In an exclusive interview, host Emil Guillermo talks with Profs. Scott Kurashige and Emily Lawsin about their discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Michigan. 

See more on the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund blog, http://www.aaldef.org/blog

The lawsuit paints a broad picture of discrimination and exclusion at the school that Kurashige previously documented in his writing and in the media. The suit alleges his outspokenness on exposing the school’s discriminatory demographics (e.g., only 4.1 percent Black, 4.6 percent Hispanic, 0.2 percent Native American in 2015; only 4 percent of students from low-economic status in 2014) led to his termination as director of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies Program in 2013.

Kurashige, a tenured professor and a winner of the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Award, alleges he was blacklisted by colleagues and forced to resign in 2014.

Lawsin was also harassed for attempting to expose discriminatory practices at the school. While on protected leave to care for a baby with Down syndrome in 2015, she alleges the school began layoff proceedings that turned into a move to terminate. Lawsin has since been barred from teaching her classes for the winter 2017 semester.

Their lawyer, Alice Jennings said the university had no cause for action against Kurashige or Lawsin.

“As is usually the case where an individual is championing the rights of others and refuse to accept racial and sex discrimination aimed at them, the institutional process, by individual leaders or administrators, creates pretextual allegations against the person or community of persons to give a logic to their discriminatory or retaliatory actions,” Jennings told me. 

Jennings continued: “I think what occurred with professors Kurashige and Lawsin is precisely what occurs in an academic culture that is systemically racial and sexist and geared to perform in a protect manner against people of color who will not allow themselves to be undercompensated, -evaluated or humiliated, degraded and treated with disrespect, where others — non-people of color, similarly situated are treated more favorably.”

“We will vigorously defend the university against this lawsuit,” University of Michigan spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald said in media reports.

We're on iTunes, so please, subscribe,rate and review.

Contact us on the AALDEF site at http://www.aaldef.org/blog

Follow on Twitter: @emilamok

Thanks for listening to Emil Amok's Takeout

In Emil Amok's Takeout, host Emil Guillermo, writer on the Asian American Legal Defense and Educaton Fund blog (www.aaldef.org/blog) talks about the new travel ban.

Even sanitized, the ban is an attack on Muslims and Muslim Americans. 

Beyond the travelers it specifically bans, it authorizes a provision to create a data base of foreign nationals in America and the crimes they commit. 

A score card! What better way to criminalize an innocent community. It's another wrongheaded attempt by Trump 45 which will only alienate and anger Islamic people, not just from the six countries in the ban, but all Islamic countries and the communities where they live in America.

Good job, Trump!

Emil also talks to Deepa Iyer, author of the book, "We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim,and Sikh immigrants shape our multi-racial future."

Iyer says immigrant communities are already in fear. She denounces the travel ban, and talks about how it fans xenophobia in the U.S. 

Specifically, she talks about the shooting death in Olathe, Kansas, where one Indian engineer was killed and a second on injured in February. 

Iyer says the killing has impacted the Indian community, which she says is "becoming woke." 

Go to Emil Amok's bio at http://www.aaldef.org/blog

It's not every day an undocumented person gets to sit in the chamber of power and listen to the president.

But that's what happened to Angie Kim.

Emil Guillermo talks with Kim, a community organizing fellow at the Minkwon Center for Community Action in Flushing, Queens, NY.

Brought to the U.S. at age name by her parents from South Korea, Kim qualified for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood arrivals program (DACA), in 2012.

It gave her the right to get a work permit and stay in the U.S. Now 32, her future is in jeopardy, as President Trump has yet to say what will happen with DACA recipients. In recent days, some DACA recipients have been apprehended by ICE  under new broad guidelines.

Kim, invited to the speech by Congresswoman Grace Meng, didn't get a shout out like the widow or Ryan Owens. Kim shares her thoughts on the politics of the night and how she uses her activism to deal with the fear she faces as the only undocumented person in her family

Emil Guillermo write for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund blog. He is an award-winning journalist who was once an NPR host, newspaper columnist, and TV reporter. 

