How what we study shapes our collective understanding of race
So much of America’s collective understanding of how race and racism shape our culture, politics, and American identity sprouts from the ivory towers.
That’s partly why who colleges admit and what ideas they encourage students to develop has become such a third rail of American politics, especially in recent months.
The study of Asian American identity made a small but monumental advance last month when Amherst College became one of the first higher-ed institutions to approve an Asian American and Pacific Islander studies major.
From a story by Chronicle reporter Francie Diep:
It was only a half-century in coming, but Amherst will offer the major this fall, in what several experts believe will be a first for a small liberal-arts college. Faculty members voted in favor, 138 to six, at their March 8 meeting.
The new major is a sign of renewed interest in the field in recent years, and also a reminder of its slow growth historically.
“We have Black studies. We have Latinx studies. We think these are important because these are major populations of our country who have distinct experiences,” said Pawan H. Dhingra, a professor of U.S. immigration studies who will be the program’s first chair. “The same thing applies to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”
Diep describes a half-century movement to bring the field — a mix of history, sociology, and literature — to college campuses. The first Asian American studies program was established in 1969 at San Francisco State University as part of a new ethnic-studies department formed in response to Black activists’ demands.
Interest in such programs reemerged in 2020 after a wave of pandemic-era hate crimes targeted Asian Americans.
The effort has not gone without controversy.
From Diep:
Not all Amherst students are as optimistic about the major. Kei Lim, an editor in chief of The Amherst Student, and Noor Rahman, a senior managing editor, published an opinion essay in the paper expressing worry that the major would overemphasize East and Southeast Asian American perspectives, at the expense of Central and South Asian and Middle Eastern Americans, populations the major also purports to cover.
“That the richness of Asia and, by extension, the so-called Asian American diaspora, is boxed into a single department because of a Eurocentric designation of ‘us and them’ is both irrational and racist,” Lim and Rahman wrote.
Last summer, Diep wrote about a $450,000 Panda Express postdoc fellowship. The effort went viral and was widely panned on Twitter (“Consider the lower-status postdoc whose CV will forever be an orange chicken ad,” one X user wrote.)
From that story:
There’s plenty of room for growth in the discipline. Outside of the western United States, Asian American studies departments are underdeveloped, experts say. Among Ivy League institutions, only Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania have dedicated programs.
Since the pandemic began, Duke University, Harvard, and Penn have all made cluster hires in the field. “This moment is transformative,” Khan said.
More:
In a statement, Andrea [Cherng, chief brand officer for the Panda Restaurant Group and daughter of the founders, Andrew and Peggy Cherng] wrote that she hopes Panda Express’s investment in the Asian American studies program will help students to “understand our collective history” and “learn from the past so that there could be greater belonging for those that may appear to have foreign faces.”
What I’m reading...
- David E. Harris, the first Black commercial-airline pilot in the United States, recently died. During his career, several airlines said they couldn’t hire him because hotels wouldn’t accommodate him, according to a New York Times obituary.
- “Shani Mott, a scholar of Black studies at the Johns Hopkins University whose examinations of race and power in America extended beyond the classroom to her employer, her city, and even her own home, has died in Baltimore. She was 47,” write Campbell Robertson and Debra Kamin in The New York Times.
- “I have no time for this foolishness,” Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat of Maryland, said to CNN about an online spat over DEI and the Baltimore bridge collapse.