Studying issues of ethnic minority identity and marginalization comes naturally to Dr. Que-Lam Huynh, associate professor in the department of psychology at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She remembers what it felt like to be an 11-year-old refugee from Vietnam thrust into a new life.
Her first acute observation of prejudice was at age 13, when Huynh and her mother lived in a working class, mostly White and Latinx neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona. After a Black family moved into the neighborhood, she heard her White neighbors whispering about it.
“At that time in the early ’90s, when a new family moved in, everybody went to greet them with cookies or other food,” says Huynh. “I remember not seeing that happen for this Black family. I started to understand very explicitly that race and racial differences were not valued.”
As a teenager she started to explore her own ethnic and racial identity. Huynh became involved in Anytown, a diversity, leadership and social justice program that empowers youth to become change agents. It is run by the National Conference for Community & Justice. For the first time, she engaged in conversations about race and ethnicity.
In college, Huynh again witnessed marginalization firsthand, feeling marginalized as she saw wealth all around her when she could only afford one phone call a month to her mother. She found community among other low-income students of color. Even before she started doing research, Huynh was interested in understanding how marginalization affects people and how they come to understand it, resist it and persevere.
“I tell my students all the time that I almost flunked out of college, but I found a way to turn it around,” Huynh says. “I tell them, ‘Reach out to me. I understand what it means to be struggling and trying to figure out what college is about because that was me my first year.’”
Extensively reading material on critical race theory, sociology, history and ethnic studies, Huynh’s research has focused on Latinx farm workers, members of the LGBT community, immigrants and refugees. She explores how people process and make sense out of marginalizing interactions.
