Asian Americans have been in the United States for hundreds of years, and are the fastest growing demographic in the country. Despite that, they've historically been marginalized and often erased from mainstream American history and culture, particularly in the South.
"I was born and raised in North Carolina," said Aida Guo, a student at Duke University. "And the extent to which I learned about Asian America was really limited to Japanese incarceration and the 1882 [Chinese] Exclusion Act."
For college students like Guo, that gap in education has narrowed in recent years as a new wave of Southern schools have established Asian American Studies programs. But according to Professor Nayoung Aimee Kwon, who served as the founding director of Duke’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies program in 2018, "It's a little bit belated."
And by that, she means by about 50 years.
The history of Asian American Studies
The call for Asian American Studies was born in the protest movements of the late 1960s.
"The civil rights movement and the anti-war movement against the American war in Vietnam were concurrently happening," Kwon said. "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 a hundred years and have not been included in these histories."
In 1968, student groups at San Francisco State University formed the Third World Liberation Front and went on strike. They demanded the creation of African American, Chicano, Native American and Asian American Studies programs.
The strike shut down classes and spread to the campus of nearby UC-Berkeley. Ronald Reagan — then the governor of the state — declared a state of emergency and called up the California National Guard. The soldiers descended on Berkeley, injuring and arresting many students during a series of violent clashes. After five months, the two schools finally agreed to the students' demands. It remains the longest on-campus strike in American history.
Decades of hurdles
Despite those early successes, the movement largely petered out.
"For the most part, most universities in the United States today do not have Asian American Studies programs," Kwon said.
Kwon cited several major hurdles to program building at colleges, including slow-moving academic bureaucracy and the extra labor required from faculty and staff. But Asian American Studies programs have also faced specific regional challenges.
"In the South, I think it's more evident than the rest of the country that race is defined by Black and white," said Professor Esther Kim Lee, the current director of Duke's program. Lee said that despite their long history in the South, Asian Americans don't usually get included in that conversation.
"So where and when does Asian American Studies enter in that dialogue?" Lee said. "And how does it complicate that binary of Black and white? And so that's one challenge — is to question what race means."
Lee said that question is increasingly relevant, as the rapid growth of Asian American communities in the region makes them more visible.
That visibility has corresponded with an expansion of Asian American Studies programs at universities throughout the South. In the last two years, UNC-Chapel Hill opened an Asian American center on its campus, with students now petitioning for a program; Duke approved a minor; and this past spring, Vanderbilt University launched both a major and a minor.
But demographics aren't always destiny. At Duke, even after getting a program established, Lee said students and faculty were hindered by administration concerns about attendance and a perception that the student-led movement for Asian American Studies was "something that [the university] could just brush aside. Wait four years, they'll graduate and, you know, be quiet again. Not to be too cynical about it, but I think that's been the attitude."
The toll of anti-Asian violence
The scapegoating of ethnic minorities during times of crisis is a well-documented phenomenon, and the pandemic is no exception. Several people interviewed for this story shared mixed feelings about seeing so much progress for Asian American Studies amidst the waves of anti-Asian violence that have brutalized the community since 2020.
None more so than Iris Kim. In the spring of 2021, Kim started a campaign for Asian American Studies at Nashville's Vanderbilt University where she was enrolled as a senior. Kim said she wanted to go beyond public statements of solidarity regarding anti-Asian violence "to address the students who do not feel safe right now."
Kim was in the early stages of gathering support when tragedy struck. On March 16, 2021, a man went on a killing spree at a series of Atlanta spas. Most of his victims were Asian women and it’s widely believed that the act was racially motivated. Kim described it as "a bittersweet turning point," because after the murders, the university moved quickly to approve Asian American Studies.
"It wasn't a good feeling, I think, in the first week," Kim said. "That was actually a fear I had, that people… who didn't know what came first would assume we started this call after the shootings happened. But we've been here this whole time."
Vanderbilt's new curriculum started this spring. That's stunningly fast progress for any student movement. Kim gave credit to an unprecedented nationwide wave of collaborative student activism.
The path forward
For advocates of Asian American Studies in the South, there's a lot to celebrate. Last September, the first ever Southeast Conference for Asian American Studies was held jointly at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. The event brought together faculty, students and alumni from more than fifteen universities. They gathered to tell an oral history of the movement and discuss how to extend their successes to more schools.
Attendees included members of the Asian American Studies Working Group, a grassroots student organization that has led the movement for Asian American Studies at Duke for 20 years. Their efforts have paid off: Duke's program has been able to establish a minor and hire two tenure-track faculty.
Thang Lian, a junior and member of the group, said that the program provides him a safe space to wrestle with his own Asian American identity, and allows him to take what he learns back to his community. “I understand that all our struggles, our triumphs, our tears, our mournings, they're all interconnected,” said Lian. “And nothing exists in a vacuum."
While Duke’s program is considered a success by many, the school still doesn't have an Asian American Studies major or the permanence of a department. The future isn't guaranteed. Kwon, the program’s founding director, said she fears that when crises pass and students have less time to advocate for Asian American Studies, resources might dry up.
And yet, she yearns for a future without Asian American Studies.
"My hope," she said, "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."
But right now?
“We need it.”
Editor’s note: As a student, the author formerly worked under Professor Kwon in Duke's Asian American Studies Program.
