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1. How does the difference in cultural identities affect people’s path in seeking for the truth and justice?

2. We are shown several of Jun’s letters – what do they reveal about him? How complete is the picture of Jun that they present?

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Randy Ribay is an award-winning author who writes young adult fiction. Patron Saints of Nothing earned five starred reviews, and was selected as a Freeman Book Award winner. Randy Ribay was a finalist for the National Book Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and many more. Some of the other books that he wrote are Project Kawayan, After the Shot Drops, and An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes.
Randy Ribay was born in the Philippines and raised in the Midwest. He earned his Bachelor's in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his Master's in Language and Literacy from Harvard. Randy currently lives in San Fransisco with his wife and dog.

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Patron Saints of Nothing By Randy Ribay was based on the War on Drugs in the Philippines from 2016-2022. The War on Drugs was an anti-drug campaign that had killed over 12,000 people. We see this when Jay travels to the Philippines to look into his cousin, Jun's mysterious death. As Jay is immersed into the Philippines he acknowledges the life and culture while the Philippines was going through this crisis and how it lead to his cousins Jun's death.

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The Hate You Give follows the story of a high school girl named Starr, who is forced to witness her childhood friend get murdered by a police officer simply for being black. She spends the majority of the book trying to find justice for his death. Patron Saints of Nothing follows nearly the same plot. Somebody close to being mature and needing to move on to the next chapter of their life until their oldest friend, whom they've grown apart from, is killed for unjust reasons. Alongside the main plot of the books, both Starr and Jay have culture and identity crises throughout their stories. Jay feels guilty for leaving his home country and being phased out of the traditions his family still follows back home. Starr feels guilty for leaving the neighborhood she grew up in and distancing herself from the problems back home. Both have to endure challenges they never thought themselves worthy of completing and, in the process, realize they'll always have a part of their homes in their hearts. While both feel they need to do their cultures justice, Starr and Jay defy their family's expectations in different ways. Starr, being the middle child in an entirely black family, secretly has a white boyfriend. When confronted by her dad, she refuses to change things for him to be happier. Jay, the child of two doctors and a relatively intelligent student, is expected to enter engineering or some medical field. Despite his parent's concern and expectations for him, Jay decides to wait on college and see what he wants to do with his life. The two books share direct connections in plot and character arcs while beautifully depicting teenagers' emotions and thought processes in painful situations.

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That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes

This poem is Justice by Langston Hughes, which conveys a strong message of justice, racial inequality and discrimination of himself being an African American. Langston describes "That Justice is a blind goddess", which refers to that justice should be unbiased, and that is shouldn't be based on anything that appears on the very surface. He next wrote "Is a thing to which we black wise", which suggests that African Americans are a group that is being treated unequally. In Patron Saints of Nothing, this group of people refers to those Philippines who have been suffering throughout the drug war due to the unfair rules and laws. Moreover, it also refers to the main character Jay, which is an American Filipino, and that he was treated quite rude in some situations during his investigation in the Philippines just because of his mixed identity.

Both these literary works all reveal the inequality of minority groups under political systems, and then speak up for justice to come.

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I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me I guess being colored doesn't make me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me-we two-you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me-who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records-Bessie, bop, or Bach.

the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write? not like

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white-
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me-
although you're older-and white-
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

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I wonder if it's that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St.

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As previously stated, Patron Saints of Nothing is about the Philippines drug war that started in 2019 and is ongoing today. In June 1971, President Richard Nixon announced to the U.S. Congress that drug addiction had become a national emergency and declared drug abuse the public number one enemy. Not only are both these situations referred to as a part of the global War On Drugs, but both have had positive and negative effects. In the U.S., there's clear evidence that fear tactics and strict laws have heavily affected the number of dangerous drug users. The negative part is the undeniable racial discrimination within law enforcement that continues to this day. For example, possession of five grams of crack cocaine, which was disproportionately consumed by African Americans, triggered an automatic five-year jail sentence, whereas 500 grams of powder cocaine, which was mostly consumed by richer, white demographics, merited the same punishment. Today in America, black people are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession. Over 80% of Americans feel the drug war failed, and over the last 15 or so years, many laws regarding criminal punishment for drug use have been done away with while 24 states have fully legalized marijuana for recreational use. The parallel in The Philippines is their own unjust and far more depraved system of punishment. At least 12,000 people are suspected to have been killed for illegal drug use or possession. When a president's campaign promise is to kill tens of thousands of drug users, it leads to extreme mistrust and hatred for the government by those inside and outside the country. Our government never won against and continues to struggle with drug epidemics killing Americans. The Philippines has had a much shorter and darker experience than us, and there's no way of knowing how it will end.

