Photo: Amira Caluya’s Equity Symposium presentation by Britt Pierro
Workshop by Amira Caluya, Article by Miette Deschenes
“There is no monolithic Asian American experience.” This was one of the most prominent messages of The Social Construction of AZN, a workshop that was held Friday morning during the Equity Symposium. The workshop was hosted by Amira Caluya, Trans & Queer Center coordinator at The Evergreen State College. The goal of their workshop was to deepen and widen participants’ understanding of Asian American history, to examine how “Asian” as a racial category was invented, and to unpack the “model minority” myth.
The first activity Caluya led was having participants introduce themselves to someone in the crowd who they didn’t know. After this, they asked everyone to take out their phones and message someone who has helped them get to college, as a way of expressing gratitude. They then began the educational portion of the workshop by asking participants to walk around the room and look at the timeline. Taped on the walls was a timeline of racial discrimination in the United States. The timeline was made up of pieces of printer paper taped to the wall with blue tape. On each piece of paper was an important moment in history and the year in which it took place. There were a lot of papers—the timeline covered almost the entire room. It was adapted from AAtimeline.com, a website with an expansive timeline of Asian American history. The timeline that Caluya set up began with the first slave trading posts in 1441 and ended with the Muslim bans of 2017. After everyone got a chance to walk around and read the timeline, they were broken up into small groups to discuss what they read about.
Caluya went on to give a brief lecture about some important points in Asian American history and culture. They spoke about the formation of the “model minority” myth; a dangerous concept in American culture that Asian Americans are somehow “better” minorities than other races. They also discussed the historic tensions between Asian American and black communities and covered some of the significant anti-Asian laws in U.S. history.
Caluya wanted attendees to leave the workshop understanding the diversity and variety of Asian American experiences. They advised everyone to challenge the idea that Asian American history began with the first Asians who came to America. They stressed that this erases the effect of colonization, imperialism, racial domination and oppression, labor exploitation, war, and social movements that led to Asians immigrating to America.
Overall, The Social Construction of AZN was a very expansive workshop that covered a lot of important parts of Asian American history and was a great starting point for anyone interested in learning more about Asian American culture.
