On August 5 7, I’m joining a few friends in co-hosting a fundraiser organized by Grace Keh and Yuni Chang to help the Haiti Relief Project, coordinated by Jordan International Aid (http://www.jordaninternationalaid.org), which will send a strong team of ten doctors and volunteers to continue the recovery efforts ongoing in Haiti.

UPDATE 7/25: Event has been moved to Aug. 7 so that we can hold at 111 Minna.  See doctorstohaiti.org for the most up-to-date information.

The host committee includes Dave Lu, Kevin Lee, Benjamin Wan and Darlene Lee. Grace and Yuni, aka KC Productions, are organizing this fundraiser to supplement the cost of sending these ten volunteers to Haiti.

RSVP on Facebook.

Five days after the earthquake, JIA was there beginning the work that continues even today. In fact, the president of JIA just left last week for Haiti again, continuing to help Haitians rebuild and recover from the devastating earthquake that demolished Port-au-Prince in January of this year.

It has been over six months now, but let’s not forget the devastation that took place there with over 230,000 lives lost.

Please see the event website (http://www.doctorstohaiti.org) for more information about the event.

$25 donation for admission; any and all additional donations will be appreciated. Your generosity makes a life-changing difference to the lives of many Haitian victims. If you are interested in being a sponsor, please e-mail events@gracekeh.com.

We hope to see you all for this exciting event!

Below is the text of brief remarks I delivered June 29, 2010, at an event in Washington, D.C., in celebration of the Equal Justice Society’s 10th anniversary.

Good evening and thank you all for being here tonight.

I’m Keith Kamisugi, the director of communications at EJS.

The fact that an organization of our size has a director of communications in itself speaks to how critical a role strategic communications played from the very start ten years ago.

In 2000, there was no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter, no iPhone, no iPad. Few were concerned about the death of newspapers. And most folks still bought their music on plastic discs.

What Eva Paterson and the other co-founders of EJS insisted then holds true even more today: we must parallel a progressive legal approach with strategies to creatively educate the public and change hearts and minds about the role of race in our society and to counter the notion of a colorblind America.

Still today we are faced with the vexing challenge of how to communicate about discrimination and structural exclusion in a way that resonates with the average American – and when I mention Americans, I’m not just referring to citizens, but to immigrants as well.

Litigation, legislation, and public policy debates are not the only means of heightening a progressive consciousness around race and racial justice. In order to force the courts’ hand to consider new legal frameworks in adjudicating discrimination cases, EJS draws more attention to racial justice issues, reaching out to the public as the “body-politic,” as potential jurors, as well as consumers.

Almost two years after we elected a Black man as our president, we confront new – and in many ways – more complex challenges about how our society views race, not the least of which is the notion that a Black president signals the end of racism in our country.

Add to this environment the constantly changing landscape of information consumption and we’re presented with formidable communications challenges.

Our approach to meeting these challenges includes three efforts related to popular culture, online activism and communications coalition building.

We’re looking beyond traditional media outlets to evaluate and respond to the reality that music, video games, fictional TV and movies and online social networking are educating more and more people about race issues than ever before. And that education is a poor one.

For people of color and indigenous people, the way Hollywood and other content creators present life is often far different from what we know as reality.

Most of these creative avenues are enhancing the concept that race discrimination is something of the past — a notion seemingly supported by the decline of overt aggression or harm against someone because of their race, gender or sexuality – and ignoring the fact that our social structures today still include structural and institutional racism that perpetuates inequalities and an uneven playing field of opportunity.

A critical piece of this structural puzzle is “unconscious bias” or “implicit bias” — a concept that explains why discrimination persists, even though research clearly shows that people oppose discrimination.

In September 2009, the Equal Justice Society and the American Values Institute organized a panel in Hollywood with the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Kirwan Institute to provide writers and other entertainment industry types with a thorough background on Unconscious Bias, offering insights challenging and inspiring new ideas for developing and producing programming that reflects the true diversity of our rapidly changing society.

And at the Transforming Race Conference earlier this year, I moderated a panel with American Values Institute executive director Alexis McGill Johnson and other panelists to share new ways to engage popular culture and develop content to educate audiences about race and race issues.

We’re also embedding ourselves into the online community of activists by collaborating with Netroots Nation, the organization that puts on an annual conference by the same name – a gathering that has become the premier convention for progressive online organizers, thought leaders and influencers.

