Racist assaults revive demand for Asian American Research – KIRO 7 Information Seattle

When Nicholas Sugiarto of Dartmouth College was leafing through the course catalog last semester, two words struck him: “Asian American”.

Little did the 19-year-old Chinese Indonesian-American know that courses focusing on Asian Americans on campus in Hanover, New Hampshire were even an option. The major in biomedical engineering eventually enrolled in Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature and now wishes he could get a degree in Asian American Studies.

“I never realized how long and steeped the history of Asians in America is,” Sugiarto said. “You also hear stories that never made the news or standard AP US history textbooks.”

That feeling of being seen resonates more than ever with students and faculty members of Asian Americans and Pacific islanders at colleges across the country. Despite the “Stop AAPI Hate” hashtag, reports keep popping up of new incidents where Asian Americans are coronavirus scapegoats or feel like foreigners in their own country.

The ongoing anti-Asian attacks, as well as the March shootings in Georgia that killed six Asian women, have sparked national visibility talks.

The debate has renewed the appetite for Asian American Studies programs in some universities. As the diversity of students increases, so does the desire for representation in the curriculum. Qualified color professors, however, say such programs do not last unless they are offered ongoing decision-making power.

Inspired by his literary class, Sugiarto added his signature to the nearly 1,000 when he asked Dartmouth to major in Asia-American Studies, a challenge that the Ivy League school has been facing for four decades.

Sugiarto and his classmates hope that given recent events, this time will be different.

Eng-Beng Lim, the Dartmouth professor who taught Sugiarto’s class, said the petition had gained momentum and even fueled discussions with administrators following the massacre murders.

These talks were recently interrupted, although Lim still described them as “a promising and critical impasse”.

“If US universities refuse to support Asian American Studies designed the way we designed it, it is truly a missed opportunity to ponder how we can nuanced understand American racism through the binary terms of black and white White. ” Said Lim.

Pawan Dhingra, a professor at Amherst College and the new president of the Association for Asian American Studies, said he knows of several other schools on the east coast that are either thinking about or renewing their commitment to Asian American Studies.

“Many ethnic study programs arose from student demand during major turning points in American history,” said Dhingra. “This is a turning point. The urge for ethnic studies – in this case Asian American Studies – fits in with the tradition of how these programs come about. It’s rarely the idea of ​​administrators or faculties. “

The concept of ethnology is believed to have started in California, where it became state law in August for California State University students to take an ethnology degree in order to graduate.

In 1968, students of color at San Francisco State University, then called San Francisco State College, joined black classmates in demanding a curriculum that wasn’t just focused on the euro. What followed were five months of protests – the longest student strike in US history – and hundreds of arrests.

In March 1969, after intensive negotiations, the university officially opened a College of Ethnic Studies. Other schools developed similar programs.

Alumni who went on strike 53 years ago see parallels with today’s “Stop Asian Hate” rallies, said Mai-Nhung Le, chair of the Asian American Studies program at San Francisco State University. Young Asian Americans are again calling for classes that are relevant to them – not just history, but everything from popular culture to environmental justice.

While the backdrop in the 1960s was the Vietnam War, today it is “two simultaneous pandemics”: COVID-19 and structural racism, Le said.

Establishing an Asia-American Studies department is one thing – maintaining it is another. Ethnic study programs are on shaky ground if schools cannot hire instructors to plan courses and supervise students.

Of the more than 428,000 faculties employed or tenured at graduate institutions nationwide in 2019, 70% were white, 11% were Asian or Pacific islanders, 5% were black, and 5% were Latinos. Alaskan Indians and natives made up just 0.4%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A riot broke out in Dartmouth in 2016 when Aimee Bahng, an assistant professor of English, was denied tenure. It was unanimously endorsed by a department committee, but not by senior campus officials. The rejection came when the students made another foray into Asian American Studies. Bahng had even started planning potential classes.

She recalls receiving hundreds of sympathetic messages from women scientists in the United States and abroad.

“I had an electronic folder with only women or women in color who were denied tenure,” said Bahng, who now teaches at Pomona College. “It was amazing, but also depressing. … I always know when the term will be denied.” because I still get a handful of emails. “

18-year-old Dartmouth freshman Anais Zhang never thought much about Asian American Studies until she was hired to write about it for the school newspaper after the Atlanta area shootings. In her research, Zhang learned of all attempts to start a program that ultimately got nowhere. It made her frustrated.

“I talked to many of my friends about the article and my shock that we really don’t have an institutionalized program, and only about my reaction when I learned how hard previous students had tried to petition the college and Hiring professors … Just to lose that support and undo all that progress in the years that followed, “Zhang said.

According to Dhingra, young ethnic study programs often decline because junior professors who are not full-time or permanent have to bear them.

“It just creates extra manpower for the faculty that burns people out and can’t grow because it wasn’t created with enough infrastructure at all,” Dhingra said.

The University of Arizona in Tucson launched a minor in Asia Pacific American Studies last month. While it’s an “example of the way the university is fighting anti-Asian hatred and ignorance,” it was a culmination of efforts that began several years before the pandemic, said Brett Esaki, an assistant professor who helped draft the coursework helped.

“The short and long term goals are definitely about stability,” said Esaki, who is not a permanent employee. “We can’t just hope for another disaster to get people to say, ‘You are important.'” ___

Tang reported from Phoenix and is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP