Chair of the BIPOC Committee of the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC), Nicky was also the principal author of FACCC’s DEI statement. Nicky was raised in an immigrant family where his early childhood in Louisiana was marked by traumatic racism. From this experience, he developed deep compassion for those who suffer from oppression.
Anti-racism has been an ongoing theme in Nicky’s work— from his earliest days as an intern for the People’s Law Office working on the lawsuit against the Chicago police department for the murder of Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton, through civil disobedience arrests in the Dean’s office at Berkeley Law protesting their appalling racist and sexist hiring practices, through his work for Marin Fair Housing to stamp out housing discrimination, or his work at the Asian Law Caucus or the National Center for Youth Law, to his pioneering work at De Anza College writing and teaching the college’s first courses to fulfill UC Berkeley’s “American Cultures” ethnic studies graduation requirement.
Nicky has been completely dedicated to building a world in which everyone is given the opportunity to develop their human potential to the fullest.
At Peralta, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Nicky successfully shepherded a unanimous Peralta Board to end the Alameda County Sheriff’s department contract and then eventually to adopt an alternative holistic model of community safety developed by a newly developed District Holistic Safety and Security Committee. Peralta was recently approved for an $800,000 federal grant to build out this work.
He has led dozens of local and statewide anti-racism workshops and trainings for faculty, staff and students and recently participated in Peralta’s own 4-part “Difficult Dialogues” training.
As an instructor, he is the editor of five editions of The Politics of Liberation, an equity-focussed anthology of articles for community college students including several original articles on race, class, gender and oppression. Including Tammeil Gilkerson, the last five chancellors at Peralta have all been women of color.