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Moments in Time with Bill Ong Hing

Related:
• Hate Crimes Galvanize U.C. Davis Students
• Blast from the Past: Some Student Activist History

Blast from the Past

Last Thursday, a diverse group of almost 400 students, alumni, faculty, and supporters converged on the administration building at the University of California at Davis, protesting recent incidents of anti-Asian hate violence and racial epithets on campus. Asian American students, who represent a third of the enrollment at Davis, led the protest, supported by faculty from all the ethnic studies programs — Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, Chicano Studies, and African American Studies. The student-ethnic studies resistance to racism at Davis is a symbol of the history of Asian American student activism that was planted in the San Francisco Bay Area almost 35 years ago.

On the heels of the Black Power movement in 1968, Asian American students joined African Americans and Latinos in protesting the lack of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University and U.C. Berkeley. These students and faculty supporters challenged the college education convention, arguing that the Euro-centric curriculum failed to recognize the diversity of the nation and the validity of their communities.

The initial responses of Berkeley and S.F. State officials were completely negative, maintaining that ethnic studies subjects did not belong on campus. In fact, S.F. State President S.I. Hayakawa (ironically, a Japanese American who was later elected to the U.S. Senate) is often remembered for the combative stance he took against student protestors. In a protracted student strike at S.F. State in 1969, Hayakawa had students arrested, and called in the National Guard in an attempt to bring order to the institution.

Across the bay in Berkeley, the Third World Strike and demonstrations were also greeted by arrests and police reinforcements from the National Guard, as well as the Alameda County Police. Tear gas, shattered windows, cars overturned and torched were common sights on campus.

In the end, the multicultural demonstrations at Berkeley and S.F. State led to the establishment of ethnic studies programs at both schools. Both institutions can boast having the oldest Asian American studies programs in the nation as a result of the efforts of student protestors.

The tradition of Asian American student involvement in campus protests has continued.

At Northwestern University in 1995, 17 Asian American students camped out in three tents in front of University Hall and engaged in a hunger strike for several days, demanding the creation of an Asian American studies program. Throughout the 1990s at U.C. Irvine, where Asian American students make up more than half of the enrollment, students engaged in protests, hunger strikes, and strikes until an Asian American studies program was established.

At Columbia University, more than a hundred students engaged in a sit-in in the marble-and-oak lobby of the main college building, exasperated by the university’s unwillingness to take Asian American and Latino studies as seriously as African American studies. At India University in 1996, students and 32 campus organizations staged a protest demanding the opening of an Asian American culture center; three years later, their demands were rewarded.

In 1989, 60 Stanford students were arrested after a peaceful sit-in at the president’s office protesting several racial incidences, including a campus sorority that had pledges act out an “Indian” dance in front of the Native American student center. Similarly, in 1995, at Grinnell College in Iowa, Asian American students were among 70 students who protested alleged racism on campus, including charges that student spectators yelled racial slurs at a black basketball player during a game.

At the University of Connecticut, Asian American students led protests against discriminatory policies at McDonald’s and Denny’s restaurants near campus. And at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, campus authorities met with students and agreed to reprimand the staff of Mass Media, an independent campus paper that published a picture of a woman of Asian descent performing a sex act.