Malden City Hall sold

Six BIPOC graduates tell stories of racial microaggressions from teachers and administration during their years attending Malden Public Schools and offer ideas for improvement. By Fern Remedi-Brown and Kyla Denisevich Students in the Malden Public Schools – a district with one of the state’s largest percentage of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) enrollments –  say they have experienced forms of racism that range from incidents of micro-aggression to unsupportive environments to acts of outright prejudice. The reporters who initiated this Neighborhood View article interviewed six BIPOC alumni of Malden Public Schools. In this article, the alumni recount their experiences and offer ideas for an improved environment. The student body in Malden is diverse: 20% African American, 23% Asian, 28% Hispanic, and 24% white. The teachers in the Malden Public Schools are predominately white. There have been as few as six Black educators in the school system at the same time. Representation of the demographics of the students in the staff is important, said the former students. They say that the lack of diversity in the […]

By Nikita Sampath  Two days after the Olympic Games began in Beijing, Chris Choi, a Malden nursing student originally from Hong Kong, was standing in the bitter cold in Copley Square  with a group of protesters calling for a boycott of the games to draw attention to reports of human rights violations in China.  “Any kind of participation in the games is equivalent to being complicit in the atrocities China is committing,” said Choi who has been organizing for No Beijing 2022  in the last few years. Choi’s family left Hong Kong following the Anti-Extradition Law protests in 2019-2020.   A few miles away in Medford, a group of protesters, including some from Malden, have been gathering every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., in front of the Colonial Volkswagen dealership on Mystic Avenue. The protests started in reaction to the allegations that Volkswagen has been using forced laborers of Uyghur descent, an ethnic minority in China, in the company’s factory located in Urumqi, Xinjian, built in 2013.  Organized by Maya Mitalipova, the president of the Boston Uyghur Association, the weekly demonstration […]

By Sandra G. Ndengue All the media  — even TV comedy shows – were focusing on the pandemic. I needed a respite from fear and panic. So I opted for a sweet escape: reading, done at convenience via select outlets. Reading has always been a place for discovery, exploration, and travel. It’s like being in a time capsule, anywhere. My usual reads are nonfiction, autobiographies and memoirs — books that  help me understand and navigate someone else’s life experiences, living in their truth and finding a deeper connection. But during the pandemic, my reads were mostly fiction, focusing on African authors around  the globe and exploring culture in their respective world and how their origins and perspective affect society and how they developed as persons. With the lockdown, lots of people have found solace in reading.  “Before the pandemic more people borrowed non fiction and  memoirs but now people seem to fall back to fiction, fantasy and classics,” said Dora St. Martin, Executive Director of the Malden Public Library. Shaneuik, a 37-year-old nurse at a Boston Hospital, mom of two and former Malden […]