Last year, EJS organized at Netroots Nation a panel on the Myth of Post-Racial America and we’re sponsoring this year’s gathering in Las Vegas next month. I’ve also just been asked to serve on their advisory committee to craft a strategy on how to improve opportunities for people of color, women and other communities under-represented in what used to be called the blogosphere.

Lastly, one of this year’s most important communications projects for us is a national convening of progressive communicators, activists and attorneys that we’re hosting along with the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights, and with the support of organizations like the Leadership Conference, Alliance for Justice and The Opportunity Agenda.

The convening will be held August 16 and 17 at the American University law school.

Although we will spend a good deal of time at the convening developing ways to better collaborate on communications related to litigation, judicial nominations and reform efforts linked to developments in the courts – we also want to walk away with possible answers to the riddle of why we continue to be on defense in terms of public discourse when we have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats control Congress.

We’re calling this convening “Communicating for Justice” and it builds up both a retreat of communications practitioners and advocates organized by the Rollback Campaign, as well as a series of convenings on litigation strategies hosted by EJS in 2008 and 2009 at the Schools of Law at Duke University and the University of California at Irvine.

These meetings clearly confirmed the strong interest of social justice organizations in strategizing and working collectively on communications efforts and this year’s Communicating for Justice convening is a next step towards developing a stronger and more coordinated infrastructure.

If you’d like to join us at this convening, visit communicatingforjustice.org. We’re taking registrations until July 15.

Thank you again for celebrating with us tonight. I’ll turn it over now to EJS staff attorney Sara Jackson.

Contestants are judged in part by their responses to questions posed to them on stage during one part of the evening’s program.

One contestant was apparently asked this: “Do you think the Festival made the right decision allowing contestants who aren’t 100 percent Japanese to participate?” (I wasn’t there and had to rely on reliable sources.)

Worded this particular way, I hope this question is never asked again.

Before sharing why, here’s some background to provide context. In 1998, as president of the organization that runs the Cherry Blossom Festival, I persuaded our board of directors to end 47 years of discrimination in the Festival queen contest against multi-ethnic Japanese American women. Until that time, a young woman could not be a contestant unless her ethnicity was 100 percent Japanese. (This article provides more details behind the change.)

The question doesn’t offend me because I was a proponent of the change. Many members of our organization and others in the community were strongly against the change, some because they were anxious about change itself, others because they simply did not believe that a Festival celebrating the Japanese American community should be represented by a multi-ethnic woman. I wasn’t bothered by the criticisms of the change.

What’s wrong about the question is subtle and subversive.

When the question identifies someone as “not 100 percent Japanese,” I know that it’s intended to refer to the ethnic composition of the person, but an unintended consequence of the phrase — and remember that this is being asked in front of hundreds of people — is the reinforcement of the notion that a person’s ethnic makeup dictates their cultural identity.

The amount of “Japanese blood” in a person should never be a barrier to that person being a full-fledged member of the Japanese American community. And that’s why I feel the question as worded and asked to the contestant risks priming our subconscious discrimination.

If you think that’s a ridiculous notion, read this.

If the question was “What do you think about the Festival’s decision to allow multi-ethnic contestants to participate in the Queen contest?” – you avoid the slanted nature of the original question as well as encourage a broader range of possible answers.

In an interview I did for a book written about this very subject, I had expressed hope that years later, the Festival would focus less on the “blood quantum” issue, and more on increasing the Festival’s overall relevance to the Japanese American community.

I’m not a good judge of the latter since I haven’t lived in Hawai’i for ten years.

But on the first part of my aspiration, it seems that 12 years later the notion of being “100 percent Japanese” is still worthy of a stage question.

The film will show at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on Saturday, March 13, at 4:30 p.m. and at VIZ Cinema, 1746 Post St., on Wednesday, March 17, at 7 p.m. Order your tickets online and join our Facebook event.

And join us for our film afterparty the same night, March 17, from 9 p.m. at DOSA, 1700 Fillmore. RSVP on Facebook. Our host committee for the afterparty includes: Keesa Ocampo, Boots Chavez, Hon. Greg Chew (San Francisco Arts Commission), Glenn Fajardo, Tessie Guillermo, Marlene Mira, Alyson Megur Stamos, Dale Minami, Rich Pio Roda, Rodel Rodis (President, Ninoy Aquino Movement) and me.

