California bill apologizes for discrimination + Monks tour greater Sacramento area: Your AAPI newsletter
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It is Thursday, Feb. 20, and this is The Sacramento Bee’s AAPI weekly newsletter, brought to you by yours truly.
Here’s a recap on the stories I recently covered and issues I’m following:
A Southern California lawmaker wants the Legislature to apologize for the role it played in carrying out policies that discriminated against Japanese Americans before and during World War II.
The bill by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, catalogs a history of California officials working to identify and remove Japanese Americans from their communities, from forbidding Japanese citizens from owning property to dismissing public employees of Japanese descent from their jobs.
The resolution, scheduled for a vote in the Assembly on Thursday, is the latest effort from California lawmakers to acknowledge the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. Those measures go back as far as 1982, when the Legislature passed a law providing compensation to state employees who lost their jobs because of internment.
Tibetan Monks from India are on a Northern California tour, including a visit to Placerville, the first stop amid a two-year journey where monks from a southern India monastic college travel around the United States to hold workshops, teachings and give blessings. They will be in town until Saturday.
Placerville Friends of Tibet, a volunteer group that organizes and hosts Tibetan cultural events in the area, has been coordinating the tours for 18 years.
The monks head to Auburn on Monday and will stay until March 4, then will spend March 15-28 in Grass Valley. The full tour schedule can be found on the group’s Facebook page.
Community organizer Miya Yoshitani, who for years has worked to educate, inform and engage low-income Asian communities statewide, was honored as one of the recipients of the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award on Wednesday in Sacramento.
This comes a few weeks before the presidential primary election on March 3, and the invitation to participate in the 2020 Census arriving by mail on April 1.
Under her leadership, APEN also runs a multi-lingual Asian American voter mobilization program across the nation, and engages 20,000 voters who speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Lao, Mien, Khmu and English across the state.
This helps fill a gap in engaging communities that political parties could be ignoring due to the cost of providing language assistance and more uncertainty as to how these voters might lean politically.
In other news
The Asian American Journalists Association points out that reports of xenophobia and discrimination toward Asians and Asian Americans have surfaced across the country. [NBC News]
Why the fastest growing population in America is the least likely to fill out the census [The New York Times]
U.S. funding reintegration program in Laos for Laotian and Hmong refugees [NBC News]
New generation pushes Hmong mental health concerns into the light [MPR News]
How Andrew Yang quieted the Asian American Right [The Atlantic]
Bullies attack Asian American teen at school, accusing him of having coronavirus [CBS News]
Omar Ameen came to the U.S. to escape the violence in Iraq. Now he’s accused of being a member of an ISIS hit squad. [The New Yorker]
Writer Anthony Veasna So on the alienation and comfort of doughnut shops [The New Yorker]
For things to do in Sacramento and beyond, a reminder that the Embracing Hmong Women Summit 2020 is happening Saturday at Sacramento State University from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Hmong Youth and Parents United is organizing spring classes for its performing arts and culture program! Starting from the week of Feb. 24, be sure to check out classes on Hmong folk songs, musical instruments, wedding traditions and language here.
Mark your calendars for the API College Day on March 6 to promote early awareness of college and career preparation to API students and families.
Celebrate API women leadership during Women’s History Month on March 7 at Cosumnes River College from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
What stories would you like to read about? Send your story to me at tyu@sacbee.com.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Thank you for reading!
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