Pulling the Tiger's Tail: Scholarship and Advocacy
Runtime - 51 minutes
 
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This video from the 2012 Teachers College Annual Winter Roundtable at Columbia University presents a lecture featuring Dr. Alvin Alvarez, who states that discrimination has a significant and adverse impact on mental health, health and health behaviors which challenges us as advocates to shift our attention to the sociopolitical context.

Dr. Alvarez uses the metaphor of "pulling the tiger's tail" to underscore the role of scholarship as a potent form of intellectual advocacy on behalf of people of color - what Dr. King called "creative maladjustment." Using personal stories, real-life events, and the research on Asian Americans and racism, he argues that mental health professionals can respond to the call for advocacy by using multicultural research to challenge the empirical status quo, to make visible the lives that are invisible, and to give voice to people of color.