Transcriber: Petra Molnárová Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
Covid-19 has claimed the lives of more than 500,000 Americans,
and it’s taken the humanity countless more.
I've been lucky to be spared the grip of this virus,
but I've been acquainted with one myself.
I’ve been Asian and American
my whole life,
but I was born in and adopted from Taiwan,
and it wasn’t until this pandemic
that I began to feel so far away from the country of my birth,
and as if I lived my whole life in a country that promised me a dream,
but a promise it couldn’t keep.
I met my family in my hometown of Taipei -
my birth mother, who was 16 when she had me.
In Taiwan, we look Chinese, we speak Chinese -
I don’t.
We are Chinese,
but we have a unique place in this country’s history,
just like people from everywhere else.
And yet we’re all thrown into this pan-ethnic label:
Asian American,
a catchall for half of the world’s population.
But my whole life, as an adoptee
adopted by wonderful Chinese American parents who look like me,
I’ve lived in San Francisco, California.
And I would sit on the roof of my house,
look west, past the Golden Gate Bridge,
towards the setting sun,
and it was a crushing reminder of how far away Taiwan was -
literally beyond the horizon,
beyond the beginning of the night and where the darkness begins.
So I don’t see horizons as something hopeful;
rather to me, a horizon is an orientation,
not a destination.
Anti-racism, racism,
they’re kind of like sunsets.
You can’t ever be at a sunset.
You can’t touch it, but it touches you.
We still paint them;
we take pictures of them,
seriously millions of pictures of them,
because they do something to us,
they make us feel a certain way.
But you can’t touch racism.
Racism touches every single one of us
every single day.
And an orientation is something to be pointed towards,
which, of course, isn’t a bad thing at all.
But it’s when we mistake an orientation for a destination,
when we are convinced
that we have already reached a ‘post-racial’ America
where racism no longer exists.
Look, in San Francisco,
I spoke more Spanish than any other language except English.
I remember all the times I refused to go to Chinese school.
Hell, I even hated Chinese food that didn’t come from Panda Express.
And my school sat atop a hill
from which you could, literally, look down upon Angel Island,
where my ancestors were first hidden away from the rest of America,
and Chinatown, where we were told we could never leave.
Being an adoptee made me a pessimist growing up
because I rarely felt as if I belonged or fit in,
even though I’m about as American as it gets.
I played varsity baseball at high school -
badly.
I have a degree in political science.
And I teach teachers how to teach US history.
But I’m not here to convince you that I’m American.
I am here to tell you
that I’m trying to live up to a single standard
of what it means to be American.
It’s a pursuit of happiness.
Like the American dream itself,
that too many of us as people of colour will never reach.
A lot of what we’ve probably heard about anti-racism and social justice
has been in pursuit of survival,
keeping us alive.
But what about thrival?
Our joys, our happiness,
which go beyond the portrayals of pain and suffering in the news media
and the stigmatization of mental health?
Part of it comes from how we become ‘racialized’.
It made us into an ‘other’ as Asian Americans,
be it the way we look, the languages we speak
or the countries ‘we’re from’.
And yet many people of colour living in this country,
like me,
have almost no connection to where we’re really from.
And I’m not alone in saying that America doesn’t really feel like home
when we’re told to go back to places many of us have never been.
(Fingers snapping)
The Asian community has been under attack for the past year.
Assaults on people I’ve never met,
but whose pain
I feel as if it were my own.
They’re the same age as my parents.
And I, as an eight-year-old,
experienced what it’s like to see an Asian American person
bleed to death
on the pavement in front of me.
That individual lost his life after he t-boned my father’s car,
his blood
soaking a pack of baseball cards I clenched in my hands
as I uttered the f-word for the first time in my life.
Now, fast-forward to a few weeks ago,
when news alerts about a mass shooting in Georgia
lit up my phone.
The image,
that Asian American person’s lifeless body,
flushed before me.
The difference is that he died by accident,
but the eight victims were murdered in a racist hate crime
because a white gunman was having a bad day.
The racist stereotypes of being a ‘model minority’,
the ‘correct’ way to be a person of colour
or a forever foreigner,
show me that we need to challenge the assumption
that there is a single Asian American experience,
and I’m here to offer some advice
on how educators and those who care about children
can be part of this fight.
And I’m not here to tell you some rosy picture
about how it’s all going to be OK.
I’m a pessimist
because justice has been denied to many people of colour
murdered by police, mass shooters and white supremacist vigilantes.
But I’m also a pessimist in a hopeful profession.
Now, my students,
our future social science teachers -
teaching and teacher education, this thing I do,
are hopeful acts.
Teaching is a forward-looking profession,
where our hopes and dreams for our communities
can become reality.