The Late Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was the boy wonder of Philippine politics until the object of his criticism, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law and threw Aquino into prison. A light bulb glared in his cell around the clock. When at last his frantic wife, Cory, found him, he was so thin he was holding up his undershorts with his hand.

NINOY tells the story of Aquino’s extraordinary transformation from brilliant politician of the Philippines to courageous martyr on the world stage in the tradition of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King.

During Aquino’s eight-year imprisonment at the hands of the Marcos regime, Aquino wrote, studied nonviolence, fasted 38 days and at one point ran for Congress from his cell, constantly inspiring the opposition. When he was taken before a military tribunal, he refused to dignify an unconstitutional proceeding by defending himself. He was condemned to death. Too renowned to execute, too powerful to simply release, Aquino was finally exiled to America for heart surgery.

Three years later, believing with Gandhi, “The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful retort to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God or man,” on August 21, 1983 he returned to Manila.

In his dying moment, his bullet-ridden body fell on Philippine soil. His mother laid out his remains in the family living room. A trickle of mourners became a flood of two million people, followed by three years of massive protests that drove Marcos from the country. The Philippines became the template for the many countries that since have transitioned peacefully to electoral democracy.

The film is emotionally explosive and intellectually challenging. It was shot with two matched HD cameras in Manila, Seoul, Taipei, Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, New York and Washington DC, by Tom Coffman, whose previous credits include “Nation Within” and “First Battle.”

Join the Facebook page at http://facebook.com/ninoyfilm.

Cross-posted on foundasian.org and bayareabenefit.org.

The consumption of entertainment media includes listening to music, playing video games, watching TV and social networking on sites like Facebook.

Adults of course likely spend far less time consuming entertainment media, but still in enough quantities that what we see on television and in the movies influences our understanding of society.

For people of color and indigenous people, the way Hollywood presents life is often far different from what we know as reality. I’m not referring to how Jack Bauer saves the country every season on “24″ or the uber-interesting lives of the women on Desperate Housewives. It’s the world these fictional stories take place in has to somewhat mimic society as we know it.

Television shows can influence the way that viewers understand race and race relations. And a recent study has shown that nonverbal behavior displayed on shows can actually transmit racial biases.

Read the rest of this on Huffington Post

Kim Shinjo, Lauren Shinjo and I hosted a New Year’s Eve party there with about 40 of our friends, complete with a RockBand on the Wii, karaoke and all-you-can-eat plate lunch food. I had vowed at the end of 2008 not to spend the beginning of 2009 the victim of long bar lines at an expensive, loud party. When the clock struck midnight, we were all full, buzzed and relaxed.

A few days later, I returned to work at the Equal Justice Society, where I serve as the Director of Communications. Not only is this the best job I’ve ever had, I’m fortunate to make a living working for a civil rights organization. Our president, Eva Paterson, likes to say that all of us there have the kind of jobs where in the morning we can read something in the newspaper and then actually do something about it. And true to that sentiment, I’ve never had a dull moment in the almost five years of working there.

Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States dominated much of the forward-looking conversations in the office and in the civil rights community. We saw during the campaign the vicious racism employed against Obama and expected that his first year in office would be challenged with not only racism, but the misguided notion that the election of a Black man as President meant the end of racism in our country.

But first we celebrated. I didn’t even attempt to make it to DC for the inauguration, but we had some great parties in San Francisco — including one where I ran into Paul Hsu and our conversation that night turned into a new project called CauseConnext. I was also asked to write a guest post on the ningin.com blog about my thoughts on what the presidency of Barack Obama might mean to the Asian American community.

Locally, the year also began with the swearings-in of my friends David Chiu and Eric Mar to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Both won races against better-funded opponents and special interests. And David’s election was especially significant because he became the first Chinese American ever elected to the district that is home to Chinatown and a large population of Asian Americans. On January 8, in a turn of events that took me by surprise, the freshman Supervisor was elected President of the Board, making him arguably the second most powerful elected official in San Francisco.

This was a long way from when David and I together ran hapihour.org, a happy hour series that raised funds for local Asian American nonprofit organizations, something David started in 2000 with other young progressive leaders, including Phil Ting, who was now the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder, and Jane Kim, a member of the San Francisco school board.

My February was quickly dominated by political events and activities.

I worked closely with my friend, mentor and benefactor Dale Minami and the local Asian American bar on an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighting the fact that no Asian American had ever been appointed as an “Article III” (lifetime appointment) judge to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. (President Obama ended up appointing the first Asian American, Magistrate Judge Ed Chen, in August on recommendation of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein. His nomination remains bottle-necked by Senate Republicans.)

