More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Harris’s unprecedented rise as the first woman, who is also Black and South Asian, to serve as vice president forces us to recognize a woman from a richly diverse background has been chosen to lead one of the greatest democracies in the world.
America, at least half of it, can celebrate that we have chosen the path of inclusion, diversity and hope—even if we barely managed to do so.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and a national reckoning with racism, Sarah Min argues, “Now is the time for Asian Americans to come together to fight for racial, economic and social justice.”
In Min’s home state of Pennsylvania, there are over 230,000 Asian Americans in Pennsylvania who are eligible to vote but have not registered. Therefore, she is calling on Asian Americans to “become more civically engaged for the liberation of all people.”
Only 47 Asian American and Pacific Islander women are among the 7,383 state legislators across the country, and only 10 are among the 535 members of Congress.
But this year, a record number of AAPI women Democrats are running for Congress.
The suffrage movement that organized, picketed, fasted, spoke out and endured arrests, beatings, force feedings and other forms of torment, would not have succeeded without the leadership and engagement of many women of color.
Dr. Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician and humanitarian, is helping fight COVID-19 in the world’s largest refugee camp, where lack of resources and illiteracy exacerbate the disease’s transmission.
Alvi creates COVID-19 teams that go into the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh to test and treat COVID among the displaced Rohingya, who number about one million.
China’s Uyghur minority are facing a gendered campaign of forced birth control—recent reports document plans for forced IUD placement, mandated abortions, and sterilizations and injections that have been reported to cease menstruation cycles. Many experts say this constitutes a serious risk of genocide.
Racism is woven into the fabric of the U.S., and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made it worse. Racist attacks and interactions—from micro-aggressions to outright hate crimes—have been on the rise since the pandemic began.
Ahead of the Intra-Afghan talks, expected in days, a coalition of Afghan women’s rights groups have released an open letter to Taliban leadership calling for a peaceful resolution to the four decades of war, reaffirming their position to preserve and build on the gains of the last 20 years, and calling for a meeting with senior members of the group.
One thing missing from the think pieces and social media musings is something I’m sure many Black and Brown women have noticed—that Harris is the most diverse person to ever achieve this level of political stature. A Black, Indian-American woman is poised to occupy the second-highest office in our country.
Although reproductive rights are under attack around the world, there remain some bright spots for women’s reproductive rights and contraceptive access.
In the Philippines, since 2012, when reproductive rights and education were finally enshrined in law in this fiercely Catholic country, the government has committed to providing free family planning services to those living in poverty.
