that even though I was learning all this new terminology my mom had already given me the knowledge of feminism before I knew that there was an academic term for it I do come from a family of matriarchs my grandma is the root of everything that we do my mom I was raised by a single mother so feminism was always a part of my household I just didn't know it was feminism at the time and now that I recognize that it is a movement and it is a political identity and I'm currently doing a lot to figure out what Asian American feminism in particular means and Southeast Asian American feminism and it's still something I'm trying to figure out so even though I identify as a feminist there are a lot of nuances to that because I personally think that I am more of a womanist but I also recognize the anti-blackness that can happen if an Asian American person identifies as a womanist since womanist is typically something that was created out of black woman to be a counter narrative to feminist too so I'm still negotiating I think feminism has a lot of history it needs to deal with but I think that a lot of Asian American women also have an opportunity to create what feminism could mean to and the possibilities it brings thank you any other question if there's not I have a question let's keep this rolling I have a question so I was wondering if you could share some advice that you might have for women who grew up in an environment where they were where they have an identity that wasn't that was under attack or wasn't appreciated so for example I grew up in a community where I was always bullied for the color of my skin and also for socioeconomic status so how can we find our own counter narratives and begin that journey of that self-love for our own communities but that knowledge to embrace our motherland or our identity so Wan thank you for sharing that story because I think that a lot of us probably have similar experiences so I think just generally as a African-American woman growing up in Denver, Colorado now in Indiana that's just my entire experience my existence is always under question and I'm always having to fight and create space for myself and that can become really really exhausting it's hard for me to give any sound advice to this question because I think everyone has their own and it happens at different times I don't think there's ever one particular time in your life that you need to come into your own I think it's an entire lifetime's worth of work that people need to do for some people they end up moving to communities that look more like them for other people they immerse themselves like I did in books and literature and media that looked like me at least on the surface looked like me I think that's why I really wanted to integrate online activism into this too because when I was feeling isolated I at least had an online community and I know that hashtag activism and Facebook and all these things have a really bad reputation because it's like one of those millennial things that people do but I think that evidence at least in my own personal story that it is because of those communities that I've been able to come into my own as a social justice advocate and as a feminist and embracing my Asian-American identity and even meeting other Southeast Asian-Americans I think that it's really important to take advantage of those and I think for those in the room who are here at Highline there are tons of resources and pathways to begin creating those opportunities I think we're really privileged to even be at a college campus at an institution have access to certain things that many other communities don't and I think it's important that while we're figuring out our own journey to recognize that other people are also having those struggles and to help them with their journey as well because I think that is critical for our own understanding in helping other people to get those resources and those knowledge too so I think that would be my advice that as you're learning to bring other people along with you and to learn together as a community whatever that looks like for you so that concludes our event today can we please give Vanessa so Vanika not a some Highline love yes