On a dewy January afternoon, I take the 7 train, “the most diverse commute in the country,” to a temple in Jackson Heights, Queens, a center of South Asian diasporic life in New York. After pausing to clap my hands in time to the Sikh prayer service happening on the first floor, I eventually find … Read More
A brisk wind whipped around NYPD barricades in front of Trump Tower on a mid-November evening. Outside of the building, a group of immigrants’ rights activists from across New York City set up shop to rally for the passage of a clean DREAM Act and more comprehensive immigration reform. Speakers representing organizations that work with … Read More
Black political resistance, in many ways, paved the road for South Asian resistance. Here’s a reading list that highlights that history. These pieces explore the family stories of working-class South Asian immigrants in Harlem and New Orleans, solidarity between Black liberation activists and Indian freedom fighters, and contemporary takes on South Asian Americans and the … Read More
On March 27th, the nonprofit Brooklyn Defender Services in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) launched an online “We Have Rights” campaign, dedicated to spreading knowledge to multilingual immigrant communities about the steps individuals can take to protect themselves and their loved ones from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a press release, ACLU … Read More
Last week, the research and advocacy organization Equality Labs released a report on Caste in the United States. The national survey that formed the basis of this new report was, according to Equality Labs, the first comprehensive look at caste identity and discrimination’s prominence within diasporic South Asian communities in the States. Equality Labs describes itself … Read More
Violence and discrimination against the Rohingya minority of Myanmar has a long history. 1978 was a pivotal year in this story of increasing marginalization, when a state campaign of expulsion caused more than 222,000 refugees to flee to Bangladesh. As a result, today’s refugee crisis has roots that go back years. The most recent wave … Read More
My Beautiful Laundrette (dir. Stephen Frears) is a beloved British film of the 1980s. It was pioneering in its depiction of a romance between a young Pakistani entrepreneur, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), and his lapsed-fascist former schoolmate, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), as they strove together to revive Omar’s uncle’s failing laundrette in South London. While it was … Read More
On January 5th, a federal judge in New Jersey ordered the revocation of US citizenship of a naturalized citizen named Baljinder Singh. According to the Department of Justice, Singh had misled immigration authorities by filing applications to adjust his immigration status under two different names—Baljinder Singh and Davinder Singh, in the process concealing that there … Read More
Ravi Bhalla, the first Sikh man to become a mayor in New Jersey, was sworn into his new position as mayor of Hoboken on New Year’s Day. His first action as mayor was to declare Hoboken a “fair and welcoming city” by executive order. While the declaration shies away from the word “sanctuary,” perhaps in … Read More
Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the US, is the first Indian-American to hold the chairmanship. But before you get excited about the representation of minorities in federal leadership positions, it’s worth learning what Pai actually stands for, and what changes he is trying to bring to the ways we … Read More
