High School Ethnic Studies—Why the Current Display of AAPI Violence Demands an Education-Based Solution

Protestors decry recent waves of anti-Asian violence. Photo by Elvert Barnes.

On March 16, 2021, a racially motivated act of domestic terrorism was committed in Atlanta, Georgia, claiming the lives of eight people, six of which were Asian women. The shooting made national headlines, inciting the American public to respond to one chilling example of a broad surge in anti-Asian hate crimes across the country. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism reports that in 16 of the U.S.’ largest cities, acts of violence targeting Asian Americans increased 149% in 2020 alone. To change the current reality of our Asian brothers and sisters, Americans must no longer be complicit in the government’s historical and present contribution to AAPI violence, which extends far beyond former President Donald Trump’s usage of the term “kung flu” to vilify China for the coronavirus. Moving forward, the pursuit of justice cannot merely be defensive; it’s time for an education-based solution that will speak louder than reactionary legislation. Public high schools ought to consider a comprehensive ethnic studies curriculum as a way to stymie the prejudices and biases at the root of today’s racial violence.

While the Atlanta shooting has not pushed Georgia lawmakers to institute stricter gun control laws, the federal government has made some effort to better protect the AAPI community. On April 22, the U.S. Senate voted 94-1 to pass the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which is being spearheaded by Representative Grace Meng, Democrat of New York’s 6th district, and Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii. The bill, which the House will vote on in May, would create a new position at the Department of Justice to review hate crimes related to COVID-19 and give federal grants to state and local governments to improve the process of reporting hate crimes. 

Representative Meng and Senator Hirono’s legislation may be well-intended, but it fails to combat the root of aggression against AAPI individuals and relies on increasing the power of the carceral system. Many groups, including the Asian American Feminist Collective, have spoken out about the counterproductive nature of policies like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act that address anti-Asian violence by increasing policing, which has historically led to higher rates of racial violence and aggression. Furthermore, what constitutes anti-Asian violence is in no way limited to incidents that are reported and deemed hate crimes. It extends to aggression that goes unreported or uncharged because it fails to meet the government’s strict criteria for what counts as a racially motivated act. This is precisely why anti-racism education deserves to be centered in national discourse aimed at addressing the proliferation of domestic attacks against AAPIs. 

Generations of poorly taught Asian American history and a misrepresentation of the government’s role in propagating AAPI violence directly link to modern anti-Asian racism. Countless educators and historians told TIME that the AAPI community is frequently depicted as “foreign” and a “national security threat” in U.S. history lessons. Narratives about World War II are a perfect example. American textbooks focus heavily on the attack on Pearl Harbor while only lightly covering the Roosevelt administration’s incarceration of Japanese Americans via internment camps. This asymmetrical education implicitly associates Japanese identity with threats to U.S. nationhood, allowing students to walk out of the classroom with biases against Japanese Americans. In fact, among all AAPI subgroups, Japanese Americans rank the second highest for worrying about experiencing hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination. Ethnic studies helps students understand the impact of race and racism, ethnicity, and culture in the shaping of various communities in the U.S. Along with other educational reforms, it can correct for the nationalistic sentiment that’s inherent in U.S. history curricula. A deeper exploration of AAPI history through ethnic studies will allow students to see that the Japanese diaspora has historically been a subject of violence from the U.S. government, not the other way around. 

Broad brush narratives that are used to characterize Asian Americans further exacerbate prejudices against AAPI individuals. The American education system leaves the historical context surrounding these harmful narratives like the “model minority myth” out of textbooks entirely, further demonstrating the inadequacy of existing curricula. Learning about the origins of these narratives, a central tenet of ethnic studies, is essential to deconstructing them and encouraging students to interrogate blanket generalizations about racial minorities. 

For instance, in 1875, the Page Law was passed, denying Chinese women access to the U.S. under the unfounded suspicion that they were all prostitutes. Understanding the Page Law’s role in the sexualization and fetishization of Asian women helps clarify that such perceptions are the result of carefully manufactured lies, not legitimate truths. Without this knowledge, the sexualization of Asian women will continue to be normalized, which has severe ramifications as shown by the Atlanta shooting. While Cherokee County police seemingly brushed off the notion that Robert Long’s crime was racially motivated by claiming that his actions were the result of a sex addiction, this concedes that Asian American women have indeed been fetishized, which explains why they are the predominant victims of a crime provoked by “uncontrollable” sexual desire. 

