My Power Was Never Hard to Pronounce—Just Hard to Contain Growing up in a predominantly white community in Wisconsin, I was one of only three Indian students in my entire high school. For four years, I faced racism, bigotry, adversity, and xenophobia—experiences that made me acutely aware of my differences. My name, Alabhya, meaning "one who is invincible," was constantly mispronounced or reduced to nicknames for convenience. Instead of making the effort to learn my name, tea

In popular media, people’s background context is often told explicitly to help us, the audience, understand characters quickly and get focused on the storytelling. Blockbuster movies tend to quickly attribute the highest influence to those characters who have an Ivy League education or surged to success within their careers in record-breaking time. Iron Man is a great example because he’s a super genius who went to MIT, and that equates to inherent goodness as a superhero. Wh