Hello AACP Newsletter Readers.

Happy Halloween or hope you had a good one (depending on when I finally get this newsletter out :)!

Happy Diwali too!

Gosh the holiday season is upon us and the presidential election is only four days away. I just heard on the news that over 50 million people have already voted. Wow! Great job – keep it going.

I’d like to apologize in advance to those of you that don’t want see anything political from us. I wrote an editorial for this newsletter that dips a little into the presidential election. Since AACP is a 501(c)3 organization, we are not allowed to get involved with any sort of campaigning.

Prior to our newsletter’s long hiatus (AACP newsletter’s before February 2011), I may have dipped my toes further across the political line back then. Since we restarted the newsletter in 2020, I’ve tried to steer clear of politics.

However, with this election, I can’t help but feel that it could be a measure of our organization’s (and others like us) success or lack of it.

AACP’s mission statement has been written and re-written multiple times over the years. Some recommendations for creating a mission statement suggest that you should try to boil it down to one sentence. When we last worked on it, we never really came up with something that was that concise. I’ve used various forms over the years for ad copy text, but here is the long version that we were working from.

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Long Version of AACP's Mission Statement

AACP is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to educate the general public about Asian and Pacific Islander American culture, history, and current experiences to combat prejudice and hate, to right and prevent civil injustices (resulting from prejudice and hate), to promote self-awareness, and to foster compassion, understanding, and tolerance.

We do this through the books and materials that we distribute and create, and through our advocacy efforts.

AACP’s goal is to do more than educate Asian and Pacific Islander Americans about their own culture, heritage, and history, we hope to reach all Americans. We believe that prejudice and hate come from ignorance and that tolerance and compassion come from true understanding.

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With such a mission, it’s really hard to gauge how well we’re doing. Our efforts are relatively miniscule on the grand scheme of things. We’re just a part of a much bigger effort by many organizations fighting for social justice causes. Since our job is primarily educational, anything learned could be utilized long after the initial lesson has been imparted (especially since the books we sell and distribute can be read over and over again and by many people).

So how the current politics interact with our mission is that I see similarities between past racial injustices and the rhetoric of some politicians and their followers. Whenever there were injustices perpetrated on the AAPI communities in the past, it was usually preceded by hateful and demonizing speech. We could go into a whole history lesson here, but I won’t at this time.

My last comment on this matter is that voting is a privilege and at every election time, we hold some power to keep our governments accountable. If you had the ability to choose the qualities of your boss at work, wouldn’t you want them to be truthful, wise, considerate of your needs, and caring? Well you have that opportunity with your governmental leaders. All I can say is that I hope you choose wisely.

If any of this or my editorial, “What Separates Us May Be One Word,” sounds like I am being biased, this is just a reflection of my views and not necessarily those of AACP.

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Onward with this editor’s message.

For our other article this month, one of our board members, Sylvia Kataoka, has written an interesting piece on growing up in three cultures. Please check it out.

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AACP does not have any more planned scheduled events for the year. If you’d like to invite us to your event, feel free to do so.

On next year’s schedule, we are hoping to go to the California Council for the Social Studies conference, on March 7 and 8th, in Burlingame. We need your support to go to this event and will have a link in next month’s newsletter for you to make a special donation. If you wish to make a donation now, you can do so by going to our general donation page.

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Food and cooking are a big part of culture and holidays. So for this holiday season, we are featuring eight food related children’s books and 12 cookbooks for our featured books. Enjoy!

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Hey, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Hope you give this a try and please feel free to tell us about your experience.

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Thank you Sylvia and Hal for your contribution of an article for this month. It’s much appreciated and it was great to learn more about you Sylvia.

Many thank to our editors Philip, Mina, Roger, and Susan. Philip, great job.

Our next newsletter will probably be towards the beginning of December. So have a wonderful Thanksgiving Everyone!

That’s all for now. Take care.