‘Asians Need Support?’
As a recent immigrant from Thailand, Dear Aunaetitrakul remembers being inspired in social-studies classes by such icons as Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. But it got her wondering: “What about us? Did Asians do anything in the civil-rights era?’”
Her teacher, even in the melting pot of Queens, N.Y., couldn’t help her. It was the first of many times she would feel excluded from conversations around racial justice and diversity. In her teen years, she got the impression that society didn’t view Asian Americans as people being oppressed. They were the model minorities who excelled academically, coasting their way through elite colleges, or so the stereotype would have people believe.
As she went through school and into college, diversity support groups seemed more geared toward Black, Latino, and Native American students, the groups most often designated as underrepresented minority groups. It wasn’t clear how she fit in.
“When colleges talk about students of color or underrepresented minority or historically marginalized students, who are they really talking about?” asks Aunaetitrakul. “I still get these questions. ‘Asians need support? Are they people of color, too?’ It can be tiring.”
Today, she sees educating people about the diversity of Asian and Pacific Islander people and the barriers they face as part of her mission at Oakton Community College, in Des Plaines, Ill. She’s overseeing a five-year, $1.5-million grant the college received in 2020 through a federally designated program for Asian American- and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions (commonly called Aanapisi, pronounced ah-nah-pee-zee). The money is being used, in part, to provide more culturally relevant academic advising and more data collection on how Asian subgroups are faring.
More than 200 colleges could potentially apply for such grants, which require that students from these populations make up at least 10 percent of undergraduate enrollment. Few, however, are tapping into that resource to support their Asian students. Oakton is one of only 29 colleges currently being funded through the Aanapisi program, which was authorized in 2008 as the newest category of minority-serving institutions. One reason for the low participation: Colleges already receiving federal grants as Hispanic-serving institutions — and there are a lot more of those — can’t simultaneously receive money designated for Aanapisis.
‘We Clump Asian Folks Together’
Asian American and Pacific Islander populations span dozens of ethnicities and speak more than 100 languages, scholars note. They’ve also experienced racism and exclusion, especially since the pandemic. Still, “For far too long, many Asian American and Pacific Islander students have been pushed out of conversations on equity, diversity, and inclusion,” Aunaetitrakul told Oakton’s Board of Trustees during a meeting in February.
She’s also a member of the Asian Pacific Islanders Knowledge Community, an educational arm of Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. She and two other members of the group met with a group of Chronicle reporters and editors recently.
Shruti Desai, associate vice president of student engagement at Duke University, told us that one of the biggest frustrations she hears from Asian and Asian American students is “how we clump Asian folks together” rather than disaggregating data about subpopulations.
It’s easy to look at the broad umbrella and conclude that Asian students don’t need extra support. When colleges say, “our Asian retention rate is 98 percent, our Asian graduation rate is 99 percent, and our Asian students aren’t needing financial aid, OK — but is that Indian, Chinese, Japanese? Is that Malaysian?” Desai says. “There’s this inability to nuance the conversation around Asian needs because we’re all getting lumped together in data sets.”
The “model-minority myth,” she adds, originated from an influx of mostly upper-class Chinese and Indian families who came to the United States a generation ago. Many recent immigrants from Southeast Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia, are first-generation, low-income students attending community colleges. They’re also among the undocumented students known as Dreamers who are struggling to stay in college. But because Dreamers are more often associated with Latinos, undocumented Asian students are too often treated as afterthoughts, Desai says.
Hing Potter, assistant director of student services for Northeastern University’s San Francisco and Silicon Valley campuses, says transracial adoptees like himself find it especially hard to fit in. Born in Cambodia and adopted by white parents at age 4, he feels part of “an invisible identity that doesn’t get added into the equation when it comes to student support.”
“We need to disrupt the idea that the Asian American community is a monolith and see our individual communities, whether they’re Cambodian, Vietnamese, Malaysian or whatever,” he says. When colleges think of Asian and Latino students, the defaults might be the high-achieving Chinese student or the struggling Mexican American immigrant. In any case, Potter says, the result is to stigmatize students and not allow for nuanced conversations about what diverse students need. —Katherine Mangan