On behalf of EJS, I coordinated an event at Mercury Lounge in honor of Mike Lux, a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Team and liaison to the progressive community, and celebrating the release of his first book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee also came to town in February and I was lucky to participate in a roundtable with him and representatives of the legal and civil rights community.

The highlight of the month though was the marriage of my BFF (yes, guys can have BFFs) Angela Tseng to Ted Szeto in the rotunda of City Hall. Our friendship is especially meaningful in light of the fact that when she first met me (via Steve Owyang), she hated my guts. We don’t have to go into why; it’s something we still debate over. This moment was bittersweet for me because it meant that she would move to San Antonio, where Ted is stationed as a military doc.

March for me had less politics, but most memorable for a ski trip for some of the staff and volunteers of David Chiu’s and Jane Kim’s campaigns. The only thing I can report about this excursion is that Jane and I battled each other in a snowman building contest. And I won.

Earlier that month, Steve Chin and I started a national campaign to seek the release of our friend Roxana Saberi, an American journalist of Iranian and Japanese descent who was arrested in February and held in Iran on charges of espionage. For more than two months, we worked with about a half-dozen folks around the country and the Asian American Journalists Association through Facebook, Twitter and our blog to highlight Roxana’s plight. We’re thankful that she was eventually freed on May 11.

April started with a San Francisco fundraiser I coordinated with Dale Minami for Mark Keam, who was running for the Virginia state house. Mark would eventually win the general election, becoming the first Asian American to serve in Virgnia’s Legislature.

The month ended with the annual dinner of the Asian Law Caucus, which I had recently joined as a board member. The event was also the launch of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education, which will advance the cause of Asian American civil rights and human rights through pan-Asian American alliances and programs that focus on education, activism and leadership. I was responsible for guiding the marketing efforts of the Institute’s launch and I was fortunate to have worked with Stephanie Ong Stillman and Johanna Silva Waki of Hope Road Consulting, a firm the Caucus hired to execute the media relations campaign.

On May 1, I coordinated an APA for Progress reception honoring Glen Fukushima at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Glen made a very generous donation to APAP for a campaign fellowship, which we named after him and applied towards to Judy Chu’s historic campaign for Congress. My service on the APAP board of directors ends on Dec. 31.

I was able to take some time off in mid-May to spend nine days back home in Hawai’i, in part so I could attend the wedding of my college friend Mike Miller to Lisa Menor. Mike and I spent many years together in student government at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and someone I continue to look up after all of these years. I got to spend time with my family, during what turned out to be my only trip back home this year.

I visited the Angel Island Immigration Station for the first time in June, taking some folks from the Asian American Googler Network on a service project field trip there as part of CauseConnext.

August was full of speaking engagements with the Young Filipino Professional Association, at the national convention of the Organization of Chinese Americans and at Netroots Nation 2009 in Pittsburgh. Also took a side trip to DC to celebrate Christine Chen’s birthday.

Sept. 9 was my birthday, which I celebrated with several hundred people because the 40th anniversary dinner of Chinese for Affirmative Action was that night and I serve on the board. That night also featured the showing of an anniversary video that I worked on with fellow board members Stephanie Ong Stillman and Jeff Chang. I’m starting my seventh year on the CAA board and have been privileged to work with executive director Vincent Pan and board chair Germaine Wong, among many others in the organization.

I won something big this year at the Chinatown Community Development Center’s annual dinner: round-trip JetBlue tickets to anywhere the airline flies. I had just joined the CCDC board of directors and feel a little embarrassed about winning such a big ticket prize, but I’m sure I’ll put it to good use. I’m definitely looking forward to working with Gordon, Norman, Malcolm, Cindy, Dave and Kat in supporting CCDC’s outstanding work.

The end of September marked the culmination of a nearly two-year effort for EJS when we co-presented a panel on unconscious bias at the Writers Guild of America West in partnership with the Screen Actors Guild, Americans for American Values and the Kirwan Institute. The panel represented our first foray into developing entertainment industry connections that could result in changes in the way that race is portrayed in popular culture.

In response to the Sept. 26 disaster inflicted on the Philippines and other countries by Typhoon Ondoy, I joined a committee led by Keesa Ocampo that organized a relief event on Oct. 9, which led to other fundraisers throughout the month that ended up raising nearly $15,000 for flood victims.

