Is it possible that America’s epicenter of contentious debate and bureaucracy is further along in its social activism than our esteemed progressive California institution of liberal arts? Spending a summer in Washington, D.C. showed me that in terms of Asian American activism, the answer is yes. Our notoriously slow-to-respond government is actually taking faster action on salient issues in the Asian American community than Pomona College.
I went to Washington to work at the Environmental Protection Agency. My placement was through an Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocacy group called OCA, which runs an internship program. Each year OCA places 20 college AAPI interns from all over the country into various federal and non-governmental agencies, with the goal of increasing AAPI participation in Washington.
My boss turned out to be the most well-connected woman in the Washington AAPI community. Her name was Piyachat Terrell, and she was fabulous as the one-woman head of the EPA White House Initiative for Asian-Americans, which does everything imaginable that involves the Asian American community, human health, and the environment. Piyachat never slacked; she took on anything and everything that came her way, even if it was outside the realm of “protecting human health and the environment” (the EPA’s mission statement), all the while looking very stylish (she had been a fashion design major in college). Her eagerness to tackle last-minute projects got me on a plane to New York during the third week of my internship, where I gave a presentation on the new federal designation of AAPI-Serving Institutions at the largest annual conference for AAPI Americans working in the federal sector.
Since 2001, there had been a push for long overdue legislation that would designate AAIP-Serving Institutions, institutions of higher learning that have a high enrollment of needy Asian American students. Other communities have benefited from a similar designation, like the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions and Tribal Serving Institutions. Legislation for the AAPISIs was introduced five times in the House and Senate, until it finally passed in September of 2007 as a very small section of the comprehensive College Cost Reduction and Access Act. The designation would appropriate government grants directly to institutions and federal agencies that work with these institutions, offering everything from internships to large grants for environmental education programs.
As much as AAPI organizations are excited by this historic landmark designation, there are several problems with it. The first is the most obvious: had you heard about it until now? Probably not. Most likely, the appropriate administrative officials at your college have not either. The designation of AAPISI is incredibly small in terms of attention and monetary contribution—a drop in the bucket compared to the money allotted to other minority-serving institutions.
The full designation in the Act is “Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions” (AANAPISIs). What? The AAPI community is already incredibly diverse and has to reconcile extreme differences within its own community. Pan-Asian organizations hardly have the infrastructure to assist the various communities within their served population – how is adding the Native American community to this designation going to help the program be successful?
But back to the conference in Brooklyn. One of Piyachat’s colleagues was supposed to give a presentation on the new federal designation, but she pulled out at the last minute. Piyachat put me, the frightened intern, on the job. I set out with only the congressional bill in hand to make a presentation on something I knew nothing about.
My first step was to go to Wikipedia. I found that the article on “Model Minority Myth” was incredibly inaccurate. Generally speaking, the myth is that certain ethnic minorities are better disposed to succeed at the “American Dream,” than others; Asian-Americans are frequently cited as one of these “model minorities.” This myth is at the heart of nearly every issue facing the AAPI community. I found that the Wikipedia page was not only misrepresentation, but it even played into the model minority myth. I spent two workdays editing the entry, since I am apparently more knowledgeable than the punks who wrote it.
Most of my research came from a new report on the harmful misunderstandings about AAPIs in higher education. The report showed that the communities within the umbrella term “Asian American and Pacific Islander” are unbelievably different in their needs, but because their statistics are aggregated into the one AAPI category, the needy communities are ignored—especially Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, and refugees. Aggregated statistics show that Asian Americans have an average graduation rate from high school of 19.6%. However, this statistic is drastically lower for the Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian American communities. The story is similar for all other commonly accepted indicators of success: college attainment, income, SAT scores, etc. Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders appear to be doing really well within the category “Asian American and Pacific Islander,” but the story is much more complicated than the aggregate statistics imply. The new AAPI-Serving Institution designation can help fix this long-ignored problem by building up special emphasis programs, or even by collecting disaggregated information by ethnicity.
At the Marriot Brooklyn, when I asked a room full of over one hundred twenty federal employees from various agencies who had heard of the long-awaited AAPI-Serving designation, only three hands apprehensively rose in the air. The ones who did know about it–people from the Department of Education-didn’t even bother to come to our presentation. Later, though, they came looking for me and Piyachat, thoroughly embarrassed, saying how they wanted to work with us. I am hopeful that we inspired some other agencies to reach out to the AAPI community.
So, yes, Washington can be tedious, frustrating and bureaucratic, but clearly we can make small victories in AAPI advocacy. I am hopeful because we have Piyachat. We have Rep. George Wu, who persisted in introducing the legislation for AAPI-Serving Institutions. We have Rep. Mike Honda, who helped host a Congressional hearing on AAPIs in Education this summer. Attending this hearing was probably the most memorable part of my summer internship, besides getting bitched out by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao’s assistant, but that’s another story. All in all, I am hopeful for the future of the government’s investment in the AAPI community.
On the other hand, back at Pomona, I am uninspired by a lack of AAPI leaders and activists. We now have only two professors in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies, both of whom are joint appointments. There was one other professor who resigned from the department the day he got his tenure. The head of the AARC recently left to become the dean of students at another school. Among the AAPI student groups, the emphasis is heavily East Asian. This is not the students’ fault, because the admissions department does not care about recruiting Southeast Asian students, who heavily populate the Inland Empire and Orange County.
My sophomore year, I made an attempt to participate in the very successful Minority Student Action Program (MSAP), a special emphasis program to get more students of color to apply to Pomona. Disadvantaged AAPI students can supposedly participate, but they are not allowed to stay for the popular MSAP weekend. I noticed that hardly any of the staff, student volunteers, or high school students touring the school with the MSAP kids were AAPI.
Did you know that Pomona College does not make visits to every school in the surrounding community? They visited my predominantly white upper-middle-class high school in suburban Massachusetts, attracting more of the same. I very recently got two mass emails from the admissions department looking for volunteers to represent Pomona at local college fairs and “help recruit students of color.” Not only does admissions not want to send its staff to these fairs, they can’t even pay students to help increase their minority enrollment?
It didn’t make sense to me, until I realized it’s a numbers game: why spend money to attract students who will only cost the school money, rather than students who will generate a substantial income flow? So as we keep populating this school with students from predominantly white and privileged communities to form another predominantly white and privileged community, we keep getting kids who feel entitled to an explanation of why there is AAPI activism. It should be the other way around: they should be explaining why they are in such a privileged position.
And we go in circles. And the school administrations get nervous, but then these radical student leaders eventually graduate. And the administration breathes a sigh of relief, at least until the next student activists take three years to come to the same realization.
Did you see “ASIAN AMERICANS DIE NOW” painted on Walker Wall in 1992? Did you know that student activists took over Alexander Hall that same year and chained the entrances shut -- and that was how we got an Asian American studies department?
So go ahead and talk about making white mentor groups. For the remainder of the time that I am at this institution, I give up on Claremont AAPI activism. I am more optimistic about the economy, because I trust the leaders in Washington more.
The National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) report entitled “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight,” is a collaboration between the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and the College Board, You can get a PDF copy of the report at http://www.nyu.edu/projects/care/.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment