Kat Chow

Our most recent #NPRObamaEffect chat explored how — or whether — the Obama years have shaped how Latino communities and people across the country think about identity today.

Rick Bayless is a master of Mexican fare. He's also a white guy from Oklahoma. Over the years, that's made him the target of criticism. Who gets to be the ambassador of a cuisine?

Jeremy Arambulo, a Filipino-American comic artist who lives in Los Angeles, says he basically came out of the womb knowing the legend of Bruce Lee, the kung fu king. "He's like our Elvis," says Arambulo. "If we didn't have him, geez, who would we have? Charlie Chan? I don't know. ...

Early one morning last weekend, Amrik Singh Bal, 68, was standing along a stretch of highway in Fresno, Calif., waiting for a ride to work. Two white men pulled up beside him, hurling obscenities out their window.

The Fresno Bee reports that Bal, who is Sikh, has a ...

In Fresh Off The Boat's first episode, Eddie Huang walks into the cafeteria of his new middle school for the first time, toting a brown paper bag. As he looks for a seat, we're reminded that on top of the usual new school jitters, Eddie's the lone Asian-American kid in ...

Recently, we've been talking a lot about onscreen diversity and how much browner TV has gotten in the past few years with shows like Empire, Master of None and Dr. Ken and showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and Nahnatchka Khan injecting more people of color into the system.

The New Yorker's ...

Around this time in 2014, ABC had just canceled the sitcom Selfie, starring everybody's ideal boyfriend John Cho and Karen Gillan. Cho was the first Asian-American male to play the lead in a rom-sitcom — he called his role "revolutionary" — and fans lamented that the show was ...

The word "diversity" gets thrown around a lot in these parts, and recently, it has come under a lot of scrutiny; it's easy to invoke, but what does it actually mean? Over at The New York Times Magazine, Anna Holmes recently pondered how the word gets used in corporate ...

Police in Irving, Texas, have decided not to press charges against a 14-year-old boy who brought a homemade clock to school. Authorities and educators were worried it might have been a bomb.

A 14-year-old high school student in the Dallas area is home from school Wednesday after his expulsion. Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade clock to class on Monday, and the school phone...

Grace Lee Boggs, who has spent much of her life advocating for civil rights and labor rights, became such a noted figure in Detroit's Black Power movement that people assumed she must be partially black. In some of her FBI files, Boggs, who is Chinese-American, was described as "probably Afro ...

There's a long history to the Emanuel African Methodist Espiscopal Church in Charleston, S.C., — affectionately known as "Mother Emanuel" — where nine churchgoers were allegedly shot and killed by 21-year-old Dylann Roof on Wednesday night in what authorities are calling a hate crime. In fact, this church has ...

Today on Code Switch, writer and critic Roxane Gay, who's a favorite of ours, writes about the problem of all-white recommended readings lists.

It also reminded us of an essay from last month by Saeed Jones, literary editor at BuzzFeed. Jones, whose first book of poetry, Prelude ...

Simon Tam, the founder and bassist of The Slants, has spent six years trying to register his group's name. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says the name disparages Asians.

Baltimore's lead prosecutor Marilyn J. Mosby announced on Friday that the death of Freddie Gray was a homicide. Mosby, who took office in January, is charging six city police officers with a range of offenses — including second-degree murder and manslaughter.

NPR's Bill Chappell wrote that Mosby's investigation found ...

Editor's note: This post contains some language that many will find offensive.

Lots of people are looking for words to make sense of Freddie Gray's death and the subsequent unrest in Baltimore, and have turned to writers — from novelist and social critic James Baldwin to hip hop artist ...

In Fresh Off The Boat's season finale, Jessica, the family matriarch, worries over whether or not she and her kids have assimilated too much. The Huangs had been struggling to make ends meet, and now all of a sudden, things are turning around. Their steak house, Cattleman's Ranch, is booming. ...

Remember that Deadline article from a few weeks back? In which the writer pointed out that Hollywood is diversifying — and claimed that's a bad thing?

At least one good thing may come of it:

A media coalition of multi-ethnic Hollywood watchdogs — including the American Indians in Film ...

K-pop — or Korean pop — makes its latest move toward the center of American pop culture with Nickelodeon's new show, Make It Pop. But beyond "Gangnam Style," how did K-pop evolve?

A recent study found that in general, college students aren't taking foreign language classes as much as they used to — a slowdown of nearly 7 percent since 2009. But for one language in particular, there's actually been a pretty amazing jump in the rate of enrollment: Korean.

The ...