See his work at www.aaldef.org/blog

Or at www.amok.com

www.twitter.com/emilamok

Emil Amok on the Speech. amok.com March 1, 2017

It wasn’t exactly a State of the Union, more like a Trump state of mind.

But that means the best thing you could say about Trump45’s address before Congress is this: At least the TelePrompTer didn’t break.

If it did, who knows what we would have seen on speech night.

“Campaign Trump”?

Or “Twitter Trump”?

That’s the Trump who has been the real enemy of the people.

But this speech was slightly more tempered. Milder. And he didn’t veer off wildly.

The president showed us all— he could read!

Sad.

And just for doing that, 78 percent of viewers in a CNN/ORC poll gave Trump positive marks.

Now that’s something Trump understands. Ratings.

Governing, however, has been a mystery. But now Trump will learn from experience that if you give a political speech that’s long on promises on things like jobs, education, infrastructure, and Obamacare, without a stitch of detail on how to keep those promises, let alone pay for them, ratings can go up.

And maybe he’ll start acting normal?

That’s something both to welcome and to fear.

Welcome because he’s not 100 percent in your face.

Fear, because he’s figured out how the game works.

And that of course, makes Trump more dangerous than ever.

There were two things specifically I was looking for in the speech,  that  left  me pretty disappointed.

Though Trump began the speech talking about Black History Month and civil rights, he really could have condemned the threats to the Jewish Community Centers and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries much stronger than he did.

And he could have dwelled on the shootings of Indian Americans in Olathe, near Kansas City. One man, Srinivas Kuchibhotla died. Another Indian American was wounded.

A Caucasian man, Ian Grillot,24, was wounded trying to disarm the shooter, another Caucasian male, Adam Purinton, 51, who  started it all by hurling racial slurs at the Indians.

These are the kind of things Trump45 has brought out in America since the start of his presidency.

We should have seen a passionate denunciation of these acts. Instead,  rump simply read the prompter then bathed in the shower of self-congratulatory applause.

It was as if just by being gracious makes him a hero.

But what did Trump do since he’s taken over?

With his anti-immigrant, build-a-wall, nationalistic rhetoric, he has given a segment of America a signal that hate is OK in America.

The O-KKK.

Trump’s victory unleashed all that on America.

But the president acknowledged it with just a single line:  “While we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”

It didn’t seem sincere. Not after the first 40 days. It seemed hollow.

He didn’t even mention the Asian Americans by nationality or name.

It was just a shooting in Kansas City.

Not good enough.

Of course, later in his speech, Trump milked another sentimental moment to honor Navy Senior Chief William “Ryan” Owens, who died in Yemen during a raid last January.

The military is always a safe bet. So honor a Gold Star family, and deplete the domestic budget in favor billions for the military.

But for the Jews, or for the murdered Indian immigrant?

Trump gave them short-shrift.

It’s the reason Trump’s big pre-speech “leak” that he would be calling for a bi-partisan immigration reform seemed just like an insincere  tease.

After the travel ban fiasco, and the new ICE policies that have resulted in round ups of undocumented immigrants around the country, a real push for a compromise on immigration would have been a great headline.

But there was “no there, there.”

Not when Trump’s speech contained more talk of a border wall, references to “illegal immigrants,” and borders as “lawless chaos.” And then, as he is likes to do, Trump mixes border security with national security and all that entails, and creates for us all one big fear: “Radical Islamic Terrorism.”

And he used that exact counter-productive term, once again, despite advice to refrain.

By the time he got around to his pitch for a bi-partisan immigration  “compromise,” Trump had no credibility with minority communities and those close to the immigrants who are living in fear.

Immigration has always been humanitarian based for political or economic reasons for the immigrant. The benefit to the U.S. has always been the extra.

Trump’s idea is for a merit-based immigration. He wants to cherry-pick the best, because the best will make money for Trump, the U.S., and that’s all he really cares about.

Once again, he could have made a better case had he mentioned the Indian man who died in Olathe, that suburb of Kansas City.

