Furthermore, during the Cold War, “homophobia and anticommunism went hand in hand” and homosexuality was seen as a threat to national security, going so far as banning gay men and women from federal employment in 1953

Asian Americans have a 500-year-old history in the Americas starting with Filipinx sailors who traveled with Spanish colonizers on the Manila-Acapulco Galleon

Vincent Chin, age 27, was out with his friends celebrating his bachelor party on June 19, 1982 at a local strip bar. Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler plant superintendent and his stepson, Michael Nitz, a laid-off autoworker, seemed annoyed that Vincent was receiving attention from the dancers. Vincent’s friend overheard Ebens say, “Chink,” “Nip,” “fucker,” and one of the dancers heard him say, “It’s because of motherfuckers like you that we’re out of work.” Vincent responded, “Don’t call me a fucker” and they fought. When both groups were kicked out of the bar, Ebens and Nitz drove around searching for Vincent. Once they found Vincent, Nitz held him down while Ebens swung a baseball bat into his skull four times.

She brought up the brutal 1982 killing of Vincent Chin, and the wave of anti-Asian violence in the 1980s that targeted Korean shopkeepers and Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

“When your body is queer and brown/ they will want to build fences around you/ choose a side/ brown or queer/ but borders are not natural to us/ we are both moon and sun/ we are everything in between/ you can not divide land and you can not make me choose/ I am manifestation that all borders will fall.”

Harriet Tubman, shown in Figure 3.3.4, was also famous for her daring leadership in helping to free enslaved people and bring them to safety through a network of activists called the Underground Railroad.

Fannie Lou was an outspoken civil rights activist that endured acts of violence by white doctors, policemen, and politicians.

Panafricanism became the foundation for the idea of Blackness and Black identity, which brings together the experience of people of African heritage.

Crenshaw developed the term intersectionality - using an analogy of an intersection: one road representing a workforce structured by race, the other road by gender.

Settler Colonialism which “destroys to replace” (Itsuji Saranillio, in Teves, Smith & Raheja, 2015) adopts and promotes the same rapist genocidal mentality as colonialism, should actually be termed "invader colonialism" because to use the term "settler" seems to be innocuous and implies that the land and the people needed to be "settled" because it was/they were "wild" and "out of control" at the time of the invasion.

Self-determination refers to the social movements, legislation, and beliefs by which Native American tribes in the United States exercise self-governance and decision making on issues that affect their own people. Self-determination is an integral piece of sovereignty and the right of a people to decide upon its own form of government, without outside influence and relates to the freedom and free will of the people of a given area to determine their own political status and independence.

Anthropologists are quick to put dates on our existence in North America because of their colonized mindset to attempt to "prove" we have no history or "not enough" history in our homelands to lay claim to it. By trying to date our existence closer to the invasion of the Americas, they are attempting to dismiss our connection to our place of origin and our creation.

This was a common story he heard growing up in Palestine. She learned about Muslim women who saw no contradictions between feminism and Islam, such as the Muslim Sisters (Ikhwat al-musilmat) in the West Bank who believe that Islam gave women their full rights, but that the religion was corrupted by men to suit their patriarchal agenda

They also break down how prison labor is exploited as a loophole in the 13th amendment which was supposed to abolish slavery, but allowed slave-labor “as punishment for crime.”

In Chapter 2: “The Ongoing Struggle for Ethnic Studies,” Espinoza-Kulick examines how Ethnic Studies was birthed out of struggle, which helps to define this unique discipline.

Ethnic Studies exposes us to larger historical issues, broad socio-cultural topics, philosophies both inherited from our ancestors and rooted in our daily experiences, and the discipline helps us analyze and break down systems of power.