Sept. 30 marked the close of the Nichi Bei Times, Northern California’s oldest Japanese American newspaper, after 63 years of business. Kyle Tatsumoto and I for many years wrote a Hawai’i column in the newspaper and it would have been a severe loss for the community if the newspaper slipped away. But thankfully due to the vision and drive of editor Kenji Taguma and other staff, the newspaper continues on published by a new nonprofit, the Nichi Bei Foundation. I was honored to be asked to serve on the board of this pioneering media nonprofit.

My October included serving on the search committee for the Asian American Journalists Association national executive director, traveling to Atlanta to participate in a convening on race and race issues and to Los Angeles to speak with Jen Wang of Disgrasian.com and Phil Yu aka Angry Asian Man on a panel at the first-ever Advancing Justice Conference.

Hawai’i Congressman Neil Abercrombie visited the Bay Area in November and I was fortunate to host a lunch reception for him at Roy’s so he could meet kama’aina expats and local Asian Americans and talk with them about his campaign for governor of the Aloha State. That same week, Carole Hayashino and I hosted a fundraiser for Calif. Assemblymember Warren Furutani.

I also accepted a last-minute invitation to deliver a social media workshop in mid-November at the Asian Pacific Leadership Conference for AA and PI college students in Santa Barbara.

November was also one of my friend’s Thanksgiving gathering, where he single-handedly whips up a Thanksgiving meal for us orphans. It’s one of the year’s traditions that I always look forward to.

Winding down the year always begins after the EJS annual gala and this year Miguel and Ginger in our office did another incredible job of creating an event that sends us out in style and with celebration.

So I guess I didn’t do much in 2009. But I hope I made a difference. I remind myself how lucky I am to have a job, a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food on the table. Any year that ends with that is a good one.

The event is from 6-9 p.m. at Lot 46, 46 Geary St. in San Francisco. Due to limited space at Lot 46, we are encouraging attendees to purchase advance admissions online for $20 per person, plus a nominal processing fee (buy here: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/85148). Advance admission will be on a VIP list and will be able to avoid the general admission entry line. You don’t have to donate in advance to attend. We’ll be accepting donations of $20, or any amount, at the door. Proceeds from the event will be donated to the flood victims. We regret that we are unable to accept in-kind donations at this event.

The event is posted on Facebook, Going.com, Yelp.com and Upcoming.org.

The massive flooding in Metropolitan Manila in the Philippines has claimed hundreds of lives and displaced over 700,000 people – in what is considered the worst such calamity in the region’s history. The impact of this unfortunate event will be felt for many months ahead and the country will need a lot of help from the global community in rehabilitation efforts as well as in dealing with resulting food & basic supply shortages and the spread of disease.

Honorary Co-Hosts:
Hon. Dianne Feinstein, United States Senator
Hon. Jackie Speier, Congresswoman 12th District of California
Hon. Betty Yee, Chair of the California State Board of Equalization
Hon. Leland Yee, California State Senate
Hon. Fiona Ma, Majority Whip 12th Assembly District
Hon. Jerry Hill, Assemblymember 19th Assembly District
Hon. Marciano Paynor, Jr., Philippine Consul General to San Francisco
Hon. Gavin Newsom, Mayor City of San Francisco
Hon. Kamala D. Harris, SF District Attorney
Hon. Phil Ting, San Francisco Assessor-Recorder
Hon. David Chiu, President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
Hon. Jane Kim, Vice President of San Francisco Board of Education
Hon. Hydra Mendoza, Mayor’s Education Advisor City and County of San Francisco
Hon. Steve Ngo, San Francisco Community College Board Trustee
Hon. Joel Young, AC Transit Board Director-At-Large

Host Committee: Keesa Ocampo (Chair), Audie Vergara, Eric Casher, Erin Haney, Fred Calindas, Gen Jopanda, Glenn Fajardo, Keith Kamisugi, Kyle Wong, London Breed, Masood Ordikhani, Matt Haney, Meena Harris, Rene Astudillo, Rhean Fajardo, Terrine Baluyut and Vidhya Prabhakaran

