Ben Tran: Asian American Studies means a lot to me.
Thang Lian: Our struggles, our triumphs, our tears, our mournings, they're all interconnected. And nothing exists in a vacuum.
Angela Yan: Where do I fit into the equation?
Anisa Khalifa: Asian Americans have been in the United States for hundreds of years. And today, they're the fastest growing demographic in the country. But historically, they've been marginalized and even erased from popular American history and culture.
But that's beginning to change: at the movies, at the polls — and on university campuses. After decades of student activism, Asian American Studies programs are finally gaining a foothold at colleges in once-resistant regions. And yet, that progress comes amidst an onslaught of continuing violence, incited by anti-Asian rhetoric at the beginning of the pandemic.
I'm Anisa Khalifa, and this week on the Broadside: the history of Asian American Studies and why it's finally having a moment in the South.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: I'm learning a lot about podcasting already.
Anisa Khalifa: That's Professor Nayoung Aimee Kwon of Duke University. She’s the founding director of Duke's Asian American and Diaspora Studies program. She was also my thesis advisor when I was a grad student. So you could say I'm kinda close to this story.
That was really nostalgic.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: So you haven't been here? How many years has it been?
Anisa Khalifa: It's been almost three years. Almost exactly three years. So it was February 2020. And we went into Shelter in Place on like March 18.
I recently went to see Professor Kwon at Duke to ask her about the history of the movement for Asian American studies — or AAS — and find out where it stands today.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: Right now with Duke, and elsewhere in the American South, there's actually a new wave that started, really in the, in the last few years, that in which we are establishing for the very first time, these programs. So it's a little bit belated.
Anisa Khalifa: And by a little belated, she means by about 50 years.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: The history of ethnic studies in the United States goes back a long ways, to the 1960s when the civil rights movement, and the antiwar movement against the American war in Vietnam, were concurrently happening. And many students across our campuses were mobilizing, particularly to learn the history of the United States that is more inclusive of a wider swath of Americans who have been here for 100 years, and have not been included in these histories.
Anisa Khalifa: Let's travel back in time to 1968 — on the campus of San Francisco State University.
(SOUNDBITE FROM DOCUMENTARY SFSU: ON STRIKE)
Anisa Khalifa: That’s where a multi-ethnic coalition of student groups formed the Third World Liberation Front and demanded that the school teach the histories of people of color. They called for African American, Chicano, Native American, and Asian American Studies. Community radio station KPFA was on the ground during many of the protests
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL STRIKE AUDIO)
Anisa Khalifa: Their movement carried the spirit of student uprisings that were happening around the world, against colonialism, capitalism and war.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL STRIKE AUDIO)
Unidentified students: On strike, shut it down! On strike, shut it down!
Anisa Khalifa: Led by the Black Student Union, the group shut down classes and gathered support from faculty, labor unions, and community groups in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE FROM DOCUMENTARY SFSU: ON STRIKE)
Unidentified striker: The demands of the Black students and the Third World Liberation Front are not discussable, negotiable, debatable, or compromisable!
Anisa Khalifa: In 1969, the protests spread to nearby UC Berkeley.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL STRIKE AUDIO, POLICE BEATING PROTESTORS)
Anisa Khalifa: In response, then-governor Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency. The California national guard descended on Berkeley with tear gas and shotguns. After 5 months of protests, the two schools finally agreed to the students' demands. To this day, it remains the longest on-campus strike in American history.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: So that is the beginning of Ethnic Studies, and Asian American Studies.
Anisa Khalifa: That's Professor Kwon again.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: Asian American students worked hand in hand, side to side with black students, Latinx students, Native American students, and so forth. So it was a multiethnic coalition that really tried to revolutionize the way we teach our histories, our literatures, our other cultural experiences at our universities.
Anisa Khalifa: But despite those early successes the movement largely petered out.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: For the most part, most universities in the United States today do not have Asian American Studies programs. While there was a regional movement, a national movement that started in the California schools, each school, each institution really was left to itself to fight these battles, again, and again and again.
Anisa Khalifa: So what were the stumbling blocks? Professor Kwon says most advocates for AAS fell victim to academic bureaucracy. Universities move slowly.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: And so if you think about the makeup of a department, the faculty in a university, you know, we are hired to teach certain classes. We're hired to do certain jobs, mentor students, do administrative roles, and so forth. Program building is something that you have to do on the side, on top of everything else that you are already hired to do.
