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COMMENTARY: Suicide: Let’s talk

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By Randon Aea The deaths of American designer Kate Spade and celebrity gourmand Anthony Bourdain draw attention to suicide as a growing U.S. health issue. At the same time, they open uncomfortable and hard-to-answer questions. Not least is reconciling the dissonance of such finality from two people who appeared to “have it all.” Bourdain and […]

COMMENTARY: AAPI health disparity intersects disability and civil rights

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By Nadine Shiroma HBV civil rights advocate & Hepatitis B Foundation policy adviser Between 1991 and 2012, many medical and dental schools in the United States accepted students with chronic hepatitis B (CHBV) — most of them Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) — only to prohibit their enrollment due to the disability. Over the […]

COMMENTARY: Implicit bias

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By Akemi Matsumoto APACEvotes and APACE Board Member Faculty Emeritus, Bellevue College There has been a lot of talk about implicit bias because of the recent incident at Starbucks in Philadelphia, when Dante Robinson and Rashon Nelson were arrested for merely sitting at a table waiting for a business meeting without purchasing anything. So what […]

COMMENTARY: Automatic Voter Registration

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By Derek Lum APACEvotes Community Organizer It has been a historic session in the Washington state legislature. Four laws passed this year that will make Washington one of states with the strongest access for voters. APACEvotes worked to pass one of these laws, Automatic Voter Registration (AVR). Through this new law, the voter registration process […]

Dismissing minority-led shows

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By Ruth Bayang NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY Numerous viewers condemned the recently revived TV series Roseanne over a scene in an episode last week. John Goodman’s character, Dan Conner, tells Roseanne they “missed all the shows about Black and Asian families” because they fell asleep in between Wheel of Fortune and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, referencing ABC’s […]

Don’t whitesplain food to Southeast Asians

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By Ruth Bayang NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY This outrageous story came into my radar because I am from Malaysia. Two white judges on the cooking show, BBC’s MasterChef UK, insisted a Malaysian contestant’s chicken rendang curry should have been crispy. The contestant, Zaleha Kadir Olpin, was eliminated from the competition. Her offending rendang was presented as […]

COMMENTARY: Breaking the cycle of opioid addiction requires federal partnership

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By Troy Christensen Executive Director of the Korean Women’s Association Innovation around opioid abuse prevention is happening in Washington state, and the Korean Women’s Association (KWA) is collaborating with partners in the regional “Accountable Community of Health” to find solutions to one of the most pressing healthcare equity issues of our time. There isn’t a […]

COMMENTARY: Reader commentary on the bill to reinstate affirmative action

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By Linda Yang WA Asians For Equality Proponents of the repeal of I-200 tried to use a 2006 study, entitled “Affirmative Action in Washington State,” to justify their cause. We’d like to add data that were left out in the original article in the Northwest Asian Weekly (Bring back affirmative action? March 17, 2018) to […]

COMMENTARY: Earth to Bruno Mars — Cultural appropriation or appreciation?

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By Peggy Chapman Bruno Mars (Peter Gene Hernandez) won six Grammy awards this January, including Best Album for 24K Magic and Best Song of the year. His background is eclectic — his mother was Filipina, and his father is from Puerto Rico and also part Jewish. He was raised in Hawaii. His father nicknamed him […]