I left America when Barack Obama was still president. I watched Donald Trump take office from my living room in Havana, and continued the rest of my year discussing his impact with communities abroad. I first heard about the Ku Klux Klan rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia last August. It was during this time in Sydney that I first learned about the Aboriginal Black Power Movement. Australia's legacy of enslavement was directed at the Indigenous and Pacific Islander populations in the 19th century. Aboriginal Black Power Movement in the 1960's drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power in the U.S. It was decades of movement building centered on the self-determination of Aboriginal people and resulted in victories such as the founding of an Aboriginal Legal Clinic, Aboriginal Medical Clinic and education center for the community. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been and continue to organize around deaths in police custody, gentrification, Land Rights, and reparations for systemic injustices. The White Australia policies, a series of acts passed to keep Australia White and British in the 20th century, mirrored the U.S. anti-immigration ones a few decades before that, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Today, both governments continue such policies in different forms, such as in the atrocities on detention centers on Manus Island and the current refusal of the U.S. government to pass a clean Dream Act. I learned that with these parallels, Western empires influence each other directly when passing systemically oppressive policies. Yet, the resistance and movement that builds before, during, and after, is just as strong. Learning about Aboriginal Black Power and parallels between communities of strong grassroots organizing from Redfern in Sydney to Harlem in New York, helped me realize the global resistance and influence that people have on each other, whether or not mainstream media documents it. From the intersections of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Australia to the national Indigenous-led climate justice movements, the current momentum in both countries are happening full force.

2. The Changing Nature of Race: Chinese as Oppressed or Oppressor

As I lived with the global Chinese diaspora, I saw both the working-class stories of immigrants moving to new countries and also racist rhetoric from the same people. In my reflections about the role of Asian Americans in the Black Lives Matter movement, I understood more how where Chinese people fall on the color line is ambiguous and entirely socially constructed. Chinese friends have asked me, "Are we Brown?" and others have written about how there is no "Chinese" side of justice even though it may seem like we get to choose.