And at teaching’s core is a fundamental belief
that our students’ strengths, their passions, identities
will re-imagine a better and brighter future
for communities all across this country.
And if you want proof,
ask my students who are starting their careers
as social studies teachers in schools across Michigan
during a global pandemic,
who are still hopeful
because they know the impact that they have on their students.
I tell my students that I see myself as a pessimist in a hopeful profession
because I’m painfully aware that I’m teaching my students
to work with a curriculum that I do not see myself represented in.
(Applause)
So, I don’t see horizons as something hopeful,
but they’re kind of like my home country of Taiwan
because to me,
Taiwan is somewhere that feels far away,
somewhere that I can aspire to return to someday,
somewhere that will always be home to me,
but it will always be an idea.
And I’m giving this talk
at a time of intense anti-Asian racism and xenophobia re-emerging
because of a pandemic
that the previous occupant of the White House
called the ‘Chinese virus’ or the ‘kung-flu’.
Or again, just weeks ago, when six Asian American women
were murdered by a white supremacist mass shooter in Georgia.
But I said I'm in a hopeful profession,
which means I and my colleagues believe our work can do something
about the violence our kids of colour encounter at school and beyond.
But it is not just on us as teachers and teacher educators
to orient our students
towards normalizing counternarrative, storytelling
and fighting the racialization of folks of colour.
We cannot keep mistaking an orientation of anti-racism
or even our loftiest ideals, like the American dream,
for a destination,
when kids, especially those of us who come to America, like me,
are taught to be American in social studies classrooms.
We learn white middle-class norms and are set up for disappointment
when we realize that years later that the American dream is -
as David Labaree reminds us -
a frail hope rather than a firm promise.
And Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate point out
that so many folks of colour
feel that we have to self-condemn our identities
in order to self-preserve.
I think often about the times I had to distance myself
to self-condemn my race, my culture
in order to preserve myself.
And in that way, this horizon of a post-racial America
after we’ve had a Black president
and now a Black woman vice president
is still an orientation, not a destination.
And I say that again
because we need to disrupt the curriculum we teach our kids
and challenge those in power who profit from what we continue to teach our kids.
And in our communities, classrooms,
well-meaning teachers unintentionally cause kids
to be ashamed of their identities and histories,
or, just as problematically,
taught to see that their culture is a set of stereotypes -
food and festivals -
which means that we need to rethink
what representation and solidarity look like
in our classrooms
and how we train our communities, teachers.
Maybe then the things that made me feel like an outsider as a kid
will become an entry point into another student’s happiness.
Now with survival and anti-racism as an orientation,
and our students’ and childrens’ joys -
the destination.
Here are three steps towards centering that happiness of our kids,
and the kids in our communities,
as an anti-racist practice,
with links that you can scan while you watch, by the way.
So, one:
Black Lives Matter at School is an organization of teachers
who make four demands:
One,
that schools fund counsellors, not cops.
Two, hire more Black teachers and teachers of colour.
Three, teaching Black history and ethnic studies every month.
And four, ending zero-tolerance policies.
Because when Black lives matter, we are all lifted up.
Two:
I want you to be intentional about the books you pick for your kids.
It’s not just our elementary school teachers’ responsibility
to choose books for our kids to read.
There’re organizations advancing Asian American representation
in children’s libraries, in our curriculum.
One in particular that you can support right now
is the Association of Chinese Teachers
who has worked since the 1960s to combat racism
[for] all Asian Americans in schools.
This is an organization you can support with your dollars
and help them bring their lesson plans and resources
to classrooms all over this country.
Three:
If you see something, say something -
and I don’t mean to police or surveil folks of colour,
but to report incidents you see of violence against Asian Americans
by going to StopAAPIhate.org.
And if you see something right now, stop watching, scan this code,
and add to our national database
that will inform future civil rights legislation.
Because honestly,
resistance is not a luxury of convenience
but a necessity of survival,
and we need to do better
because a black square on Instagram isn’t resistance -
it’s safe.
It’s not like showing up to a protest or risking your safety and privilege
for someone you don’t even know.
And because, look, again -
anti-racism,
it’s like a sunset, it’s a horizon,
it’s an orientation.
It cannot be a destination unless we start over
with some of the very structures of our schools and country,
because right now, the spiritual, emotional and physical survival
of students of colour in this country
is the orientation,
but our joys and our happiness in school needs to be the destination.
We are not there.
We will make mistakes,
but we need to be in this work together for the long game.
From a pessimist in a hopeful profession,
take it from me.
We must dream big, fight hard, get into a little good trouble
but also look inward
to unlearn the assumptions, biases and stereotypes
that cause our children in our communities to self-condemn
in order to self-preserve their psyche and their spirit.
And maybe ... maybe then,
we’re going to take a few steps towards our destination.
Thank you.
(Applause)