In 1978, the first call for reparations for the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII had sounded, “Oriental” people were becoming Asian and the first Asian Pacific American Studies Conference happened on Oberlin’s campus. Last weekend, students continued this tradition with the 12th biannual APA Studies Conference:Transcending Boundaries: Communities, Crisis and Resistance. This year’s conference focused on post 9/11 issues and coalition building in the APA community.
Frank Wu, Howard University law professor and the author of two books on APA community and race in America, opened the conference. In his talk, Wu addressed several fundamental tensions within APA identity including the myth of the perpetual foreigner and working past a white-black binary view of race in America. Wu began his talk by reenacting the kind of daily encounter that makes it clear to him, as a Cleveland born Chinese American, that American, according to a mainstream U.S. logic, still means white, “‘Where are you from?’ a white man says to me, I respond that I am from Ohio, ‘but where are you really from?’ he says,” Wu said, echoing lessons many audience members had learned from assistant professor of sociology Antionette Charfouros-McDaniel, who, in her APA Communities sociology class teaches this myth of the ‘perpetual foreigner’.
“The only way strangers can place me is in a geography of race, people want me to know that they saw the Wall in China last year, that they ate at a Chinese restaurant last night. The food was good,” Wu said. The talk concluded with a brief question and answer period where students challenged a point Wu made about Asian being the middle-ground between the white and black community, making it apparent that speaking at Oberlin required a more nuanced approach to race than had his last book signing stop at a Cleveland Barnes and Noble.
“When Wu talked about Asians in the middle of whites and blacks what I assumed he was actually talking about was the statistical data, mortality, income, where Asians are stastically in the middle. Really, that’s a false way of looking at data though, there is an upward tier pulling the numbers up and then a very poor segment pulling Asians back down. The statistics that Wu were using hid all the diversity in Asian America,” Saturday night’s keynote speaker and 1988 Oberlin graduate Sonia Shah said.
For Shah, a frequently published journalist, as well as the editor of Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breath Fire (South End Press 1997) and Between Fire and Hope: A Decade of Peace Activism (Fortkamp, 1992), the conference served as a reminder of how much work still needs to be done, both in Oberlin’s APA community and in the larger population.
“Hearing the speakers talk made me realize that we are still stuck in a progressive bubble. Hearing activists, people like the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, speak gives a more realistic picture of what is really going on outside OC, a place of privilege where we pay $34,000 to read about things like that. It was good to see people actually doing something,” senior Freedom Nguyen said.
Shah spoke on post 9/11 press coverage, civil liberty threats for Asian Americans and then, the coalitions that have sprung up in support of communities of color that are now experiencing increased rates of hate crimes and discrimination. While she emphasized the importance of this broad-based, diverse movement, she also urged students to think about where their energies were being exerted, and to whose benefit. “The problem is that sometimes solidarity campaigns are better at making the activists feel better than helping,” she said, prefacing comments on feminist activism that, rather than improve the situation of Arab women, has helped propogate orientalist mythology of Muslim society by drawing attention to the veil only as a relic of oppression rather than an artifact of spirituality and culture that a majority of wearers choose. Shah’s speech, the crown of a Root Room banquet, was well-attended, however many conference events attracted far less students, “If events aren’t wrapped in the guise of good food or poetry than people are not interested enough to attend. It’s priorities,” senior and APA Conference committee co-chair Tiffany Foo said.
In 1978, the year of the first conference, the College boasted zero faculty or staff members specializing in Asian American issues or education. “As APA activists, what else could they do but create a space to address [APA] issues since that space wasn’t here for them,” Currently, the College is in the process of hiring an Asian Pacific American sociology professor, after failing to retain the second two-year professor in that position and a new Asian American history professor, Daryl Madea, has just been hired to replace Professor Moon Ho Jung who left Oberlin last year for a tenure track position at University of Washington.
While the conference receives financial support from campus offices and academic departments, as well as staff and administrative support from the MRC, students still coordinate the conference. In 1995, the College established a Multi-Cultural Resource Center to serve communities historically underrepresented on Oberlin’s campus. This center served as a home-base in the organizing for the conference.
The MRC is staffed by one administrative director and four community coordinators, interns who organize and implement social and cultural programs and advocate for their respective communities. Most interns leave after two years.

“Many schools have Asian-American centers with staffing, not academics, cultural events and speakers. There is a full-time staff oriented to students,” Shah said.
“I think students need support, smart people who can support them while coming into racial conscienness…The students need more support,” she continued.
To many members of the community, both student and faculty, activism and teaching are inextricably linked. “Teaching how to engage in community, teaching the history of activism is activism. But there still could be more community based links between faculty and students and community based organizing. I try to facilitate that with my APA communities sociology class,” Assistant Professor of Sociology Antionette Charfauros McDaniel