His name was Srinivas Kuchibhotla. He was a tech worker at Garmin, the gps company.

He was one of the immigrants Trump likes.

But not enough to mention in a major speech.

There were other glaring things Trump said. Like calling education the “civil rights issue of our time.”

Really? So is that why Betsy DeVos–the voucher queen hell bent on destroying public education–the new secretary of education?

And what about that travel ban? After the  speech, Trump cancelled again the announcement for the new executive order that was to supercede the one held up by the court in Washington state.

Reports had it that Iraq would come off. Would other countries be added?

I worry for the  Philippines.

This is the week the militant group Abu Sayyaf, home based in the Philippines, revealed a video showing the beheading of a 70-year-old German hostage.

Trump didn’t mention it at all.

But it was in the subtext when Trump said, “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America—we cannot allow our Nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.”

Stated or unstated, you knew that the beheading in the Philippines,  reported in the New York Times on speech day, could potentially be more fuel for Trump’s xenophobic fire.

And this was a toned down speech.

So if you hear people praise Trump about this speech and the polls giving him good marks for his performance,  don’t be fooled.

All he did was stick to the TelePrompTer.

And act presidential. Remember, he’s all showbiz.

It’s still the same old Trump.

In this episode, recorded days before the announcement of Trump 45's new travel ban, journalist and commentator Emil Guillermo talks to  Erika Lee, the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She's the author of the book, "The Making of Asian America." 

If you’re Asian American,  not a visa overstay, nor a DACA recipient, you may have your head down and not be paying attention to all the new proposals on immigration and border security.

But a new proposal could impact Asian Americans and their families and friends.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed this idea: to collect private social media from Chinese visitors entering the U.S. on tourist and business visas.

National security is again the stated fear, even though there’s little evidence to justify such an invasion of privacy.

This unfair scrutiny based on race and national origin could result in unjust harassment, detention and should be a chilling reminder to Asian Americans whose ancestors were the first major group to be targeted and banned from the U.S.

“These types of actions do affect Asian Americans,” historian Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me on the AALDEF podcast, “Emil Amok’s Takeout.”  “Asian immigrants are the fastest, not only immigrant group in the United States, but the fastest growing undocumented immigrant group in the United States. So they are directly impacted by these interior enforcement and border security propositions and policies.”

Collecting information from Chinese business and tourist visa holders could just be the beginning of a greater overreach by the government.

On the week when a new revised travel ban is expected, Lee warns: “If any of our international relations with Asian countries get even more  rocky, who knows who will be added to the travel ban.”

Lee adds:  “I don’t think that class status or national origin protects new Asian immigrants from these policies. But certainly as Asian Americans, whose families have  lived through (the consequences of previous bans like Chinese Exclusion),  the need to act up is imperative. The need to talk about solidarity, and  show solidarity couldn’t be more clear.”

Once we’re on ITunes, please subscribe rate and review.

You can contact me on twitter @emilamok

Or go to the aaldef blog…at www.aaldef.org/blog

Thanks for listening to Emil Amok's Takeout

Feb. 19 is the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt. It was the start of a nightmare for Japanese Americans who were rounded up and placed in internment camps during World War II.

How did it happen? And could it happen again to another group?

Phil Tajitsu Nash is an Asian American history professor at the University of Maryland, a civil rights lawyer, and a board member of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.  

He talks about how Roosevelt came to sign 9066 despite information that should have negated any sense that Japanese Americans represented a threat.

He also talks about how the internment personally impacted his family.

Read more on the blog at http://www.aaldef.org/blog

Virginia Beach dentist Allan Bergano, an Asian American of Filipino descent wasn't going to go down without a fight.

A city road widening project was forcing him to move. But after spending more than $400,000, he went to the city for relocation costs and was denied.

Officials said there decision was final. There would be no appeal. 

Bergano sued the city in Federal Court. But it wasn't easy.

It was his sense of the historical discrimination faced by Filipinos in America that kept him focused on the fight.

Listen to the podcast. Read his story on the AALDEF blog, http://www.aaaldef.org/blog