“I remember an experience of having KKK sprayed on our garage door, our car, and our sidewalk.”

” I’m a very cis, cis man presenting a East Asian middle-class. And so I’m like the prototypical anti-affirmative action person. And, and later on I just realized that I needed to learn how to use my power and my privilege to support other people.”

” I don’t even think we had a budget or anything, but at least it gave us a seat at the table to talk about education that we need to do within the Asian American community.”

Alex Tom studied from 1994 to 1999 at UC San Diego, studying both Political Science and Ethnic Studies. During his time at UCSD, he was an active student leader involved in Asian and Pacific Islander Student Alliance (APSA), OASIS, Summer Bridge, Associated Students, and more. In his interview, he shares his experiences with being a student-leader and the student-activist community at UCSD during his college years, and he reflects on how these experiences have shaped the person he is today and the work he is committed to. He discusses the events and stakes surrounding affirmative action and Proposition 209 in 1996, efforts for the student-initiated Academic Success Program (now officially a component of the Student Promoted Access Center for Education and Serivce at UCSD), and other movements to raise political awareness and action. Currently, he is the Executive Director of the Center For Empowered Politics (CEP) and the former Executive Director of the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) in San Francisco in addition to running his blog, Diary of a Baba.

The interview was conducted on May 21, 2021 via Zoom by Kyeling Ong, an undergraduate student of Computer Science.