Month: July 2015

A Decade In: My Reflections as an Asian American Teacher in Harlem in These Times

As an Asian American teacher working in a public school with predominantly black and brown students, I’m placed again in a complicated racial hierarchy that doesn’t like to name itself. I am rather anomalous in Harlem, but as a teacher of the African American Civil Rights Movement, I am freakish. Once I referred to myself as a person of color, only to be greeted with an involuntary snort from one of my students.