Allyship Starts with Education: A Look into UNC’s Asian American Center’s Anti-Blackness and Alliance Series

By: Iniya Muthukumaren

The Asian American Center (AAC), founded in 2020, is a victory for the Asian American community at UNC. Now, Asian American students have a space on campus to express and engage with their cultures and identities. According to data from UNC’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, Asians or Asian Americans are the second highest ethnic demographic among UNC undergraduates, at 11.5% of the enrolled student population in 2019. With the AAC’s founding, it feels like UNC is finally acknowledging and giving support to Asian American students, faculty, and staff. Moreover, this center is imperative for connecting the UNC Asian American community to resources that can be found outside the university at a regional, national, and even global scale. 

After the AAC opened, many of its initial events have focused on how the Asian American community can better understand allyship and its relationship to the Black community. This is essential since Asian Americans do not exist in a vacuum, and cannot remain complicit in anti-Blackness and oblivious to discourse around topics like affirmative action, that involve both the Black and Asian American communities.  

In this article, I wanted to take a deeper dive into the events that the AAC has put on thus far that are a part of the 2020-21 series titled “Anti-Blackness and Alliance: A Series on Asian-Black Race Relations.” The two events that took place last semester for this series were: “I’m Not Racist...Am I?: A Conversation on Antiracism” and “Affirmative Action Isn’t Reverse Jim Crow.” With these events, the AAC is working to make the dissection of anti-Blackness in the Asian American community an urgent priority, one that cannot be overlooked in a country that systematically commits injustices to the Black community on a daily basis. 

Specifically, I was interested in how the AAC approached holding discussions on anti-Blackness in the Asian American community when there are over 30 different nationalities and ethnic groups that fall under the panethnic term of “Asian American,” with each identity historically having different relationships with the Black community. 

Dr. Heidi Kim, director of the UNC Asian American Center and associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, described the AAC’s approach in addressing these multifaceted relationships.

“As director of the AAC, highlighting and representing the diversity of the Asian American community is my top priority in programming. For this series, we were very intentional about inviting speakers who have expertise with different ethnic cultures and histories,” she said. “Although it is very difficult to capture every community in four events, we hope that the scope we are able to offer will give a sense of the diversity of Asian America.”

The first event that took place on Sept. 10 was centered around watching the documentary, “I’m Not Racist...Am I?: A Conversation About Antiracism,” and having a discussion afterwards. This documentary revolved around 12 teenagers holding conversations on racism, race and privilege. Kim has stated in an event press release that the Anti-Blackness and Alliance Series has come at a pivotal moment for Asian Americans since the Black Lives Matter movement has motivated people across the country, and across the diaspora, to reexamine their place in the racial hierarchy of the U.S. This first event allowed for anti-Blackness as well as anti-Asian racism (especially in relation to COVID-19) to be discussed. 

The second event in the Anti-Blackness and Alliance series was a talk entitled “Affirmative Action Isn’t Jim Crow” by Professor Iyko Day from Mount Holyoke College. The talk centered around affirmative action, and how groups such as Students for Fair Admissions, or SFFA, have argued that elite universities discriminate against white and Asian American students in the college admissions process. In years past, Asian Americans have outperformed their peers on metrics for college admissions, according to one Inside Higher Ed article. SFFA claims that colleges do not view Asian American test scores and achievements in the same light as other minority students. The supposed higher standards for college admissions for Asian American students has been likened by groups, such as SFFA, to Jim Crow racism. 

During the “Affirmative Action Isn’t Jim Crow” event, Day explained how this argument misappropriates the history of the Jim Crow era and Black struggles by comparing the acceptance of Asian Americans into elite universities to the segregation that Black school children faced in the education system. Moreover, the leadership behind organizations such as SFFA often represent older conservative white nationalism. Day stated that the Asian American demographic tends to be an attractive group to use in the argument against affirmative action due to how Asian Americans are often generalized as the model minority, leaning into a ‘pull-yourselves- up-by-your-bootstraps’ mentality and achieving high asset accumulation as a result. By playing down Asian American poverty rates and playing up Asian American’s high economic mobility, conservative whites, with the help of Asian organizations against affirmative action, were able to strategically position Asian Americans as victims to justify denouncing affirmative action. 

Day emphasized that affirmative action in the college admissions process is an issue that distracts from problems such as massive wealth inequality, child poverty rates, and skyrocketing student debt that are crippling to every facet of one’s livelihood. To summarize her points, Day stated that Asian Americans must refuse to be pawns “in the reconstruction of white racial entitlement” and instead fight for a more inclusive higher education, rather than fighting a zero-sum game on elite school acceptance rates.

Kim also said that it was important to offer the history of activist alliance because a lot of people don’t know that there is a long and complex history of joint Black and Asian American activism in the U.S. 

“In the 1960s and 1970s, these movements addressed both domestic race relations and international issues such as the Vietnam War, and some of those dynamics continue to shape activism today,” she said.

As for this upcoming semester, the AAC has two events planned: a roundtable on Asian American hip hop and a panel called “Rethinking the History of Alliance.” Kim elaborated on the inspiration for these events. 

“The goal for these two events is to highlight important cultural, historical, and social aspects of Asian-Black race relations,” she said. "It was important to us to discuss how pop culture enacts politics, especially with an art form as global as hip hop.”

You can see more information on the AAC’s upcoming events for the Anti-Blackness and Alliance series using this link: https://aac.unc.edu/category/upcoming-events/