Today we’re joined by my dear brother, comrade, and friend, Virak Saroeun. He and I met in 2008 when when his life-partner, Liza and I TA’d a Raza580: Educational Equity Course with Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade as grad students at SFSU. When Liza introduced us I immediately knew this was someone I wanted to be friends with, as someone who shared so many of the same loves for music, DJing, Hip-Hop, critical pedagogy, shoes and fashion, books, film, food, beer and spirits, basketball, revolutionary politics and praxis, and so much more. Almost 20 years later, this brilliant Pedagogue, Father, and human remains my beloved and chosen family. In this episode we discuss 'The 5 Principles' (2022) by Khnum ”Stic” Ibomu of the revolutionary Hip-Hop group, Dead Prez, and 'Blood in My Eye' (1972) by co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family, George Jackson. 

Virak is the youngest of four children and the only male. He is a child of refugees from Cambodia, first in his family to go to a university and completed an undergraduate degree with double majors in Ethnic Studies and Sociology from UC, Riverside. He also holds a multiple subject teaching credential and a Masters in Education from San Francisco State University. For the last decade and a half, he has been a classroom educator and administrator in the Bay Area and Long Beach, where he resides now with his partner and daughter. When not working towards a more just and balanced world, he enjoys music, djing, roller skating, camping and outdoor adventures with his family.

The Paper Plane is a podcast created and hosted by Colin Masashi Ehara, where he interviews people he is blessed and honored to share community with, and asks them about a book(s) that have had a transformational impact on their lives. In a society where literacy rates are steadily declining and a growing number of podcasts hosted by cishet men, un/consciously champion expressions of masculinity that come at the expense of women, femmes, and LGBTQIA2S+ (especially BIPOC) folx, this space aims to operate as a counter-narrative.  

The Paper Plane is a space that intends to highlight the dire importance of relationships, community, dialogue, perpetual learning, honest expression as art, art as honest expression, and freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. It speaks to planes of existence attached to the act of reading, but also as a metaphor for the “flights” we take as we sit in what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “a one way interface” as readers, and how these “journeys” shape us…