Perhaps most well known among all narratives about Asian Americans is the aforementioned model minority myth. This stereotype was born in 1966 through publications like The New York Times that praised Asian Americans for outperforming other minority groups based on metrics such as test scores, crime rates, etc. Despite its outwardly positive connotation, the model minority myth effectively silenced the Asian diaspora by painting Asians as docile, inoffensive, and culturally assimilated. The long list of this narrative’s negative impacts is topped by the fact that notions of Asian passivity embolden racially-motivated attackers, who are under the impression that “Asians won’t fight back.” Not to mention that, in reality, comparatively higher levels of Asian American achievement can be attributed to U.S. immigration policy that prioritizes highly-educated Asian applicants to begin with. 

Ethnic studies courses have the potential to dissociate Asian identity from notions of passivity. Firstly, ethnic studies will spread awareness of the model minority myth’s origins and how factors underpinning Asian American achievement have been historically mischaracterized. Secondly, most existing ethnic studies curricula emphasize the importance of building up cultural knowledge of different ethnic groups; in doing so, students are less likely to see any particular ethnic group as a monolith. Holistically, the former stops AAPIs from self-affirming their status as a model minority under the false pretense that the label positively impacts them, while the latter provides non-AAPIs with a more nuanced account of Asian identity, disempowering the idea that Asians are a uniformly passive group. 

Education on the origins of narratives like the model minority myth also benefits society at large by decreasing the tension that often exists between minority groups. For example, the model minority myth has been repeatedly used as an anti-Black wedge between AAPIs and Black Americans, enforcing the idea that lower rates of Black achievement are a result of cultural factors. In other words, the existence of a model minority implies the existence of a “bad minority” and the facade of universal success among Asian Americans is weaponized to downplay the role of systemic racism in the struggles of other minorities, especially Black Americans. Education that properly deconstructs the model minority myth will remind AAPIs that they have more in common with Black Americans than a racist system that maintains its power by pitting marginalized identities against each other. 

There is abundant evidence supporting the merit of ethnic studies. Research suggests that ethnic studies programs increase academic achievement, empathy, and cultural awareness among all students: students of color and white students. High school is the perfect time to introduce the subject, given that high school students are already expected to have a thorough understanding of U.S. history to graduate and the value of ethnic studies is maximized whenever it is universally implemented. To clarify—all historically marginalized identities stand to benefit from ethnic studies; it goes without saying that Asian American history should be taught alongside that of other ethnic groups. My claim is that the current display of anti-Asian violence reignites existing debate around whether ethnic studies should be taught in high schools and presents a strong argument in support of its widespread adoption. 

The question of how to most successfully implement ethnic studies does not have a clear answer. Since this is an education-based solution, the federal government cannot simply mandate that everyone take ethnic studies in order to graduate. Fortunately, various state legislatures have already made attempts at instituting ethnic studies curriculum on a large scale. In May 2017, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb signed a law that requires every high school within the state to offer an ethnic studies elective. During February of this year, the Illinois state legislature introduced the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History Act, which aims to make the state’s existing history curriculum more inclusive. California recently created a model curriculum for a general ethnic studies course that high schools are encouraged to follow when constructing their own classes. Although some states’ plans may be more comprehensive than others, the abundance of different approaches is an indication that the implementation of ethnic studies is getting closer to becoming a reality and is achievable with more popular support. 

Senator Hirono made clear that the bill she co-sponsored to create a new D.O.J. position for COVID-19 related hate crimes is “not going to change people’s hearts and minds”. Senator Hirono is certainly correct in this judgement, and that’s exactly the issue ethnic studies intends to remedy. By investing in education, America can take the first step in a long journey toward unlearning the hate that the government has propagated for centuries. 

James Hu is a rising sophomore at Columbia College studying Political Science and Computer Science (tentatively). Outside of CPR, you can find him listening to Ariana Grande or debating.