Community Partners: ABS-CBN Foundation-USA, Philippine Consulate General – San Francisco, San Francisco-Manila Sister City Committee, Asian American Journalists Association – SF Chapter, Bay Area Asian Pacific American Legislative Staffers, Young Filipino Professionals Association, Filipino Bar Association of Northern California, Citizen Hope, hapihour.org, Philippine American Press Club USA, Kaya:Filipino Americans for Progress, Filipino American Arts Exposition, Asian American Bar Association, Filipina Women’s Network, Clubworks, National Federation of Filipino-American Associations, DineForChange, Soulciety.org, San Francisco Fil-Am Jazz Festival Community, Asian Business League, Fil-Am Chamber of Commerce Santa Clara, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and Bliss Entertainment

Featured DJs:
DJ Big Rich
DJ Romeo
Chief Xcel

Performance by:
Kristine Sinajon

The organizers of this benefit also stand in solidarity with the typhoon victims in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, as well as those who were most recently affected by the tsunami and earthquake in American Samoa, Samoa and Indonesia. “We encourage all those who can to equally support the various relief efforts being organized by other community groups in the Bay Area and elsewhere to assist our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the Asia-Pacific region, ” said Keesa Ocampo,Community Relations Assistant, ABS-CBN International – North America.

For complete event information, with links to Facebook and the admission purchase link, visit http://hapihour.org/ondoy.

AAJA national president Sharon Chan appointed me to the search committee, which also includes former AAJA national president Mae Cheng, current AAJA national treasurer Candace Heckman, former AAJA national vice president for broadcast Randall Yip and veteran journalism recruiter Joe Grimm.

The responsibility of choosing a new executive director belongs to each of us. We invite your ideas about how the position should be structured, how AAJA should be run and, of course, your ideas about who might fill this vital role. This critical juncture is the right time for you to stand up and lean into the process. Please send your ideas to aajasearch@gmail.com.

“This group brings together diverse perspectives, values and experiences of AAJA’s members,” said National President Sharon Chan. “Thank you to all of them for taking on this task.”

The committee’s work will begin immediately following the AAJA National Convention in Boston this week.

Mae Cheng is a former AAJA and UNITY president and is executive editor of amNewYork , a Newsday publication. As AAJA president, Cheng led the organization through transformative change, establishing the AAJA National Endowment. Cheng is also a McCormick Foundation Change Leadership Fellow named by the Poynter Institute. She was the AAJA National Convention Chair in New York in 2000.

Randall Yip has served as AAJA’s vice president for broadcast and led efforts to increase the number of Asian American men in broadcast journalism, launching an Asian American Male Broadcasters task force and mentor program. He works as a senior producer at ABC7/KGO-TV in San Francisco. Yip was the winner of ELP’s Outstanding Leadership Award in 2006 and AAJA’s Member of the Year in 2005.

Candace Heckman is AAJA’s treasurer. A former breaking news editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Heckman is a multiplatform journalist with first-hand experience of how to serve AAJA members in the midst of seismic shifts in the journalism landscape. Based in Seattle, Heckman is a graduate of AAJA’s Executive Leadership Program and the Maynard Institute’s Media Academy at Nieman Foundation.

Keith Kamisugi is an AAJA associate member and director of communications at the Equal Justice Society. Kamisugi worked as a public relations consultant for the national office and numerous AAJA conventions and led the communications team at the 2004 UNITY convention. He serves on several nonprofit boards, including Chinese for Affirmative Action, Asian Law Caucus, SF Japantown Foundation and APA for Progress and on the advisory board for Netroots Nation. He received AAJA’s Member of the Year Award in 2004.

Joe Grimm is an AAJA member and visiting editor-in-residence at Michigan State University. A former newsroom recruiter at the Detroit Free Press, Grimm has mentored hundreds of journalists in his career, and received AAJA’s Leadership in Diversity Award in 2005. An early innovator in recruiting online, Grimm now runs the Ask the Recruiter blog at the Poynter Institute and has been inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.

Chen would be the first Asian American district judge on the bench in the 150-year history of that district. He was also the first Asian American magistrate judge when he was appointed to that position on April 23, 2001.

Under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, federal judges require confirmation by the U.S. Senate and serve with lifetime tenure. Magistrate Judges have limited terms and serve as judicial officers of the district courts and exercise the jurisdiction delegated to them by law and assigned by federal district judges.

“I’ve known and worked with Judge Chen for more than 37 years and seen him become a great attorney and an outstanding jurist,” said attorney Dale Minami of Minami Tamaki LLP, who worked with Chen on the successful case to overturn the wartime conviction of Fred Korematsu for defying President Roosevelt’s internment order.

