Alisha is a Korean adoptee, mother, therapist, and educator. She was born in South Korea, grew up in Michigan, and now lives in NYC, where she has a private practice and small-batch pasta business with her husband. Alisha was the Korean American Story 1st Place Winner earlier this year for her piece “Loss, Love, and Liberation.”

Alisha talks to us about growing up as a transracial adoptee in a small, rural town and the internalized whiteness that she started recognizing and healing from once she went to college. She references a PBS documentary called South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, which examines fraud and abuse allegations in South Korea’s foreign adoption industry.

We also discuss our respective postpartum periods and mental health challenges, the healing and grieving that motherhood brings, and how we cannot help but see our own children in the children of Gaza. As powerless as many of us feel in stopping wars and genocides, I believe that it matters how we raise our children and how we show up in solidarity in day to day life. Alisha and her family are a particularly poignant example of all of us being connected as they are raising a Korean Jewish daughter, who I can’t help but see my own daughter in. Because we are all ultimately one human family.

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Sarinya was the first ever Asian woman firefighter in the FDNY and is the founder of Angry Asian Womxn, an organization centering safety, wellness, and community for women, femmes, and gender expansive folks affected by anti-Asian racism and Islamaphobia. Angry Asian Womxn is currently running a fundraiser for mutual aid to Gaza until 11/22/2024, and especially for any Sanrio lovers - I highly recommend checking it out!

We talk about Sarinya’s experience almost stumbling into organizing as well as navigating her radicalized and marginalized identity in the workplace. We also discuss Palestinians and Muslims being within our AAPI community therefore deserving of our solidarity, as ever a reminder that collective liberation means liberation for all.

Sarinya reminds us that we have the power to use our voices and take action to bring about the change and justice we want to see in the world.
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Angry Asian Womxn’s linktr.ee

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Kiki is an author, illustrator, and geographer whose parents immigrated from Guatemala. Her book, Palestine 1492: A Report Back, takes us on a journey through history, geography, and political theory through the language of memoir.

In our conversation, we share our personal stories about who we used to be, how we woke up, and who we are becoming. In this reflection, we emphasize the need for compassion, understanding, and forgiveness for those who don’t yet see the Truth.

Kiki shares her thoughts on academia, trauma, and what organization and resistance can look like, such as planting literal watermelon seeds. Kiki’s teachings and worldview are the medicine our soul need in this moment.

Kiki’s website

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Toi is an impact strategist and single mother to four boys. She is the founder of Loving Black Single Mothers, an organization creating ecosystems of care centering the needs and the support of Black single mothers. Through all of Toi’s work, she is building new ways of living, being, and caring for each other.

We talk about motherhood and the nuclear family as institutions held up by the patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Toi directs us to identify where our issues, challenges, struggles come from, and to then create another way.

Toi’s focus is on using what we have learned and are continuing to learn about systems of oppression to inform our choices. How can we move differently through the world? How can we hold multiple truths and not get stuck in our grief - as valid as this grief is? Who can we be in community with?

This is the vital next step in liberatory work.

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Welcome back to the second half of our conversation with Mohamed, which brought me back into a feeling of being back at school learning from a beloved professor. I think this is an important piece of our work for liberation — the ability to be in beginner’s mind, to listen — truly listen — to one another.

Mohamed at once describes the problems with our world as well as how we can work — together — to overcome, transform, and build anew. For those of us here on Turtle Island, there are real, tangible, and immediate ways we can get involved, starting with standing in solidarity with our Indigenous kin and to listen to our youth.

May we continue finding each other, may we listen to and learn from each other, and may we take care of each other and the land.

About Mohamed’s book

Mohamed’s article from Palestine Now

Mohamed’s X

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The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

Mohamed is a North African-Egyptian Muslim settler of color on Turtle Island. He is an interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island. He is a professor and the author of Islam & Anarchism: Relationships & Resonances.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss the meaning of identity, home, and belonging and how this informs our building of community. Mohamed talks to us about his analysis of Palestine through the framework of 1492, illustrating as ever that all struggles for liberation are connected - a free Palestine cannot be separate from Indigenous land rematriation and Black reparations. He also tells us about the student encampment at Columbia, where he was the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies.

Mohamed asks us to go beyond rhetoric in our pursuit of freedom, to seek to understand what it means to be human, and to honor that land is a spiritual subject.

“Palestine 1492” event with Haymarket Books

feral feminisms article

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The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

So Yun is a Korean American filmmaker. Her debut film Liquor Store Dreams is an incredible and intimate portrayal of two Korean American children of liquor store owners in Koreatown, Los Angeles, who set out to bridge generational divides with their immigrant parents. The film pulls us back to the 1992 LA riots, which is a personal, heartbreaking childhood memory for many of us.

In this conversation, So Yun shares that her inspiration and motivation in filmmaking is rooted in witnessing and experiencing injustice and wanting to change the world in her own way. Through her work, she builds bridges between communities, identities, and generations.

So Yun tells us about the process of filmmaking, the importance of using our voices to stand up for ourselves and to educate others, and the differences in perspectives for Koreans of the diaspora compared to Koreans in Korea.

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Watch Liquor Store Dreams on iTunes

Watch Liquor Store Dreams for free on Kanopy with library card

Briana is a liberation mentor, a speaker, an academic, an Earth minister ceremonialist, and so much more. She is on a mission to liberate herself, others, and the planet by returning to earth-wisdom and has created The Earth Temple’s Liberation Mystery School, a community of tender revolutionaries building new systems of liberation for all.

In our conversation, we talk about the spiritual industrial complex — a world that we both know quite well — and how we can find ways to heal and resource ourselves through the very practices that are so problematic in a capitalistic context. We also talk about religions and cults manufacturing obedience, the necessity of naming polycrisis, and the inherent mystery and paradox of being the embodied souls that we all are.

Briana emphasizes that we must each heal ourselves enough so that we do not continue propagating systems of oppression and so that we have enough strength to show up to love and fight. She also reminds us that we already have everything we need within ourselves and within Mother Earth — we simply have to access it.

2 gift weeks at The Mystery School

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