Tag Archives: Representation

The Importance of Hiring and Retaining BIPOC Teachers

September 30, 2021 Editor

by Alexis Mburu and Layla Ismail

As we’ve entered a new school year — one with unprecedented experiences, dynamics, and reckonings — something remains the same. Students of marginalized identities are constantly being disenfranchised in our current education system. This is well demonstrated when we look at the ways Black and Indigenous students are pushed out of classrooms. Not seeing themselves represented — whether it be figuratively in the content and curriculum of the classroom or literally in the staff and teaching force of the school — is one of those ways.

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Voices

OPINION: Hugo House’s Passive Response to Racism Prompts Writers to Address the Violence of the Past

February 9, 2021 Editor

by Luna Reyna, contributing columnist

In June 2020, Hugo House, a Seattle nonprofit writing center, posted a brief message via email and on their website in an attempt to condemn racism and show solidarity and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Below the statement, Hugo House promoted a short list of poems and essays by Black writers. But by July, over 200 writers of Color and allies had signed an open letter addressing the performative nature of the statement and the organization’s lack of real investment, advocacy, and endorsement of local Black writers and communities.

“Hugo House’s recent email professing solidarity with the Black community rings hollow,” the letter reads. “The new civil rights movement makes clear that breaking down systemic and structural racism is all of our work, and we demand that Hugo House move concretely and transparently to invest its resources and make that change happen.”

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Voices

When We Elect Black Women Leaders

November 23, 2020 Editor

by Melia LaCour

It took several attempts before I could finally write this article. What do the 2020 election victories for Black women Democrats mean to me as a Black, mixed-race woman? Each time, I erupted in explosive grief. A complex grief that holds a thousand stories.

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Features

Undoing My Own Invisibility: In Celebration of Filipino/a/x American Heritage Month

October 29, 2020 Editor

by Jasmine M. Pulido

“… if you don’t see yourself represented outside of yourself you just feel fucking invisible.”

—John Leguizamo, Latin History for Morons

I have felt invisible for most of my life.

I have never immersed myself in a story where someone Filipinx American was the main character. I have never watched a show that was led by a Filipinx American protagonist. I have never read a book by a Filipinx American author. I haven’t ever had a Filipinx American neighbor, not even one, in the 15 years I have lived in Seattle.

It’s a problem.

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