The Necessary Work of Decolonization, Equity, and Education: Thoughts From a South Asian American Scholar

• In Event: South Asians in/and America: Engaging Solidarities, Specificities, and Intersections in Educational Research in Troubled Times

Abstract

Goals
Creating common ground in order to attain shared goals (e.g., equity and justice) and, simultaneously, validating differences are both the challenge and the hallmark of multicultural democracies today. While the present-day, hyper-digitized, global context enables bewilderingly rapid cross-cultural and transnational communication, it can also serve to dilute and distort historical knowledge and detract from deep, thoughtful, contextualized consideration of social issues. In this paper, I consider two central questions:

• How can educational researchers attend to and engage the diversity and complexity (in terms of race, ethnicity, caste, culture, gender, socioeconomic status, language, region, and nation) of SAAs?
• And, why and how is this work integral to the ongoing work of decolonization and attaining equity in the larger education field?

Perspectives
An online search through U.S. Census and Pew Research Center data reveals that Asian Americans, about 5.6% of the U.S. population, were the fastest growing racial group in the first decade of the 21stcentury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_Americans ; https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb12-cn22.html). Disaggregated data available for persons of Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Pakistani, Maldivian, and Sri Lankan origin reveal that Indian Americans (3.2 million), are, by far, the largest group among SAAs.

The growing SAA population, while relatively small, is present in the public sphere – witness, for instance, Spelling Bee winners, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, comedian Hari Kondabolu’s The Problem with Apu (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Apu), poet and screenwriter Fatima Asghar, actress and director Mindy Kaling, PBS Newshour’s Hari Sreenivasan, and NPR’s social science correspondent, Shankar Vendantam, among others. South Asian Americans also continue to be targets of xenophobic, racist, and Islamophobic attacks – especially in the current polarizing, anti-immigrant climate. Between these broad representations, the lives and experiences of SAAs – like those of any other community – reveal nuance, complexity, and contradiction in educational and social contexts (Author, 2001, 2002, 2008).

Methods
This theoretical/conceptual paper, drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and globalization studies, argues for forging critical, grounded solidarities – through collaborations, research, teaching, and community work – across diverse peoples and communities via the following considerations:

• What can we learn from colonial pasts (across various parts of the globe) to inform our multicultural present?
• Along with equity and justice, what are some common goals towards which we might work with different others even as we engage and assert specificities (as SAAs, for instance)?
• How might we interrogate our own privilege (in terms of socioeconomic status, race, gender, caste, culture, language, nation) in order to work more rigorously towards equity, justice, and decolonization?
• And, how would this work inform larger Asian American education, multicultural education, and educational research?

Conclusion
We – SAAs, educational researchers, those of us committed to building collaborations to foster equity, justice, and decolonization – would do well to learn from Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and commit to “seeing deeply” (Hanh, 1991, p. 21) across historical and geographic contexts in our troubled times. Working with Barbara Smith’s (1983) recommendation to forge short- and long-term coalitions towards attaining shared goals, we may continue to advance the necessary work of decolonization and equity in and through education.

Author

• Nina Asher, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities