My name is Leo Glasgow. I was raised by a single immigrant mom in a one bedroom apartment in Queens, New York. I’m my father’s tenth child. I have the unique opportunity to speak about Black issues without people getting needlessly offended.
I live right on the border between Rego Park and Forest Hills Queens. I can say without lying that I grew up less than a block away from my middle school, my police precinct and a synagogue. Queens is the most diverse place in the world, and I’m from a special pocket of it.
My part of Queens is home to Bukharian Jewish Soviet expats and their children, who I grew up with; we all lived in the same brick apartment buildings so I never developed racist and conspiratorial prejudice against Jewish people. Bukharian kids never questioned why a Black kid could speak Russian, they were just confused as to why I was Christian and not Jewish. Bukharians could speak my mothers language with me, and unknowingly guided me towards the light in a city where the wrong crowd can easily drag young Black men towards hell. I’m grateful that my neighborhood upbringing led to me condemning Hamas, valuing joy and love over envy, and having a growth mindset — among many other things.
In the entire country, it’s just me and my mom — a two person family. I have no connections to anyone from my father’s side, although I remember, years ago, spending a Christmas at my half-sisters’ place in the Jamaica Queens projects. On my mother’s side, everyone is in Eastern Europe. To give you a taste of the nuance: my great grandfather, a Soviet lieutenant Ivan Scherbina, is a Ukrainian from close to Poltava who met a Russian nurse during World War II but ended up settling in Belarus where his daughter married a Belarusian.
At my public elementary school P.S. 139Q, my music teacher found a clarinet in the basement from years before when the school could afford a band. I used the present to join the eighth grade band as a sixth grader. Flash forward four years and I’m senior class president of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. My first year there was also the first time they ever offered Chinese classes — which I had to fight to join into. Just before COVID, I competed in the New York Chinese Speech Competition and lost only to someone with a Chinese family. It was then I knew I couldn't achieve worldly ambitions if I ignored China, the second largest economy in the world. The United States and China have the most important bilateral relationship in the world.
So when it came time to choose a college, Cornell’s China and Asia-Pacific Studies program felt like the next natural step. I wanted to study China seriously and prevent a repetition of history that felt inevitable — a lesson instilled in me from the Cold War stories I grew up hearing from my family in Eastern Europe. That commitment has taken me far beyond Ithaca: I spent last fall semester in Washington, D.C., interning for Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla) nurturing the Government major side of me, and the following spring I found myself studying in Beijing, 1 of 4 Cornell students there — the only man and the only student without a connection to China.
These experiences have convinced me that dialogue across differences is not only possible but necessary. Though there’s much more to discuss, that’s the reason I’m writing for the Daily Sun. So if you disagree with something I write, I hope you’ll reach out — we can email it out, have a phone call or meet in person. Disagreement is a positive thing, because true unity means unity through difference. That’s what America means to me. To love America means to love the world. It’s all the truth.
Leo Glasgow '26 is an Opinion Columnist and a student in the College of Arts & Sciences. The Government and China & Asia-Pacific Studies double major writes his truth about domestic and international policy as well as problems within the soul of our nation and the world. He can be reached at lglasgow@cornellsun.com
