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Coupled with student-initiated programming and courses, Asian American activists began to publicly voice their opinions against the invisibility of Asian Americans on campus and their exclusion from institutional policies through campus publications. It was first established in to address low college attendance rates among underrepresented students at IUB. Other students wrote Opinion Editorial pieces in the student newspaper addressing their experiences of not being allowed to apply for minority programming and funding. Others such as Asian American student and president of the Asian American Association, Joon Park, voiced their political identity artistically.
From , these 19 Asian American student organizations and sorority served as an emerging community that took initiative to create their own cultural and academic programming when the university had none. Their student-initiated programming seemed to be successful drawing hundreds sometimes thousands of IUB students, faculty, staff, and community members to their events.
Despite their success of initiating their own programming, academic courses, and publications, Asian American activists realized that they needed stability and permanence in the IUB Asian American community. They recognized that student leadership within the student organizations changed yearly.
Upperclassmen with the historical knowledge of past Asian American activist efforts and the institutional savvy eventually graduated, and incoming freshmen and sophomores had to redouble their advocacy efforts again. The student organizations also had a few advocates among the faculty and staff who supported their advocacy efforts. However, Asian American activists recognized that their advocacy efforts needed to go beyond themselves. Thus, the next period marks the second phase of the AAS movement where multiple Asian American student organizations unified into a pan-ethnic effort.
In addition, they combined with multi-racial groups to gain critical mass to officially push for their social movement goals: An Asian American advocacy dean, an Asian culture center, and an AAS program. The period of to focused on gaining a critical mass to navigate institutional racism within a complex university administration.
IUB Asian American activists formed multi-level and crossracial alliances within other ethnic Asian student groups as well as student groups such as the student government who had direct ties or at least a platform to talk to campus decision makers. IUB administration were also drawn by nationwide media coverage of ethnic studies strikes at Princeton, Columbia, and Northwestern University. Asian American activists at IUB followed a similar path of tactics as these national social movements. They gained critical mass of support by unifying the Asian American community and creating strategic relationships with multi-racial student organizations.
With a larger critical mass of supporters, Asian American activists were able to draw attention from IUB administrators to seriously consider their demands. In , there was a short-lived social movement to rally for a designated cultural center and an advocacy dean led by Mona Wu, then president of the Asian American Association student organization, and two other members.
They wrote and interviewed IUB administrators, gathered statistics, and distributed surveys to Asian American students asking if they felt discriminated on campus and if they would support the hiring of an advocacy dean. The social movement failed not only because of timing, but it could not gather enough support for the social movement outcomes. Asian American activists did not undertake the social movement outcomes again until when student organizations shifted towards an Asian American pan-ethnic outlook.
Pan-ethnicity is when different ethnic groups merge into a common culture as a means to increase political and social power when faced with racial discrimination. Similarly, the IUB pan-ethnic Asian American identity was founded because the various student organizations banded together to fight against stereotypes and misconceptions by collaborating on informal and formal activities established from through There has not been much cooperation or communication between the different IUB Asian and Asian American student groups in the past. However, we have seen that in the past, our collaborative efforts have drawn very positive responses from the IU community, during Asian American Heritage Month, for example, the event that is most well attended is the one in which all the groups have worked together.
We want to continue to contribute to the IU community as a group. Those six years of collaborating on events strengthened friendships but also sparked a unified political identity, something that was missing in the failed social movement. Specifically, the Asian Student Union aimed to organize student efforts to achieve long-term social movement goals that had originally failed in and As long as we have interested students, we can overcome any challenges.
In hosting this conference, dedicated students at IU are making a statement that Asians and Asian Americans are a unified community.
We are working to make positive changes such as establishing an Asian culture center and an Asian American studies program. These changes are mutually beneficial to academic institutions and to the community as a whole. Drawing nearly attendees from 25 Midwestern public and private universities, the IUB Asian American community demonstrated to the IUB administration that they had a unified Asian American community and the support of a regional body of Asian American activists.
Evidence also suggests that cross-racial collaboration aided Asian American activists in fulfilling their social movement outcomes. Asian American activists did this by recognizing that other minority student groups had similar social movement goals. Thus, Asian American activists combined their social movement goals with other minority groups on campus to present a unified agenda to IUB administration.
The proposals were sent to a faculty committee focused on strategic directions. This network of cross-racial collaboration serendipitously developed when forming the Asian American sorority, Kappa Delta Gamma. As part of the governance structure at IUB, to be an officially recognized sorority, a new sorority needed to be part of a Greek Council.
There were three existing Greek Councils on campus that represented mainstream fraternities and sororities as well as well-established African American Greek houses. However, Wu felt that the new Asian interest sorority did not fit under the mission of three existing Greek Councils.
It was through this process as well as her time working on the student newspaper where she met representatives from other minority student groups who were advocating parallel demands as Asian American activists. Historically, Asian Americans did not reach out to these student groups but the timing was right. All of their social movement goals were similar such that they wanted IUB administration to make reforms to make the campus more welcoming for students of color.
The student government body was the main organization that divided student fees, collected from tuition, to provide funding for the hundreds of student organizations on campus. In addition, Indiana University Student Association, particularly the President of the student body, have representatives sitting on the Bloomington Faculty Council as well as other administrative and faculty committees.
Because of its direct channels to campus decision-makers, a relationship with the Indiana University Student Association was a political one as well.
