Navigating Race in Educational Spaces: A Historical Analysis of the Asian Experience in the United States

• In Event: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul: Testimonies of Asian and Asian Americans' Experience of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Abstract

This paper is an autoethnographic study of navigating race and racism in educational spaces positioned within a historical analysis of the Asian experience in the U.S. As I write this paper, foremost on my mind is the announcement that Senator Kamala Devi Harris is the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee in the 2020 election. For many Asian women scholars like me working in the U.S., this is a powerful moment of change in the history of race in America as Senator Harris is half-African American and half-Asian American. This is also an opportunity for educators to bring any change in the education system, redefine what is considered the norm, and re-envision how we ‘do’ curriculum. There is a general consensus among curriculum scholars that in education the norm refers to White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant while Indigenous peoples, African American, Latinx, Asian Americans, and other non-Western, non-White identities are outside the norm and constitutive of people of color and defined as the racial other. This perception is fueled by the current political milieu that has provoked a rise in white nationalism against the racial other, border wars and hostility toward Hispanics, police violence against African Americans, and rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Hostility, violence, and hate crimes against non-White groups have a long history in the U.S. For example, historical and legal analysis of the history of Asian immigration in the US documents that Asians, along with Native Americans and African Americans, were excluded from white public schools, a policy that was fully supported by the United States Supreme Court, which endorsed "separate but equal" education for Asians (Chiu 1994, p. 1064). According to Chiu, Asians have been subjected to “exclusion, assimilation, and … ‘guilty liberalism’” (p. 1056). While exclusion marks Asians as the essentially different ‘other,’ assimilation implies conformity to dominant values and norms, and guilty liberalism selectively picks which aspects of Asians are worth recognizing such as the myth of the model minority. Chiu challenges the prevailing myth of the model minority that upholds the Asian success story as an example to African Americans and Latinx suggesting assimilation, hard work, and meritocracy lead to educational and economic success while masking the historical othering of Asian immigrants. It is time for Asian Americans to challenge this racist othering, reclaim our power, tell our story on our own terms, and make visible the complex Asian American experiences and histories as knowledge worth knowing and celebrating in the classroom.
Chiu, D. C. (1994). The Cultural Defense: Beyond Exclusion, Assimilation, and Guilty Liberalism. California Law Review, 82(4), 1053-1125.

Author

• Suniti Sharma, Saint Joseph's University