Asian American Students in Asian American Studies: Experiences of Racism-Related Stress and Relation to Depressive and Anxious Symptoms Karen L. Suyemoto, Charles M. Liu Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 21, Number 2, June 2018, pp. 301-326 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2018.0016 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/697020 Access provided by Claremont College (10 Oct 2018 06:33 GMT) ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES Experiences of Racism-Related Stress and Relation to Depressive and Anxious Symptoms Karen L. Suyemoto and Charles M. Liu ABSTRACT. Although Asian American Studies courses have existed for many decades, there is little empirical, particularly quantitative, research on their effects. This study was designed to investigate the experiences of Asian American students who take Asian American Studies courses, focusing particularly on the extent to which students perceived and were affected by racism-related stress and the relation of that stress to mental health variables previously identified as relevant to Asian American college students. Findings indicated that Asian American students who chose to enroll in Asian American Studies courses experienced higher levels of racism-related stress at the time of enrollment as compared to students who had never enrolled in an Asian American Studies course. Furthermore, although students who take Asian American Studies do not report significantly greater anxious or depressive symptoms than students who do not take them, the experience of sociohistorical racism for enrolled students was significantly related to the experience of anxiety at the time of enrollment. However, after taking a single course, the significant relation between sociohistorical racism-related stress and anxiety was no longer significant, in spite of increases in racism-related stress. T he “model minority” stereotype suggests that Asian American students experience academic success with few adjustment difficulties and little racism. However, there is ample evidence that this is an erroneous view, and that Asian American college students face major challenges that have been related to racial and ethnic discrimination and marginalization.1 jaas june 2018 • 301–326 © johns hopkins university press 302 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 Research indicates, for example, that Asian American late adolescents and college students may be more isolated, segregated, and socially excluded than European Americans, Latinx, or African Americans; experience racial and ethnic discrimination; and experience significantly more psychological distress (depressive and anxious symptoms) than European Americans.2 Previous research supports that these experiences of marginalization and racial discrimination are related to the prevalence of psychological distress in Asian Americans. In a meta-analysis of twenty-three studies, racial discrimination was related to anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, lower sense of well-being, and overall distress among Asian Americans.3 Among one sample of Asian American university students, racism was associated with interpersonal relationship problems, self-esteem problems, and career problems.4 Furthermore, compared with university students from other racial groups, the relation between perceived racism and emotional distress was the strongest among Asian Americans.5 Even mere awareness of the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, the idea that racial and ethnic minorities are considered foreign in a European American society independent of actual nativity status, predicted lower hope and life satisfaction among Asian American students.6 Although Asian American Studies (AsAmSt) classes are not designed to be a psychological intervention, they may nonetheless have positive effects on students’ mental health and adjustment, particularly distress that may be related to social marginalization or discrimination. AsAmSt was developed as an activist discipline that aimed to resist the intellectual and social hegemony that contributed to the marginalization and lack of justice for Asian American people and communities through increasing community involvement in education, fostering engagement in Asian American community activities, and promoting educational reform to combat misinformation and marginalization of Asian American experiences and contributions.7 To advance these goals, many AsAmSt classes incorporated consciousness raising and empowerment for Asian American students to motivate them to engage with communities and enable them to effectively resist racism and promote social justice.8 Courses within the discipline are therefore explicitly designed with aims to improve the educational experiences of Asian American students by increasing relevance of education through focusing on Asian American experiences, raising awareness about racial and ethnic discrimination, and empowering students to resist the negative effects of racism.9 Given these purposes, AsAmSt courses may affect Asian American students’ psychological experiences of awareness and/or distress about or related to racism. However, no research has directly ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • examined this possibility in relation to explicitly psychological variables of racism-related stress or potentially related anxious or depressive distress. The limited research on the effects of ethnic studies, including AsAmSt, does support that these courses are affecting students’ psychological experience, in addition to affecting their academic engagement and achievement, sometimes affecting the latter through effects on the former. Sleeter reviewed the small number of studies that specifically evaluated ethnic studies of any sort for ethnic minority students, pre-K to higher education, with a particular focus on academic and attitudinal outcomes. Identifying approximately thirty-five published studies from 1991 to 2009, representing sixteen to twenty-five different curricula or courses, she concluded that the benefits of ethnic studies courses “are supported by research documenting a positive relationship between the racial/ethnic identity of students of color and academic achievement.”10 Additionally, she concluded that the research indicated that ethnic studies curricula had positive impacts not only on academic engagement, literacy, achievement, and attitudes toward learning, but also on sense of agency for minority students. Although Sleeter’s review supports positive effects, there were woefully few studies for her to draw from, and only two of these studies focused on Asian Americans.11 Furthermore, both of the Asian American– focused studies specifically addressed a Filipino American curriculum and effects on Filipino American