The League of Iowa
Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Last year, when Joz Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant, decided to test out a new Nikon CoolPix S630 digital camera with her family members, she continually received an error message on the camera's display screen: "Did someone blink?" After several tries with the same results, the Wangs tried taking a shot with their eyes open extra-wide. There was no error message after this attempt, they say.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy. But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting some help. The Chine...

The Vietnamese refugees arrived in Iowa with little but the clothes on their backs and the visions of a horrible war in their minds. Led by then-Gov. Robert Ray, Iowa was seen as a leader in welcoming Vietnam War refugees. It didn't end after 1975, when Saigon fell and American troops helped 130,000 refugees board cargo planes. The so-called "boat people" risked life to flee the communists from 1978-83. Vietnamese also arrived in the early 1990s after Congress passed the "Homecoming Act." And...

Officials from Asian campaign groups have criticized Toby Keith after the country singer allegedly made a "racist hand gesture" at a Nobel Peace Prize party in Norway. The singer was in Oslo, Norway on Thursday to see Barack Obama handed the prestigious honor, and after the ceremony he joined Hollywood star Will Smith and musician Wyclef Jean for an impromptu rap performance at an after party. But the trio's performance of "Rapper's Delight" by Sugarhill Gang has been steeped in controve...

Tommy Shi knows all too well what it’s like being "the only one." An immigrant from Taiwan who was raised in New Jersey, Shi grew up in a community with a virtually non-existent Asian population. "It wasn't until I went to college that I met a large number of other Asians," says Shi.

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A recent study of the applicants to seven elite colleges in 1997 found that Asian students were much more likely to be rejected than seemingly similar students of other races. Also, athletes and students from top high schools had admissions edges, as did low-income African-Americans and Hispanics. Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the ...