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The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of America's War on Drugs, a government-mandated operation beginning in the early 1970s that has completely failed in its stated objectives of curbing drug use and ending the drug trade. To understand why, we need to take a trip through the past.

Drug use has been prevalent in American society since the mid 1880s, when narcotics like morphine and laudanum were marketed to consumers as cure-all medications. They could be found in all types of products , ranging from asthma medications to teething syrup for infants. Opium, imported from China, was also regularly prescribed as a painkiller. Yet as the 1900s dawned, presidential administrations started to adopt a restrictive approach toward the recreational use of various drugs. For instance, the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909 - which targeted Chinese immigrants - banned the importation and use of opium for smoking, while in 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Act, which taxed the production and distribution of cocaine and various opiates. Even the medical use of drugs began to be highly regulated. By 1938, more than 25,000 American doctors had been arraigned due to the illegal prescription of drugs.

The War on Drugs, after a brief pause under the Carter administration, continued again in the 1980s as a crack cocaine epidemic began to sweep the nation. Fears of this epidemic prompted newly elected President Ronald Reagan to reinforce and expand many of Nixon's anti-drug policies, arguing that drug use was a "repudiation of everything America is." His administration's most notable piece of anti-drug use legislation was the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which granted $1.7 billion for law enforcement to fight the drug war and established further mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Much of this legislation was racially discriminatory. For example, possession of five grams of crack cocaine, which was disproportionately consumed by African Americans, triggered an automatic five-year jail sentence, whereas 500 grams of powder cocaine, which was mostly consumed by richer, white demographics, merited the same punishment.

Harsh drug sentencing continued into the 1990s. President Bill Clinton was elected after running on a 'tough on crime' platform, and in 1994 his administration passed the Crime Bill , a $30 billion piece of legislation that funded 125,000 new state prison cells, mandated life sentences via three-strikes laws, and added 60 new crimes worthy of the death penalty. Between 1980 and 1997, the number of people locked up for non-violent, drug-related crimes rose from 50,000 to 400,000.

The War on Drugs' punitive effects continue to this day. In the last 40 years, the number of people convicted of drug-related crimes has risen more than 500 percent , now making up almost half of the federal prison population. Within America's prisons, the policies have perpetuated cycles of poverty and unemployment in low-income communities while disproportionately impacting people of color. Black people are more than 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than their White counterparts, despite both groups using the drug at similar rates, and African Americans and Hispanics now make up more than 60 percent of the prison population.

While incarceration is offered as a tool that helps reduce drug use, there is little evidence to suggest that locking people up reduces drug consumption in the long-term. Since 1980, despite the significant increase in incarceration rates, studies have found no statistically significant correlation between drug imprisonment rates and the rate of drug use across most states. In fact, while around 65 percent of incarcerated individuals meet the medical criteria for drug addiction, only 11 percent receive treatment. The penalties for violating drug laws also extend far beyond imprisonment. The job market, for example, routinely discriminates against people with prior drug offenses. This leaves many without the possibility of meaningful employment. In fact, half of formerly incarcerated people are unable to find jobs in their first year after leaving prison.

In order to achieve long-lasting policy change, a move toward harm reduction strategies is critical. Harm reduction relies on the premise that there will never be a drug-free society, and that government policy should focus instead on prioritizing the safety of people in America by reducing deaths and societal harm caused by drug use. Harm reduction policies are intended explicitly for those most impacted by the War on Drugs and include evidence-based practices like syringe exchange programs, increased access to methadone clinics, and safe, supervised drug consumption spaces.
Ignacio Diaz Pascual was a fall 2020 and spring 2021 undergraduate intern at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

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The War on Drugs, and the criminalization of drug-related offenses, must end immediately.

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-In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte announced a “war on drugs” in the Philippines, launching a wave of violence and murder targeting thousands of suspected drug dealers and users. With unprecedented, intimate access both to police officials implicated in the killings and the families destroyed as the result of Duterte’s deadly campaign, On the President’s Orders is a shocking and revelatory investigation into the extrajudicial murders that continue to this day. Entering a murky world of crime, drugs and politics, the filmmakers have managed to capture the clear trajectory of what depths those who wield excessive power can reach, when attacking those who have the very least.

-The searing story of President Duterte's bloody campaign against drug dealers and addicts in the Philippines, told with unprecedented and intimate access to both sides of the war - the Manila police and an ordinary family from the slum.

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Duterte's Drug War (full film) | FRONTLINE

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"What do you do when the police is criminal?" says the mural up above. This painting on the streets of the Philippines voices about the drug war, and how the police are innocently killing. Philippine people want to get justice, and get the police behind bars.

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This piece of art is connecting to the drug war. The people on the bike are leaving behind the person on the ground, after killing him. Just like the drug war when police are killing people and leaving them and their families with so much questions and grief.