I don’t know if the #1 is an implication that there are more lazy link-blogs to come, but here are a couple of good reads I found today:
California may be a beacon of diversity, with Asians, Latinos and African Americans comprising the majority. But when it comes to its nonprofit sector, that racial and ethnic diversity is not reflected, and Latinos are especially underrepresented, according to a recent study.
Although Latinos are more than one third of California residents, they represent just 6 percent of directors and 28 percent of staff jobs at nonprofit groups. Among members of boards of directors, Latinos are just 9 percent.
Asian Americans are also underrepresented in leadership positions, though less dramatically. They are 12 percent of Californians, but just 7 percent of executive directors of nonprofits.
Rola admitted that the amount of research done in the area of Asian LGBT studies is still small, calling the field “relatively new territory.”
But before examining the experiences of Asian members of the LGBT community, Rola stressed that her use of the term “Asian” does not imply a uniformity of experience for “a host of people from very different, disparate groups.” Every culture is different, as is every family, although Rola suggested that a shared “history of war” helps to tie them together.
Rola described how many Asian Americans struggle to form a cultural identity in a society that is not predominantly Asian, and explained that students of color tend to go through six stages of understanding their culture: conformity, dissonance, immersion, emersion, internalization and integrative awareness. These steps outline a tumultuous and emotional process where the student first tries to fit in with the dominant culture before changing his or her worldview and consequentially taking steps to define himself or herself as Asian American.