For Asian American activists, their relationship with the student government started as early as From , Indiana University Student Government passed multiple proposals to support an Asian American advocacy dean and brought the proposals to the attention of the Bloomington Faculty Council. The Indiana University Student Association agreed to fund the project because the organization believed its role in increasing cultural awareness. However, not all student government cabinets supported the diverse needs of the student population.
With the help of these minority leaders and other student groups on campus, the Moats-Moor-Skomp-Bhimani presidential ticket won the academic year. They also wanted a student body president and the cabinet to represent the interest of the minority student populations on campus. Following the student body election, the Moats-Moor-Skomp-Bhimani upheld their promise.
The formal proposal was submitted to the Bloomington Faculty Council in fall The Bloomington Faculty Council considered the proposal that semester, and in January , the Asian American community gained a large victory on their agenda. Nevertheless, with the creation of an Asian cultural center on campus, Asian American students not only had their own physical space but also gained a permanent administrator to represent them.
During this period, activists needed to understand and play by the rules of the university administration to achieve their goal of creating an AAS program. Activists targeted key decision makers such as university executive leaders in the IUB administration and curriculum approval committees to understand program development policies. Activists also formed cross-racial collaborations with already existing ethnic studies on campus to share knowledge on policies, procedures, budgeting, and advocacy within higher education. They engaged in regional benchmarking with AAS programs at peer institutions in the Midwest to share resources such as successful academic proposals and budgeting documents.
These methods helped form a critical mass of activists both within and outside the small Asian American population at IUB. To appeal to university administrators for the need for an AAS program, Asian American activists had to intellectualize the need for an AAS program to gain acceptance within a traditional curriculum offering.
Deradicalization was a pragmatic strategy for activists to achieve their goal of creating an AAS program at predominantly white institution.
Yet, this strategy highlights a continuing national trend that AAS scholarship is moving further from its community activist roots and morphing into an academic discipline focused technical skill and reputation. To navigate the IUB governance structure and gain alliances within the IUB administration, activism meant going beyond the student level.
Establishing a new academic program needed faculty-driven authority and advocacy. This period is characterized as a shift from student activism to include faculty and administrators. During this point, faculty and administrators took on the responsibility of driving forward the social movement outcomes while student activists shifted to a supporting role. Administrators pooled together faculty to be on the AAS proposal committee, and faculty dealt directly to administrators.
When the AAS proposal committee faced resistance from IUB administrators and academic deans of the sustainability of an Asian American Studies program, Asian American activists were tasked to gather a petition of students who were interested in taking Asian American Studies courses. Starting in spring , Melanie Castillo-Cullather and the Asian American activists began to identify faculty members and graduate students to join a committee dedicated to establishing an AAS program.
Faculty and students were specifically recruited from different disciplines at IUB—sociology, journalism, history, East Asian Studies, education and comparative literature—to provide different perspectives on the Asian American Studies committee 86 hereafter known as the AAS committee.
The committee was also academically diverse because, traditionally, AAS was an interdisciplinary field. Since its emergence in the academy during the s, AAS enriched the research methods and findings of traditional academic disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology and literature. Most importantly, they shared previous tactics on navigating bureaucratic inaction and administrative opposition to assert the validity of the AAS curriculum.
During those two years of composing the AAS program proposal, the AAS committee met with a number of upper-level IUB administrators from 15 academic and administrative departments to gather information on appropriate policies, approval channels, course offerings, and operating expenses.
Subbaswamy and Dean Bennett I. Berthanthal, who helped gain support within the upper-levels of administration and find funding for the AAS program. To demonstrate that the AAS program would benefit the larger university, Asian American activists coordinated a number of strategic tactics. They collected and submitted letters to the university Chancellor from the African American and Latino student organizations as well as the Board of Directors for the Asian American Alumni Association. Taking almost 20 years to be finalized, one of the major reasons that Asian American activists achieved their social movement outcome of having an AAS program is deradicalization.
An important theme emerging from social scientific analyses of ethnic studies, deradicalization is that for an ethnic studies program to be implemented and gain acceptance within the university, activists had to distance itself from an ethnic central lens and promise that all course would be open to all students. Even their AAS proposals and budgets were similarly structured because they shared similar Asian American demographics, communities, and academic literature. The writers of the proposal needed to argue that the AAS curriculum linked to the liberal arts education and its research potential.
They argued that an AAS program was needed to signify recognition of the growing numbers of Asian American students on campus. Ramos approached the pair and started screaming, "Where the [expletive] is your mask?
According to Kim, another passenger yelled at him about Chinese people bringing diseases to the United States. Source: NextShark March 10 - Charlottesville, VA: The Mainland Student Network at the University of Virginia reported that two Chinese international students were attacked by assailant s who threw raw eggs at them from a moving vehicle. Source: Facebook March 10 - New York, NY: NYPD arrested a year-old boy and charged him with assault and aggravated harassment as hate crimes after he approached a year-old Asian man from behind and made anti-Asian statements.
He also kicked the victim. The suspect asked her, "Where's your expletive mask? The woman allegedly also told the victim, "You've got coronavirus, you Asian expletive. Source: The New Yorker March 9 - San Francisco, CA: A woman told reporters that while walking to the gym she was harassed by a man who shouted expletives about China at her and encouraged a passing bus to "run them over.
The same boy attacked the same man again on March 10 in a similar incident.