COLUMN: 'Preserving y' all's culture'

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '00 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '00About a month ago, I was invited to teach two classes on Asian-American history at Mennonite High School, a private and (of course) Mennonite-run school north of the Art Museum, next to Girard College. For a former TA who's missed teaching all year, this was a great opportunity to reach out to students beyond Penn's borders. But my frustration at getting these kids to think was matched only by the sad fact that some of my students seemed to think they knew all about Asian Americans even though they'd never had a single Asian friend. One especially bright and challenging African-American student explained that he couldn't answer my questions because he didn't know any Asians personally. Yet, he repeatedly asserted that Asians were all about "sticking together and preserving y'all's culture." As my students would have it, this "culture" consisted of restaurants, grocery stores in black neighborhoods and the latest Jet Li film. For someone like myself who had long believed in education as an instrument of social change, this was a real lesson. Where else could this young man have obtained all his knowledge of an entire race, if not from television and popular culture? And what good would it do for one graduate student from Penn to convince him and his classmates otherwise, that there was more to Asian-American history than Hong Kong action films and "preserving y'all's culture?" I now believe more than ever that ignorance and lack of education are not the only, or even the main, causes of prejudice and social conflict. The sensationalism and bias of our media -- which feeds young children distorted stereotypes or outright lies, whether about Asian Americans, foreign countries, Islam, our political process or anything else -- is at least as much to blame. If that's true, it follows that education must go hand-in-hand with protest, grassroots organizing and visible activism -- agitation, if you insist -- to bring about positive and lasting change. Consider, for example, the ongoing campaign against "secret evidence," an unconstitutional practice by which numerous Muslim immigrants to the U.S. have been kept in prison. Against often overwhelming anti-Muslim prejudice, the movement has been moving forward precisely because Arab- and Muslim-American activists, in addition to speaking out and raising awareness of this practice, have challenged the courts to defend the civil rights of these victims of injustice. There are good precedents for Asian Americans, too. Long after the "radical" days of the civil rights and "Yellow Power" movements, Asian-American leaders embarked on a drive in the late 1970s to ban the slur "Jap" from the press. These activists understood what a new generation knows today -- that all the sensitivity training and multicultural curriculum in the world wouldn't mean a thing if students and employees went home and read or heard that sort of language. (After all, if it's on TV, it must be OK, right?) College students in the U.S., as elsewhere, have long been in a particularly privileged position to make activism a part of their education. In the late 1980s, students at Penn successfully pressured the "Oriental" Studies Department to change its outdated name, so that future generations of Asia scholars wouldn't keep referring to 60 percent of the globe with a demeaning epithet. In each of the above cases, the formula is the same: educating the public combines with visible action and nonviolent political struggle to effect change in public attitudes and a change in "the system." Thanks to these achievements, children today no longer grow up learning offensive words from their television sets. I hope that future efforts can put an end to the distorted, oversimplified coverage that so frustrated my lesson plan at Mennonite High. Activism can help bring about that increased public awareness and create discussion and debate. But education by itself has little power to make that happen, not without the activism to back it up -- as I was reminded once again on my recent trip outside the ivory tower.