Week 4: Justice, Leadership, and Collective Liberation (May 22 to 28).
Justice work is rarely solitary. It is communal, intergenerational, and rooted in love for community. Throughout history, Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islander leaders have organized across movements; recognizing that liberation is interconnected, that the fight for labor rights and the fight for sovereignty and the fight for the planet is the urgent work of their generation.
This week we honor four leaders who have worked at the intersection of activist-philosopher and embody what revolution looks like when you build from the ground up.
Voices of the Work
Chinese American philosopher and activist, Grace Lee Boggs spent seven decades asking what revolution looks like when the focus begins with how people treat each other. Throughout her lifetime of organizing in Detroit, she showed that liberation is not a destination, but an ongoing communal and intergenerational practice rooted in love. Leaders who embody Boggs’ philosophy and practices today include Ai-jen Poo, a Taiwanese American organizer and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who has spent decades fighting for the dignity of the largely immigrant women of color who care for other people’s families; Vivek Maru, the Indian American founder of Namati, who trains grassroots paralegals called Barefoot Lawyers, in ten countries to help communities protect their land, their health, and their rights; Amanda Nguyen, Vietnamese American civil rights activist and founder of Rise, who drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; and Sung Yeon Choimorrow, a Korean American Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, who is building economic and reproductive power for AANHPI women across the country. These are not Boggs’ successors by accident. They are proof that her approach to building communities of care was right.
Representation Matters
Born in Mogadishu and raised in a Kenyan refugee camp before arriving in the United States at thirteen, Ilhan Omar became one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress and the first woman of color to represent Minnesota. Her path was built on two foundations; the decades of Arab American civic infrastructure laid by James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, who insisted that Arab American voices belonged in the political process, and the trailblazing example of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, whose 1972 presidential campaign proved the door could be pushed open even when the world says you don’t belong in the room.
Omar’s memoir ‘This Is What America Looks Like‘ tells her journey from displacement to civic leadership with unflinching honesty. It is an insightful testimony from a woman who has been the target of relentless racist, Islamophobic, and sexist attacks, but continues to face every challenge with political courage and perseverance.
Voices of the Pacific
Brianna Fruean became a founding member of 350 Samoa at eleven years old, taking on climate advocacy before most adults were willing to speak out for their own survival. At sixteen she became the youngest ever winner of the Commonwealth Youth Award, and has since spoken at the United Nations and COP26 as a member of the Pacific Climate Warriors. Fruean’s Democracy Now interview from COP26 is essential listening.
Fourth-generation Chinese New Zealander – poet, playwright, and broadcaster – Lynda Chanwai-Earle,whose 1996 one-woman play Ka-Shue: Letters Home was the first authentically Chinese New Zealand work for mainstream audiences, tracing one hundred years of her family’s history across colonialism and the Poll Tax levied against Chinese migrants. She spent two decades as a journalist and documentary producer for Radio New Zealand, insisting that telling the full, unfiltered story of a people is a righteous form of justice.
“If we are able to save the islands, we are able to save the world.” – Brianna Fruean, Democracy Now, 2021
Reflection: As a global citizen, what does your consumption cost someone else’s home? Whose leadership are you being called to follow?
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