The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News March 14, 2008

Asian Americans Discuss Justice

Despite the severe weather that shut down DeCafe and made travel between Hopkins and Oberlin nearly impossible, scholars and entertainers from across the country made the trek to educate students and discuss issues of identity and inclusion in last weekend’s 15th Biennial Midwest Asian American Student Conference.

The conference, subtitled “Policy, Barriers and Justice,” is held every two years. Though it has inspired imitators such as the Midwest Asian American Student Union, with a conference rotating between regional colleges and universities, Oberlin’s conference has been at the forefront of local Asian-American issues throughout its 30-year history.  

A committee of 11 students appointed last spring began planning the conference in September, though the conference leaders were already hashing out ideas months prior.

Conference co-chair and College senior Shibo Xu said, “This is a student conference, meaning that at the end of the day, it’s what we want to say.”

Conference co-chair and College junior Cheska Tolentino explained her thought process in determining this year’s theme over the summer. Because it is an election year, students wanted the conference to have a political focus.

Tolentino asked, “In terms of these elections, where are Asian Americans mentioned at all?” She said she wanted to get students “thinking about race beyond black and white.”

College junior Daniel Tam-Claiborne, who worked on publicity for the event, said his goal was to “promote a broad theme that related to Asian Americans but that also could gain support here and make other students who weren’t Asian-American involved.” 

The conference opened on Friday, March 7, with a screening of the film Second Class Veterans and an evening banquet.

Oiyan Poon, a PhD candidate in Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, began Saturday’s events with “The Awkward Turtle: Asian Americans in the Education Access and Equity Debate.”

Xu said, “Everything you see about Asian Americans in the media is about how they’re a model minority, how well they’re doing in Harvard.” However, as Poon explained, Asian Americans actually have the lowest college acceptance rate of any ethnic group.

Tam-Claiborne said the talk “reveal[ed] that many disparate Asian groups are suffering.”

Midwest District Governor of the Japanese American Citizens League Ron Katsuyama led a workshop on hate crimes on college campuses, leaving attendees with questions about their own institutions.

“We don’t know [the prevalence of hate crimes at Oberlin] because the administration keeps it hush-hush,” said Tolentino.

Though two of the three guests slated for Saturday’s panel on sustaining ethnic communities, as well as the moderator, were unable to make the meeting due to the weather, Charu Gupta of The Cleveland Free Times delivered a presentation on the revitalization of Cleveland’s Chinatown.

Purvi Shah, executive director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, spoke about violence against women. Sakhi, which means “woman friend” in a variety of South Asian languages, has assisted well over 3,000 survivors of domestic violence across the world since the organization’s inception in 1989.

“You can’t separate the status of being a woman or gender minority from the status of being an ethnic or cultural minority,” said Shah. She added that the community focus of South Asian cultures means that an abuser could also be a family member.

Shah’s talk ended on a positive note: “We want to be clear that there’s a lot to celebrate in our community as well.”

The Blue Scholars’ Saturday night performance at the ’Sco was the most popular of the weekend’s events: “It was beyond sold out. We had to turn people away,” said Tolentino. The hip hop duo, based in Seattle, drove to Oberlin from the Detroit airport to avoid the poor conditions at Cleveland Hopkins.

Later, Rashne Limki, OC ’05, a masters and PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and Daniel Domaguin, OC ’06, a masters candidate in social work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, led a workshop on Asian-American student activism at Oberlin. They spoke from experience about how to effect change on campus.

“What can you work with?” Limki asked. “What do you have? Time.”

Both Limki and Domaguin worked to rescue an Asian-American history professorship that had been cut in 2005 as part of the Strategic Plan. After the departure of Professor Darryl Maeda and a series of letter writing campaigns and petitions that fell on deaf ears, students organized a silent protest outside of Cox and played a role in restoring the tenure track position.

Said Domaguin of the students’ success: “It’s not just us being on the outside. We have to get ourselves inside the structure.”

Despite the conditions, Tolentino and Xu said that student turnout at the conference, as well as the number of visitors who drove on unplowed roads, was quite high.

“The way I see it, the conference is kind of like a torch that gets passed down,” said Xu. The continued involvement of Asian-American students on campus leads to this conference.”

“It’s a legacy,” said Tolentino. “As a safe space, we were able to learn about ourselves and bring it out to the campus.”


 
 
   

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