Most Asian American college and university students (heck, this is probably true for most Asian Americans) have no idea that Asian American Studies is a topic you can actually take at the college and university level. If you happen to attend one of the few places where Asian American studies is offered, you enjoy a privilege too few can enjoy. To graduate without having taken a class on this topic at one of these campuses would be to forsake the sacrifice of the students who came before you. But I don\u2019t want to play the guilt-card. There are many important reasons why you should be taking Asian American Studies. Here are just three:<\/p>\n What you learn through Asian American studies scholarship, for instance, is that the stereotypes attributed to Asian Americans have changed historically, and that these stereotypes are constructed alongside and against stereotypes of other racialized minority groups. What this means is that these stereotypes are complete fiction and were created to foster divisions between us and other people of color. \u00a0<\/strong>Asian American studies, however, was never meant to only provide critical and historical analyses of the power structures that shape our lives. It was meant to provide knowledge for social transformation; to provide us with tools for challenging the system. Asian American studies offers us education for us, by us, and not for the corporations<\/a> that have too much control over higher education and that you\u2019re likely to have to work for to pay off your debts, ironically, after you graduate. Asian American studies has been documenting our stories and speaking truth to power for decades well before #MyAsianAmericanStory became the phenomenon it has become today. Though #MyAsianAmericanStory is a worthy endeavor it doesn\u2019t really give us the tools for understanding why our stories have been suppressed to begin with. Asian American studies does.<\/p>\n 3. It gives us a longer historical sense of who our \u201cfriends\u201d are.<\/strong> Social media can definitely be credited for making us more aware of issues taking place beyond our everyday realities and to weigh in on issues even if we don\u2019t think of ourselves as activists. With a simple \u201clike,\u201d \u201cfollow,\u201d or \u201cshare\u201d we can participate in some way, however modest, in expressing disgust for injustices or support for social justice causes. Take #BlackLivesMatter. The hashtag took the Internet by storm and has had very real, off-line impacts (and vice versa). Many Asian Americans joined in. However, many other Asian Americans seemed troubled<\/a> that Asian Americans were amongst those visibly taking a stand. They seemed to think that Asian Americans taking a stand with #BlackLivesMatter were somehow forsaking their own communities. They\u2019re totally wrong. One of the important lessons you learn in Asian American studies is that in earlier moments, African Amerians made \u2013 in today\u2019s terms \u2013 #asianlivesmatter. Another way of thinking about it is Asian Americans\u2019 \u201cfriendship history\u201d with African Americans is over a century long. During historical periods when the U.S. imperial police state perpetrated violence on Asian people, African Americans stood up side by side\u2014in solidarity\u2014with Asians in their resistance struggles. In 1898, the United States decided to position itself as a world power and seized control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba from the declining Spanish empire at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. Though the United States has its anti-colonial history, having waged revolution against England, it replaced Spain as a colonizer over the Filipino, Puerto Rican and Cuban people. In fact, American leaders backstabbed Filipino anti-colonial revolutionaries. They promised Filipinos that they would support their fight against the Spanish. Filipinos took up arms against their false friends giving rise to the Filipino-American War. The United States sent troops to the Philippines to suppress the so-called \u201crebellion.\u201d Among those troops were African Americans who served in segregated units. Black soldiers realized soon enough that they shared common cause with Filipino guerillas who their white counterparts referred to as \u201cn______s.\u201d![\"sfsu](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/sfsu-twlf-picket-aapa.jpg\")
<\/a>They went back to campus, but they didn\u2019t go to class. Instead, students at San Francisco State went on strike for five months, the longest academic student strike in American higher education history, and shut down their university. Their peaceful protests for the admission of a greater number of minority students, an education that reflected their families\u2019 and ancestors\u2019 histories and experiences, as well as more community control of their education, were met with violent police repression. Yet they stood their ground. led by a multiracial coalition, the Third World Liberation Front, would lead to the establishment of Ethnic Studies, including Asian American Studies<\/a>, on that campus. Students on college and university campuses across the state of California, inspired by their peers at San Francisco State, followed suit soon after. Years later, students on campuses beyond California would be inspired to do the same. On those campuses where Asian American students were brave enough to stand up to their college and university administrations, Asian American studies programs and departments were formed.<\/p>\n\n
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\n![\"YellowPeril\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/YellowPeril-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>These stereotypes are meant to uphold the white supremacist, profit-driven society we may not always like to admit is the society we live in. For example, Asian Americans were the first immigrant group to be considered \u201cillegals.\u201d It was thought that we threatened (whites\u2019) jobs and posed a cultural threat to American society because we could never assimilate. Sound familiar? These ideas were used to justify the labor exploitation and residential segregation of Asian immigrants from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. More recently, with increasing immigration from Latin America, these ideas have been retooled and used against Latinos. Meanwhile, as the United States faced international criticism for Jim Crow racism during the Cold War, and as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the late 1960s, the negative stereotype of Asians was reversed. Asian Americans all of a sudden became a \u201cmodel minority.\u201d The successes of a few were used to undermine anti-racist struggles being led by African Americans across the country. If Asians could thrive in American society despite experiences of racial discrimination, according to the \u201cmodel minority\u201d myth, then all racial minorities can thrive. Why change the system? This false logic, however, masks the deeper social structures that reproduce a veritable caste system in what is supposed to be a democracy. Asian American studies provides us with this historical perspective and challenges us to look beyond a present-ist perspective (i.e. a perspective that is only focused on the present, the now, the instant and immediate).<\/p>\n
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<\/a>African American army corporal David Fagin actually abandoned the U.S. military, joined Filipinos and became a guerilla leader. Meanwhile back at home, African Americans were among the most vocal anti-imperialists, decrying the colonization of the Philippines and the atrocities committed against Filipinos by the American military (including the torture technique invented during the Filipino-American war: water-boarding). Decades later, world-famous boxing champion Muhammad Ali would similarly take a stand against U.S. imperialist incursions in Asia at the height of the Cold War. He objected to being drafted during the Vietnam War stating, \u201cWhy should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I\u2019m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Bernie-Sanders-Black-Lives-Matter-2869-700x467\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Bernie-Sanders-Black-Lives-Matter-2869-700x467-300x200.jpg\")
<\/a>foundational logic organizing American society. However, in other places he in fact writes, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line\u2014the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.\u201d For DuBois, white supremacy is a struggle against which all people of color share common cause. This sense of common cause motivated the various groups that came together the Third World Liberation Front on the San Francisco State University campus.