Dear KACA members,
I hope this message finds you well. It feels surreal to think that it has been a year since our lives were suddenly disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and lost more than a half million American lives. With the hope of vaccine, we are becoming cautiously optimistic about the foreseeable future. I hope we can look back someday and be proud of how resilient we are to overcome many challenges we face and to build a better place for our loved ones.
To be proud, we must not let our guard down and we must be constantly vigilant about our surroundings and issues that affect our community and society at large. To me, this has been a year of awakening. From issues of global pandemic to issues of environment, how our lives dependent on each other and are so intricately connected. We face many critical issues, but the realization that we are powerless, if we try to solve these challenges alone, helps me find ways to voice our concerns and be heard collectively. One very critical challenge we face is racism against Asians in the United State of America. As mentioned before, racism against Asians has rapidly risen since the pandemic began. It is disheartening even to think that the United State of America repeats its ugly path of racism toward their own people. History repeats itself and the only difference is who falls victim of the blame for health/societal problems. So the main question is what can we do?
We must find our own voice within ourselves and we must establish our voice within our community and nation at large. KACA is a premier academic institution with more than 40 years of its own history. We have worked together to elevate the Korean American voice within our academic community. We must continuously work hard to strengthen this community and elevate its statue as proud Korean American communication scholars/students/professionals.
In order to continue shaping the future, today, we need your support. March is designated for our membership drive where we will be reaching out to you for your membership support. You can renew your membership and encourage others to join KACA at http://www.thekaca.org/membership/ We are working diligently to extend our community of and support for Korean American Communication scholars and students like you. We want to be the community that you are proud of!
In an effort to highlight our current KACA members and their achievements, we started making short introductory videos of our members to get to know each other. As our community grows, it is difficult to know everyone without personal encounters through conferencing or social interactions. However, we are not quite there yet in terms of resuming normalcy due to the fear of COVID-19. This often causes a feeling of isolation among us. To reduce this feeling of isolation, we decided to introduce each member though our social media platforms. If you want to showcase who you are through our social media platforms, please fill out this short questionnaire at https://forms.gle/L45CdJgKpyV6Yfif7. We would love to get to know you and introduce you to our clan!
Thanks again for your support and let’s stay strong together!
Sincerely,
Moon J. Lee, Ph.D.
President, 2019 – 2021
