A Series Introduction from Asian/Pacific Islander Affinity Group Chair Stacey Wang
Holland & Knight's Diversity Council and Asian/Pacific Islander (API) Affinity Group are proud to celebrate Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month and pay tribute to the generations of Asians and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and continue to play a role in its future success. The past year has seen a sharp uptick in hate against the API community, making it all the more important to ensure that its members feel supported, seen and heard as Americans. This year, we took time to reflect on how we could better support our API colleagues, sitting down with attorneys and staff to have important conversations about racial justice and allyship. Throughout the coming weeks, we will be presenting a video series showcasing some of these conversations. We hope that the stories conveyed in these videos help advance dialogue around API Heritage Month as well as lead to further discussions of how we can be better allies to our API friends, family and colleagues.
In this video, Asian/Pacific Islander Affinity Group Chair Stacey Wang, a partner in our Los Angeles office, introduces the series and previews other events comprising our Heritage Month programming.
More Videos in this Series
Episode 1: A Series Introduction from Asian/Pacific Islander Affinity Group Chair Stacey Wang (You are currently viewing Episode 1)
Episode 2: Witnessing API Discrimination: A Shared Experience
Episode 3: Kristin Asai Shares Her Family History in the U.S. Japanese Internment Camps
Episode 4: Highlighting API Contributions to the U.S. Military
Episode 5: A Brief History of Discrimination Against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans
Episode 6: Becoming an Ally with Jennifer A. Mansfield
Episode 7: Perspectives from a Second Generation Samoan American
Episode 8: Reflecting on the Importance of Professional Mentors
Episode 9: Explaining the Model Minority Myth
Episode 10: Holly Camisa Shares her Experience with Being Multiracial
Episode 11: Celebrating the Everyday Asian Lives with Vinh Duong and Quynh-Anh Kibler
Episode 12: Remembering to Have Roots and Wings with Shannon Goff Kukulka
Stacey Wang: Hi, my name is Stacey Wang. I am a partner in the LA office and practice in commercial litigation. I'm the chair of the Asian/Pacific Islander Affinity Group at the firm, and we are proud to present our video series for the Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. We always have Heritage Month programming, but this year we just felt that we needed to do things a little differently. With the recent events going on in this country and the rise in API hate, we just felt that it was really an opportunity this month to educate our partners and our associates and staff on our experience in wanting to engage them in a deeper and further conversation about racial justice and how we can support each other and promote allyship across our affinity groups.
The firm has signed on as a signatory to the Stand Against Racism from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and we look forward to working with NAPABA and other organizations such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice and other organizations in furthering our support of the API community. For our attorneys and staff, we have arranged for an internal bystander intervention training where we will learn how to safely intervene during a situation where we are witnessing discrimination or an event where things may escalate so that we're all prepared to do our part to not let these events go unanswered. I would like to thank the firm and our Diversity Partner Tiffany Lee for the support that they have shown us, as well as the outpour of support from the affinity group leaders and others in the other affinity groups. We hope that the programming and the stories conveyed in the videos help to further the dialogue around API Heritage Month and also the larger issues of allyship and racial justice.