Bryant’s Mailee Kue: ‘The work of belonging and inclusion belongs to all of us’

Mailee Kue, Ph.D., remembers the first time she felt she didn’t belong. Kue, who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1976 as a refugee, was ten when another child in her South Providence neighborhood began targeting her family. The boy would chase her and her siblings from school to home, taunting them along the way. 

Kue’s father, who experienced persecution as a member of the Hmong minority in Laos, was intimately familiar with exclusion, as well. But, instead of deepening the divide of racism and bullying by intervening in a forceful way, he brought the boy into their home and developed a bond of friendship — a formative example of belonging that has influenced Kue’s work in the diversity sphere over the last two decades...