In March, a series of shootings at Asian spas killed eight people and rocked headlines around the country. After a year of increasingly severe and frequent attacks against Asian Americans, experts say it will take systemic change to turn the boat around.
A good place to start? At our country’s higher learning institutions.
While there are many ways to enact change, Asian American school faculty members are now trying to push progress during this pivotal moment. First, creating educational resources for students and the public and also speaking out about the model minority myth that can lead to damaging consequences for Asian American students.
“Universities are really critical, because young people are the base of the movement to fight racism,” said Russel M. Jeung, chair of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University.
A co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, Jeung and his colleagues saw a disturbing uptick in anti-Asian violence, with victims reporting nearly 4,000 incidents between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021. What isn’t reflected in that data are those who chose not to report, and according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, a staggering 81 percent of Asian American adults say violence against them is rising in the U.S.
Experts will tell you that hate against Asians is nothing new, though, and the Asian American community has faced discrimination for centuries. One issue is that Asian Americans are left largely out of history books, and most colleges don’t offer courses in Asian American studies, either. That could be about to change, though.
“There’s kind of a disjuncture between the ways in which Asian American history and Asian American studies don’t often get taught in higher education, whereas the model minority discourse kind of frames Asian Americans as heavily tied to upward mobility through education, right, so there’s kind of this disjuncture there,” said Lily Wong, an Associate Professor and Faculty Affiliate of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center (ARPC) at American University.
One of the first of its kind, American University’s ARPC was founded in order to generate research, educational tools and policy analysis “geared towards dismantling racism in its many forms.”
“The center does provide a very particular space and resource, and it has a very unique mission,” says Wong. “It gives us in academia some space to connect with the public, and I think that is what most [Black, Indigenous and people of color] faculty really want to do — to give back to the community.”
Wong says that while the center is unique in its focus, there are other spaces in universities aimed at doing similar work, such as those that run ethnic studies departments.
“Ethnic studies came out of student activism,” she says, “out of the liberation strikes — the longest student strike in U.S. history. AAPI student leaders were a huge part of that coalition of students that striked and created these spaces on university campuses. Even though the assumption is that AAPI folk are apolitical, we are not and have always been active members of the American political landscape.”
One advocate for the expansion of ethnic studies curriculum is Jeung, who said that area of study is intended to “expose the roots of racism and to build racial empathy and a renewed sense of justice and equity.”
Faculty members across the country seem to agree that an increase in educational resources about Asian Americans and other minority groups can help facilitate an increased awareness and understanding amongst students. While Wong says it is rare to see an Asian studies program at colleges and universities outside of California, the growing debate around the topic has seemingly renewed an appetite for such programs.
One example can be found at Dartmouth College, where more than a thousand students have signed onto a petition calling on the school to establish an Asian American Studies major.
“When U.S. universities refuse to support Asian American Studies that are framed in a way that we have framed it, it’s really a missed opportunity to think about how we might have a more nuanced understanding of American racism beyond binary terms of Black and white,” says Eng-Beng Lim, a professor at Dartmouth College.
It was at that same college, though, that a then-assistant English professor named Aimee Bahng was denied tenure despite having unanimous support from a departmental committee. When it came time for higher-ranking campus officials to weigh in, Bahng was handed a rejection. It came during a time when students were making a push for an Asian American Studies program, and Bahng had even begun planning potential classes.
Experts say that while establishing an Asian American Studies department is a feat in and of itself, without institutional support it will not have a strong enough foundation to stand upon.
“It really brings up the question about resources, and the need for more hiring,” says Wong. “I think a huge part of it is that we need a sustained, intellectual space to circulate the information and the education about this long, rich history of ethnic studies, including Asian American studies within the U.S., but what I see in a lot of universities is that ethnic studies is underfunded, if it even exists.”
Wong says that many students come to her classroom and read Asian American literature for the first time in their lives, and some start the class unaware of historical events such as the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Japanese internment camps. The professor says that this lack of knowledge is what makes it difficult for many Americans to contextualize incidents of violence, like what happened earlier this year in Atlanta.
“If higher education is done well then education extends past the students to the general public. If done right, we can relieve a lot of the burden of education and advocacy work from folks that are mobilizing on the ground right in the community,” says Wong. “And if we can do that advocacy work through education, we can help carry that burden.”
A version of this article was also featured on The Hill.
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