Anisa Khalifa: Of course, there have been notable exceptions. In 1995, students at Northwestern University successfully lobbied for the establishment of an AAS program, inspiring a wave of protests across the Midwest and Northeast. But the catalyst for that victory was a 23-day hunger strike.
(SOUNDBITE FROM NORTHWESTERN HUNGER STRIKE)
Anisa Khalifa: AAS programs have also faced regional challenges.
Esther Kim Lee: In the south, I think it's more evident than the rest of the country is that race is defined by black and white.
Anisa Khalifa: Professor Esther Kim Lee is the current director of Duke's Asian American and Diaspora Studies program – Professor Kwon's successor. She says that while Asian American communities have a long history in the south, they don't usually get included in the cultural conversation of being "Southern".
Esther Kim Lee: So when, where and when does Asian American Studies enter in that dialogue? And how does it complicate that binary of Black and white? And so that's once one challenge is to, to question what race means.
Anisa Khalifa: In the new South, people are challenging that binary way of thinking.
Esther Kim Lee: We are seeing a huge population change and growth in major cities like Atlanta, Raleigh, Durham, where we have, you know, just people moving in who are Asian American, you know, and we're still trying to figure out how that's changing the region.
Anisa Khalifa: Asian Americans are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States. According to the US Census, the population grew by 36 percent in the last decade. In the Southeast, that number is even higher — 46%.
This corresponds with an expansion of AAS programs at universities throughout the region. In 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill opened an Asian American Center on its campus; students are now petitioning for a program. Duke approved a minor in Asian American studies last year. And this past spring, Vanderbilt University launched both a major and a minor.
But demographics aren’t always destiny. For Esther Kim Lee and the Duke community, even after getting a program established, students and faculty faced challenges and broken promises.
Esther Kim Lee: 2018, when the program was founded, many students and faculty were frustrated that the administration will promise certain things like say, we will have a program or we will have new faculty hire, but none of those things actually happened.
So why is that the case? I mean, there are a number of reasons. I mean, you could think of administrators thinking that there's no value in the field, value in including Asian American Studies. That's one. I've also heard them worrying that while there may be a few number of activist students asking for it, but if you actually offer the courses, no one is going to take it, which turned out to be not true. I've heard that as well. So there may be some perception of this student activism as something that they could just brush aside and wait for years, they'll graduate and, you know, be quiet again, I think there's, I mean, not to be too cynical about it. But I think that that's been the attitude.
(MONTAGE OF NEWS CLIPS DESCRIBING ANTI-ASIAN VIOLENCE)
Anisa Khalifa: The scapegoating of ethnic minorities during times of crisis is not a new phenomenon. As I reported this story over the last few months, the waves of anti-Asian violence that have been brutalizing the community were never far from my mind.
And the people I interviewed all shared mixed feelings about seeing so much progress for Asian American Studies programs during a time of so much fear and grief. None more so than Iris Kim. She started a campaign for AAS at Vanderbilt University in Nashville during the spring of 2021, when she was a senior.
Iris Kim: It was a pandemic, anti-Asian sentiment was rising. And so there was this very much like short term result that we wanted to address, which was to address the students who do not feel safe right now. Like, actually, you know, doing more than just sending out an email acknowledging that these incidents are happening, that these hate crimes are happening.
I thought about my brother who was applying to school at the time. And I could not really give my like, get myself to recommend Vanderbilt for him to apply for college, because I just felt like finding community and feeling like you belong here, especially as an Asian American student, and then even more specific for him as an Asian American guy, that it was really tough to just like find community. So it was like a variety of those factors as a student that made me want to start this call.
Anisa Khalifa: Iris was in the early stages of gathering support, and then tragedy struck.
Iris Kim: We released a statement on Monday, started gathering signatures like, had hundreds, and then on Wednesday was when the Atlanta shootings happened.
Anisa Khalifa: Iris is referring to the shocking murders of eight people on March 16, 2021, when a man went on a shooting spree at three spas in the Atlanta metro area. Six of his victims were Asian women, and the tragedy is widely believed to be racially motivated.
Iris Kim: And this is something very close to Nashville. It was an event that really shocked a lot of people in our community. And it was really a bittersweet turning point, because until then, we were gathering support, but on Wednesday was like, when an emergency council was put together and then like, things actually happened.
Anisa Khalifa: How do you feel about the fact that it took the momentum caused by this horrific tragedy to really make things happen the way that you were trying to get them to happen?