college students, rather than on a more diverse Asian American student sample or AsAmSt curriculum. In addition to Sleeter’s review, the very small amount of scholarship that does exist about the effects of AsAmSt supports additional positive psychological effects of AsAmSt, including feelings of validation, sense of agency and self-esteem, connection to community, and decreased feelings of isolation.12 However, very little of this scholarship was specifically designed to evaluate effects. Furthermore, given its qualitative or quantitative descriptive methodologies, this scholarship offers important perspectives on processes and contexts, but offers less ability to evaluate effects that may be more generalizable—an outcome that depends on larger, more quantitative methodologies. In sum, an interdisciplinary integration of literature from AsAmSt, education, and psychology suggests that Asian American students experience racism and marginalization in college settings, that such experiences relate to psychological distress, and that AsAmSt may affect racism-related awareness or empowerment that could relate to or ameliorate distress experienced by Asian American students related to hegemonic educational experiences and contexts. However, this has not been researched. Therefore, this study was designed to examine the following questions: 303 304 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2  ow are Asian American students who choose to enroll in AsAmSt H courses similar to or different from those who do not? Given that Asian American students experience racism and marginalization, are AsAmSt courses a resource for students who are distressed by these experiences? If so, we would anticipate that students who enroll in AsAmSt classes would be more aware of or distressed by experiences of discrimination. • How do AsAmSt courses affect students’ perceptions of racism and their mental health/symptomology? If AsAmSt courses are meeting their goals of raising consciousness and awareness about racialization and racism, then Asian American students taking such courses would be expected to be more aware of racism. However, we would hope that such awareness would not contribute to greater psychological distress given the discipline’s aim to educate and empower. This is in line with Crocker and Major’s theorizing that the self-esteem of racial minorities may be protected even in the face of awareness of discrimination by attributing negative experiences to others’ prejudice, rather than to personal shortcoming.13 • Method This study examined the impact of AsAmSt on Asian American students’ mental health in a public university in New England using a pretest and posttest design with a control and intervention group. The University of Massachusetts Boston is a U.S. Department of Education–designated Asian American, Native American, Pacific Islander–serving institution (AANAPISI). AANAPISIs are colleges or universities where the undergraduate student enrollment consists of at least 10 percent Asian American or Native American or Pacific Islander, and at least 50 percent of the student body is eligible for federal need-based financial assistance. Asian American students at UMass Boston include a relatively large number of Southeast Asian Americans, reflecting the local contexts: the greater Boston area contains the second largest Cambodian American population in the United States and the sixteenth largest Vietnamese American population. The AsAmSt program at the UMass Boston is a nationally recognized and lauded program, highlighted by the Chronicle of Higher Education and the American Association of Colleges and Universities for its excellence and innovation. It “offers the largest selection of Asian American Studies courses, faculty, and community resources of any university in New England.”14 ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • Participants and Procedures Inclusion criteria for all participants included identifying as Asian or Asian American, being at least eighteen years old, and able to understand English sufficiently to complete the survey as measured by self-report of at least a five on a seven-point scale ranging from “English is my first language or I speak it as well as if it were my first language” to “I am just beginning to learn English.” Participant characteristics for the sample as a whole and for intervention and control group participants disaggregated are presented in Table 1. Generation was measured through questioning birthplace and inquiring for age of immigration to the United States if born elsewhere. First generation included all those who immigrated after age ten, while 1.5 generation included those who immigrated between birth and age ten. Ethnicity was operationalized through open-ended questions of personal ethnic identification and family ethnic heritage. Responses were aggregated into regional ethnicities in the following way: Filipinos; East Asians included Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; Southeast Asians included Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, and Hmong; South Asians included Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan; multiethnic included participants who specified Chinese and an additional Asian ethnicity. In the sample as a whole, the most frequently reported specific ethnicities were Chinese (38.8 percent; n = 38) and Vietnamese (21.4 percent; n = 21). Social status was measured using parents’ occupation and education according to the Barratt Simplified Measure of Social Status.15 Participants fell in the full range of scores from eight and sixty-six and were distributed in a bimodal distribution. Participants in the intervention group were recruited in AsAmSt classes, including Asians in the United States, Introduction to Asian American Studies, Southeast Asians in the United States, Becoming South Asian, Asian American Psychology, Asian American Community Internships, Asian American Media Literacy, and Asian American Literary Voices. Only students who were enrolled for the first time in an AsAmSt class were eligible to participate. Control group participants were recruited through flyers and tabling on campus. Inclusion criteria specified that these students were not currently enrolled and had never been enrolled in an AsAmSt course. Data were collected over six semesters. Pretests were given within two weeks of the start of the semester, and posttests within two weeks of the end of the semester. Participants received ten dollars for completing the pretest, and fifteen dollars plus entry into a drawing for a fifty-dollar gift card for completing the posttest. 