Garner Weng, President of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area (AABA) noted that while there were a number of excellent Asian American candidates, “Judge Chen earned this nomination for his record of public service and his experience as a federal magistrate. We are extremely proud of his nomination and of his participation in AABA over the years.”

“Judge Chen will be a tremendous addition to the bench and has a wide range of support from diverse groups, including the public interest, law enforcement, legal, and minority communities,” said Edwin Prather, President of the Asian Pacific Bar of California and a former clerk for Chen. Prather also said that Chen received the 2007 Barristers Choice Award, an honor voted on by the membership of BASF’s Barristers Club and awarded to a jurist who has made extraordinary efforts to educate and encourage lawyers new to the courtroom.

Russell Roeca, President of the Bar Association of San Francisco, echoed Prather’s comments and praised Senator Feinstein for the nomination. “The Bar Association of San Francisco has long valued and advocated for a diverse judiciary and noted the complete lack of Latino and Asian American judges on the district court. In recommending Judge Chen to the President, Senator Feinstein has initiated a historical appointment.” Roeca also said that Chen received an “Exceptionally Well Qualified” rating from BASF’s Judiciary Committee.

“Judge Chen enjoys a solid reputation as an intelligent, reasonable, even-handed and diligent judge,” said San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Chen “is a balanced and impartial judge whose temperament is well suited to the bench.”

“Judge Chen combines compassion and fairness with toughness and intellect in tacking difficult issues,” said attorney Ismail J. Ramsey, who has appeared numerous times before Chen. “He has always brought a practical approach to the issues, while ensuring that the rights of all those appearing before him were honored and making certain that the community was protected.”

“Judge Chen has earned a reputation as an evenhanded jurist who is constantly mindful of the role that judges fulfill in society as keepers of the rule of law and the public trust in our system of justice,” said David Wong, president of the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association.

Chen graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law where he earned membership in the Order of the Coif, the highest honor society at the school, and served on the California Law Review. He clerked for U.S. District Judge Charles B. Renfrew and U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge James R. Browning.

After his clerkships, Chen practiced as a litigation associate with the law firm of Coblentz, Cahen, McCabe & Breyer (now Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass). While with the Coblentz firm and then as a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, Chen joined the legal team representing Fred Korematsu.

The Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area (AABA) was founded in 1976 to provide Asian American attorneys with a vehicle for the unified expression of opinions and positions on matters of concern to all Asian American attorneys. The largest local Asian American bar association in the country, AABA is also one of the largest minority bar associations in California. For more information, visit http://aaba-bay.com.

Roxana was kind enough to email me and express her appreciation for the efforts of the FreeRoxana team, one of numerous efforts across the country and the world to raise awareness of Roxana’s terrible ordeal. We embrace her and welcome her home.

I want to thank the following individuals for playing a critical role in this FreeRoxana campaign:

Steve Chin was the first to respond to my call for help with the efffort and was my initial co-blogger after I launched the FreeRoxana.net site.

Craig Gima, Sharon Chan, Lisa Chung, George Kiriyama, Ellen Endo and Janice Lee were the key folks from the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) that provided me with support from that organization.

Alexis Grant reached out to me on her own and I asked her to take the lead on the Twitter account @freeroxana and she did a terrific job with that. Alexis also led the hunger strike effort, which generated a lot of attention and media coverage, further highlighting Roxana’s plight and engaging supporters in expressing their solidarity.

Caroline Cornish Kmack also reached out to me on her own through the Facebook page and I asked her to take the lead on the Facebook page. She also did a terrific job.

Medill student Joseph Freeman and Professors Jack C. Doppelt and Loren Ghiglione offered the invaluable assistance of the Medill School of Journalism family, which organized numerous activities in support of Roxana.

Joe Freeman was the lead blogger for much of the life of this site, keeping up with news and developments and conducting his own interviews on this issue.

Finally Sheamus Burns on his own created the FreeRoxana icon and artwork that really made a difference in attracting attention and helping me better brand the blog, Facebook page and Twitter account.

Roxana is back home in Fargo and we move on to fight other battles. Numerous other journalists — such as Laura Ling and Euna Lee — are oppressed or imprisioned in other countries. Support them like you supported Roxana so that we can hope to see Laura, Euna and others back home in their own Fargos.

Follow @LiberateLaura on Twitter and subscribe to Richard Horgan’s site at http://liberatelaura.wordpress.com.

Many thanks,
Keith