Shining a light on an unseen AAPI Heritage: How Asian Americans use civic participation to increase visibility
In elementary school, I always knew I was the next on the classroom roster when the teacher paused, chuckled, and said, “I’m not even going to try to pronounce this name.” I would raise my hand and say, “that’s me,” as if I were claiming to be the silence itself. I had a typical South Indian name—lots of letters, easy to mispronounce. But when it wasn’t pronounced at all, that’s when I was rendered invisible. So when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris spoke her South Indian immigrant mother’s name, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, in her speech as she accepted her new...
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