APA Awareness Week Nets Educational Opportunities

APA Conference successful

Oberlin hosted the 11th Biennial Midwest Students Asian Pacific American (APA) Conference last weekend, entitled "Solidarity through Resistance: From Our Communities to Our Classrooms." Running from Friday, Feb. 18 through the 20th, the conference was the culmination of APA Awareness week.

Conference organizers cited "last minute logistics" and "dealing with all the flight delays and cancellations" as the conference's most difficult aspect. Although inclementweather hindered the most valiant efforts of one speaker's flights into Cleveland, the flexibility and good humor of the conference's organizers kept the ball rolling and ultimately each scheduled event occurred as planned.

Oberlin students were exposed to myriad learning opportunities due to the weekend's events. The conference presented a total of five workshops ranging from "Organizing Working Class Immigrants in the Labor Force" to "Reclaiming Our Education: The Struggle for Asian American/Ethnic Studies."

Saturday afternoon's workshop, entitled "Organizing as Resistance for Queer APAs," allowed the audience to interact with speakers Sung Yun Lee and Svati Shah. Lee, a Korean-American activist, shared her personal story of how she became involved in political activism. Her current work is "Slice of Rice, a queer Asian youth group," as well as attending to other Asian Pacific activist groups in the Boston area. Shah shared stories of her work organizing the pan-Asian and Pacific Islander queer woman's communities, as well as the Audre Lorde Project. Lee and Shah fielded questions from the audience, discussing the issues of visibility for queer APAs and the "cultural closet." The "cultural closet" refers to the concerns of LGBT people of color who feel uncomfortable in a nearly all-white queer community.

Workshop IV, originally scheduled for Saturday and pushed to Sunday morning due to snow, presented an adopted Korean lesbian's experience. Speaker Mi Ok Bruining is involved in both adoption activism as well as Asian American and queer activism. The perspective of this poet/clinician/ESL teacher proved stimulating in its utter qualities of uniqueness, as she expounded on the development of her queer identity roughly 10 years ago, and the search and reunion with her birth family in Korea just last year.

The weekend was certainly not devoid of fun; Friday night's concert at the 'Sco featured D'Lo and 5th Platoon. Moreover, a party followed the next night at Asia House. However, the highlight of the weekend proved to be the banquet Saturday evening, featuring speaker Evelyn Hu-DeHart, who presented an address on "Asian Americans and Asian American Studies." Hu-DeHart lambasted what she perceives as "corporate, or liberal, multiculturalism" in America today. She spoke in depth about her claim that higher education is guilty of "deceptively [undermining] under the guise of managing and celebrating diversity," and of failing to affect substantial change in "the Eurocentric paradigm." Drawing from her own experiences as the Chair of the Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Hu-DeHart critiqued her home university for practicing "corporate diversity." She contended that even while setting forth the "Boulder Diversity Plan," the school still fails to address the fact that "many differences are socially constructed." Hu-DeHart urged the audience to "reject token changes that don't challenge power structures," within their own lives.

From distinguished guest speakers to the core of students who spent months putting it all together, the APA Conference represented to many Oberlin students 30 years of victories and struggles. The conference will return in 2002. When asked why they dedicated so much energy to making the conference happen, conference organizers said, "Because Oberlin lacks the classroom spaces needed, we have to educate ourselves," like a mantra. Several conference organizers expressed confusion that there were relatively few non-APA faces among approximately 150 attendees, and that "there was a noticeable lack of administration." APA Community Coordinator of the Multicultural Resource Center Michelle Shim stated, "It is a time for Asian Americans, their allies, and others who are interested in these issues to educate themselves."