Meet new reporter Ashley Wong + Hmong-black relations + Census resumes: Your AAPI Newsletter
It is Thursday, June 11, and this is The Sacramento Bee’s AAPI weekly newsletter.
First, some exciting news: Meet Ashley Wong, The Sacramento Bee’s new AAPI community reporter. She has covered housing and gentrification in Oakland for East Bay Express, as well as tech companies and artificial intelligence for USA Today. She recently worked on statehouse investigations for the Center for Public Integrity and reported on Michigan’s COVID-19 response for Bridge Magazine. You can reach her at awong@sacbee.com.
Ashley will take over next week’s newsletter as I transition out and officially complete my time with The Bee on June 26.
In light of George Floyd’s death – with one of the four officers facing charges being Hmong American – Ashley wrote a story that explores Hmong-black relations and the narrative of Asian complicity. The subject becomes far more complicated when dealing with Hmong Americans, whose history as refugees burdened by war trauma and high rates of poverty and mental health issues is often swallowed up by stereotypes of middle-class, well-educated Asian American privilege.
Some Hmong organizers who stand for “Black Lives Matter” were criticized. Some community members were fearful of being Hmong and associated with complacency. But there have also been honest, courageous and sometimes painful conversations addressing the roots and effects of anti-blackness in Sacramento’s Hmong communities.
Here’s a recap of the stories I recently covered and issues I’m following:
Field operators are stepping up efforts to contact hard-to-count community members in Sacramento following the resumption of census counting that was stalled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The federal field operations will focus on 150,000 households in the Sacramento Valley which don’t get regular mail. The operation is a part of the phase known as “update leave” in which census employees deliver a census questionnaire to homes in person, leaving it behind for a resident to fill out.
The hard-to-count population also includes young children, communities of color, seniors, low-income residents and renters, among others. Community leaders in Sacramento and other counties shared their creative outreach strategies amid COVID-19 that comply with social distancing and stay-home orders, including radio outreach, phone banking as well as attaching census flyers in food donation packs.
In other news
The history behind ‘Yellow Peril Supports Black Power’ and why some find it problematic [NBC News]
How Asian American studies classes, groups amped up activism in time of protests and COVID-19 [NBC News]
Fear sent her Chinatown restaurant spiraling. The challenges to reopening feel ‘just impossible.’ [The Washington Post]
A portrait of California protests: same message, different motives [The Salinas Californian]
California Barber Shops Have Reopened. Nail Salons Are Still Waiting [The New York Times]
Westminster courthouse re-named after first Asian American Orange County Superior Court judge [Orange County Register]
‘It’s the new Chinese Exclusion Act’: How a Trump order could hurt California universities [Los Angeles Times]
Prabal Gurung: It’s time for Asian Americans to shed the ‘model minority’ myth and stand for George Floyd [The Washington Post]
Two-thirds of Asian American health, food workers fighting COVID-19 are immigrants, report says [NBC News]
11 Asian-American artists celebrate their experiences of culture and identity with illustrated self portraits [The New York Times]
Story ideas? Please reach out to Ashley at awong@sacbee.com.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Thanks for reading, stay safe and hang in there!
— Theodora Yu
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This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 10:37 AM.