Reading this weekend: the power of yellow,Hawaiian businessman gives back to community, words matter

Should East Asians refer to themselves as 'yellow?'

I'm a little late in reading this interesting article about the debate on what East Asians can call themselves is still ongoing today so Kat Chow's article in NPR is still relevant and should spur more discussion. 

The term "Asian American" seems to be useful when addressing the broader non-Asian American audience but it is proving inadequate when talking about the needs -- education, health, representation -- of specific groups from the multiplicity of cultures that fall under that category.

" People with roots from South Asia or Southeast Asia sometimes refer to themselves as brown, which seems like a useful shorthand. But for a bunch of reasons, brown doesn't work for East Asians. I'm wondering if there's a parallel word for us," she writes. "What about Yellow?"

Eddie Flores giving back to the community.

Rags to riches: Millionaire helping improve Filipinos' status in Hawaii

Hawaiian barbecue is no-frills and mixed, just like the Filipino-Chinese entrepreneur who made it mainstream: Eddie Flores, Jr. whose rags-to-riches story is featured in Fortune Magazine.

Flores’ family moved to Hawaii from China when he was a youth, the eldest boy of seven children. His Filipino father, a musician, and Chinese mother, have sixth-grade educations and were part of the middle class in Hong Kong. In Hawaii, his father worked as a janitor and his mother a restaurant cashier and dishwasher to make ends meet.

That’s what sparked Flores’ entrepreneurial spirit. “I told myself I’m not going to be poor,” he said. That determination gave birth to  L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, which was recently rated by Entrepreneur magazine as the top Asian American fast-food franchise in the U.S.

Now the multi-millionaire is turning his attention to political and socio-economic empowerment of the Filipinos in Hawaii. Watch out!

Journalists: Watch your language when writing about immigration

Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist nature of the group or its ties with the Trump administration,” according to “The Language of Immigration Reporting: Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age.”

The report by Define American, the immigration advocacy nonprofit founded by Filipino American Jose Antonio Vargas, one of the nation's most outspoken undocumented immigrants,  found that the Center for Immigration Studies — which was founded by the late John Tanton, a white nationalist considered to be the father of the modern anti-immigrant movement — was often cited as a neutral authority in providing expert opinion or data, according to an article in The Intercept.

The article notes that the news outlets under review increasingly used dehumanizing language, such as “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens,” the emotionallly loaded terminology used by the White House.

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