AsianWeek » Asian American Studies Now

Asian American Studies Now

By: AsianWeek Staff, Apr 15, 2008

Tags: Lead Editorial, Opinion |

Like volcanoes awaking from their dormant state, Asian Americans are again shaking the foundations of educational institutions across America. But this time around, the eruptions are closer to the rising sun.

It’s been a long time since we stood hand in hand with our African American, Native American and Chicano brothers and sisters in the Third World Liberation Front and the fight for ethnic studies. More than 20 years have passed since the last real struggle for dramatic change for people of color in American higher education.

The difficult digestion and, in many cases, outright rejection of establishing an Asian American studies department by both public and private American universities is part of the cultural, social, political and economic context in which Asian Americans live. It’s almost as if these institutions don’t want to understand us, and even perhaps feel more comfortable retaining their stereotypes. Mia Tuan’s book exposes how Asian Americans are labeled as either “Perpetual Foreigners” or “Honorary Whites,” with no middle ground. Well, the reality is that we must be understood as Americans who also have a rich Asian heritage and an important Asian community.

We’re ready for the standard retort — “There isn’t a white studies department, and we aren’t crying about it. Why are you?” — for everything in the American curriculum is already tagged with an invisible label. From (white) history to (white) literature, this lopsided education is sometimes not apparent even to communities of color. It is only through an ethnic studies curriculum that all students (white and colored) are able to realize the real and complete history of America.

As Santi Suthinithet and Lisa Leong report in this issue, Asian American youth on the East Coast are becoming more restless as they hunger to learn a history that includes their own. And why not? Certainly Asian and Pacific Islanders have contributed to building this country from the railroads to the Hawaiian plantations. Today, more than ever, we need to learn from the demonstrated successes and creativity of Asian Pacific Americans to jumpstart our economy and improve our global standing.

Only with a legitimate academic department for Asian American studies will ALL Americans be able to fully understand who we were, who we are and what we can become. Enough lip service: Asian American studies now.

Comments

I support Ethnic Studies and specifically Asian American Studies education for colleges and universities around the nation. This year is the 40th anniversary of the strike at San Francisco State University that forced the administration to accept Ethnic Studies as part of the university’s curriculum. Today, I am proud to walk in the footsteps of my fellow brothers and sisters as a B.A. degree holder and nearly finishing my M.A. program in Asian American Studies at SFSU.

Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies is necessary in the college/university environment. “American History” does not tell the full story about the history and stories of ancestors who are not white, and learning about my ethnicities and about other cultures has given me a sense of personal pride and can use this towards a unique job in the future.

–Akit on Apr 15, 2008
While there are more complete history books written, they don’t ever make it into our school system. Our government is controlling the informations fed to our kids. We label this propoganda and brainwashing on China.

Let’s hold a mirror, reflect on ourselves and pray for peace.

–Hong on Apr 15, 2008
I agree that their are some problems with the educational system in America. @hong, I would never compare it to China. The US merely excludes information for the “lack” of room in a text book for high school education, so anything else would have to be extra curricular. I know that China destroyed a lot of it’s own history and other’s during the cultural revolution, and to destroy that you would have to rewrite some of it to fill in the spaces. So, I definitely would not compare with to China? Is this correct? The propaganda in the US isn’t the same propaganda in China; the US at least gives us more access and more information and choices to question what we are seeing. So, enough of the comparing because they are not the same, each issue should be looked at and investigated without biased comparisons. One excuse doesn’t justify another wrong, especially when we all know it’s wrong, especially in the 21st century. I took an Asian studies course in college, and the instructor was Koren, and he was very biased toward another group.

–Tedd on Apr 15, 2008
Dear Tedd:
On the contrary, it is precisely the point that both our American AND the PRC versions of public “education” should be examined, side by side, with the best and most accurate information, facts, not assumptions and prejudices, on either part.
What do you really KNOW about education on the Mainland? What we DO know, such as it is, of public education here in “America,” is that our K-12 schools, indeed, our colleges and universities, are not quite “safe” for ANYone, and that “western” culture and letters and “sciences” dominate the curricula with scant notice or honoring of the culture and letters and “knowledge” of OTHER systems.
We are beset and hornswoggled by assumptions and presumptions, few of which are either logical OR educational. We insist that “academic,” i.e., “western” Judeo/Christian cultural and educational standards are the “norm” for EVERYone, and, I, for one, find that as illogical and as laughable as it is “elitist.”
Art Hu, in these pages and these columns, believes and agrees with the parameters of “knowledge” and “degrees” thereof, and he could be “right.”
But, I rather doubt it.
American institutions, especially of “higher learning,” have proved just one more facet, one more subscriber, to the ruling oligarchy of power and privilege.
“Blacks” and “browns” and “reds” and “yallers” are, ipso facto, willy-nilly, consigned to the underbelly of this society, and most if not all of that consignment goes back to said “educational” system.
The day this society begins to recognize, appreciate, AND honor the “intelligences,” and, very much so, the skills and contributions of academically “challenged” members of this society, that will be the day when our “educational” system begins to come to grips with both its obligations AND its understandings of what education should be.
As for “intelligence,” consult ALL 27 agencies thereof extant today, domesticazy AND overseas.
Frank Eng
P.S.: There is an article on the London Guardian online edition dealing with the pidgin-speak of nonsplittist Mainlanders, whose “English” syntax is funny. May I ask if the laughers have an equal grasp of Mandarin? Forget the multithousands of ideograms of cursive or noncursive “Chinese,” wherein syntax is both “literal” AND functional rather than a polyglot of usage wherein the exceptions often outrun the rules.

–Frank Eng on Apr 15, 2008
Well, Eng, if American K-12 history textbooks of the present followed the PRC model, they would still be pushing like crack the view that the new world natives were untamed warlike heathen who spent half their time slaughtering each other AND THEREFORE needed to be brought to heel.
Some American history texts did succumb in that phase…

Broaching the areas of Tibetans, Uighurs etc…. Chinese history texts ARE revanchist (and racist) to this very moment!
This is your ascendant Chinese progressivism at its…best.

–Jim Erbes on Apr 16, 2008
While most ethnic studies topics never reach the K-12 classroom, there are existing programs that provide education to teach about cultural history. A good example is a program known as PEP, or Pinoy Educational Partnerships, a program created by SFSU Professor Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales that teaches about the Pilipino American history and its culture from hard working volunteers that are undergrad students to select high schools in San Francisco.

The program has gone so well, a book was recently published.

–Akit on Apr 16, 2008

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