Iris Kim: Mm. I mean, it wasn't a good feeling, I think, in the first week. That was actually a fear I had, that people would assume or people would, who didn't know what came first would assume like, oh, we started this call, like after the shootings happened, but — we've been here this whole time. And I mean, maybe it's getting more attention now because of the event, but — it was a confusing time. It was not like, joyful, or celebratory for a long time, I think, because we had to go through — we had to recognize that there was like, a lot of pain there.
Anisa Khalifa: Since I spoke to Iris last fall, Vanderbilt approved both a minor and a major in Asian American Studies – the new curriculum started this spring. That's stunningly fast progress for any student movement. Iris gives credit to a nationwide wave of student activism, and cooperation between groups at different colleges comparing notes and sharing resources.
Iris Kim: This is like the first time that Asian American student leaders have gathered like, from so many different schools. Like having zoom meetings and talking about the changes they want to see in their universities, and how we can do it as unified, in a unified way.
Anisa Khalifa: For advocates of AAS in the South, there's a lot to celebrate in this moment. Last fall, I attended the first ever Southeast Conference for Asian American Studies. It brought together faculty, students and alumni from more than 15 universities. The energy in the room was palpable, as attendees told an oral history of the movement, and grappled with how to extend their successes to more southern schools.
The Asian American Studies Working Group, lovingly referred to as "A-Swag", is a grassroots student organization that has led the movement for AAS at Duke for 20 years. Earlier this year, I caught up with some members of AASWG at their space in the student center. The building stands in the literal shadow of Duke's chapel, framed in the same Gothic style and iconic varicolored stone. It smelled nostalgic, and a little like mildew.
Can we go inside, or would we be disturbing?
David Lee: We can go inside.
Anisa Khalifa: Hey y'all, we just wanted to see the new space.
I asked the students why it's so important to have an official minor, when courses covering Asian American culture and history already existed. Here's David Lee, one of the first students to take the minor at Duke.
David Lee: I think, like, the most obvious is that it just gives some form of like academic validation. Obviously taking classes because you want to is a great thing about college. But anyone who's been in the college system knows that's not realistic for the most part.
Another thing is that it just gives a cohesive way for you to find these classes. Because especially like when I came in 2019, it was really word of mouth. If you could figure out like, this class, this professor is really cool, you should take that class. But because there is no course code, there's no way to like find it outside of people being nice and letting you know.
Anisa Khalifa: Student and faculty efforts to make Asian American Studies happen at Duke have paid off. The program has been able to establish a minor and hire two tenure-track faculty. But they still don't have a major, or the permanence that would come from being an actual department. And the future isn't guaranteed. In my reporting, both faculty and students expressed worry it could disappear.
On the other side of campus, Professor Kwon, the founding director of Duke's program, told me that she shares those concerns about sustainability.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: My worry is that when the crisis ends, when energy runs out, when this students stop advocating, because, you know, they, they're really doing so much, right? They're doing their schoolwork, they're working towards their career aspirations. They are figuring out their lives, as, you know, growing adults and individuals and they're advocating for program building. So when that energy necessarily dissipates, when a crisis, you know, takes attention away from some of these issues and concerns, I'm afraid that the resources will also run dry.
Anisa Khalifa: And while she fears for the future of AAS programs, Professor Kwon also told me something surprising: she wishes we didn't need them at all.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: I mean, if you look around America is a very diverse country, right. But the average American may not understand why there are the different communities that have been here for hundreds of years, and how these communities are either segregated from each other or entangled in their various ways. And so Asian American Studies, African American Studies, we're really trying to add to a narrative that has actively excluded these histories, in our curriculum, in our narratives, and so, my hope is that, eventually we will come to a point where we won't need something like Asian American Studies, or African American Studies, as a separate standalone program to make up for the absences that are in programs like history, or English, or political science, or sociology.
Anisa Khalifa: But right now we need it?
Nayoung Aimee Kwon: Right now we need it.
Anisa Khalifa: Thank you to everyone who spoke to me for this story, including Professor Ben Tran, and students Thiang Lian, and Angela Yan, whose voices you heard at the top of the episode. Archival audio comes from KPFA Community Radio, California Newsreel's documentary San Francisco State: On Strike, and Originating Moments, Envisioning Futures from Northwestern University's Asian American Studies Program. This episode was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa. Our editor is Jerad Walker. Sean Roux provided audio engineering support.
The Broadside is a production of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We live on your favorite podcast app, and on wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or tell a friend to tell a friend! Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.