305 306 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 Researcher Positionality Within psychology, researcher positionality is usually discussed in relation to qualitative methodology. However, positionality affects all research, regardless of the method, given that it shapes the lens through which we ask questions, choose background literature and method, and interpret results. The first author (KLS) is a multiracial Japanese European American sansei, trained as a clinical psychologist and holding a joint appointment in Psychology and AsAmSt. As a student, I had no exposure to AsAmSt. As a professor, my research focused on Asian American racial identity in psychology, which led to my current position. Through my joint appointment (and especially from AsAmSt colleagues, students, and teaching), I developed a stronger understanding of the history and goals of AsAmSt, the potential for student empowerment, and the ways that AsAmSt might contribute to shaping education as a positive force for social justice. I also have a stronger sense of how psychology’s focus on the individual and relative lack of attention to issues of power, privilege, and justice might be limiting the ability of psychologists to contribute to healing, health, and resilience for racial and ethnic minority people and communities. I brought these understandings to the shaping of this study, with an active hope to bridge the disciplines in my research, as well as in my teaching (e.g., Asian American Psychology, which was cross-listed in both Psychology and AsAmSt). The second author (CML) is a 1.5-generation Chinese American advanced doctoral student in a clinical psychology doctorate program. Although I did not have an opportunity to take ethnic studies courses during my undergraduate studies, the social sciences facilitated my own racial and ethnic identity development during my college years. Recognizing the importance of education in facilitating empowerment, rejecting racism, and creating social change, I aim to teach and contribute research that focuses on issues relevant to Asian American mental health, education, and well-being. Our particular positionalities meant that we had experiences through our backgrounds, our social relations, our teaching, and our experiences as therapists that influenced our approach to this study. We were both familiar with the pain of racism, both personally and as witnesses to the pain felt by our clients and our students; this contributed to our desire to do research that could contribute to interventions or approaches to foster empowerment. As psychologists and as people of color, we believe in personal change and empowerment, in the individual’s ability to shape resilience and strength even in the face of oppression and injustice. We also ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • understand that research is not neutral: although psychology is primarily a postpositivist discipline, our training in qualitative methods and in ethnic studies influenced (a) our valuing of qualitative studies (as described above); (b) our recognition of what quantitative methods such as those we use here can, and cannot, do; and (c) our view that research should offer directions for social good. Measures The Asian American Racism-Related Stress Inventory (AARRSI) was used in this study to examine the perception of racism and related stress.16 Here, racism is defined as the active or passive subordination of minority racial groups by the majority racial group. Racism-related stress is the psychological response that results from experiencing racism. The AARRSI includes a total score and three subscales: General Racism, Perpetual Foreigner Racism, and Socio-historical Racism. General Racism is conceptualized as overt and microaggressive forms of racism. Perpetual Foreigner Racism is conceptualized as experiences related to racialized assumptions that individuals are foreigners, independent of their actual nativity status. Socio-historical Racism is conceptualized as the extent to which individuals are aware of historical examples of discrimination on the individual and systemic levels. Liang et al. reported that the twenty-nine-item Likert-type measure had good test-retest reliability among samples of college-aged Asian Americans, as well as strong discriminant validity from measures of cultural values, and strong concurrent validity with measures of minority college student-specific stressors, interracial stresses, and emotional reactions to racism.17 The total scale and the Socio-historical Racism subscale demonstrated good internal reliability for the sample as a whole as well as for the control and intervention samples separately (as ranged from .82 to .90). However, both the General Racism and Perpetual Foreigner Racism subscales demonstrated inadequate internal reliability at the pretest time for the control group (a = .63 and .55, respectively). Although reliabilities for the total sample and intervention group sample for these subscales were adequate (ranging from .73 to .84), these variables were dropped from subsequent analyses, as low reliability within the control group made comparisons between groups impossible to interpret. Thus, the Socio-historical Racism scale was the only subscale used in this study; as noted above, it focuses on awareness of and stress related to the more historical or social-systemic aspects of racism, with items such as “You learn that, while immigration quotas on Asian peoples were severely restricted 307 308 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 until the latter half of the 1900s, quotas for European immigrants were not” or “You hear that Asian Americans are not significantly represented in management positions.” The Color Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) is a twenty-item measure used in this study to examine awareness of race and acknowledgment of racism.18 Colorblindness is conceptualized as beliefs that race is unimportant, reflecting a view that either lacks awareness or denies racial dynamics and racism. For this measure, race is understood as a social construct related to the belief that individuals have meaningful differences based on physical characteristics. Racism is the discrimination or marginalization of individuals or groups of people on the basis of race. With Neville et al.’s sample of college students and community members from the Midwest and West Coast (n = 594), this scale showed good concurrent validity by significant correlations with two measures of belief in a just world and with all subscales in two measures of racial prejudice.19 Our sample had pretest internal reliability ranging from .68 to .73 for the control, intervention, and whole samples, and posttest internal reliability ranged from .73 to .76 for all samples. The Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) was used in this study to examine psychological distress and symptomology.20 For this study, we administered the Depression (six questions), Anxiety (six questions), and Interpersonal Sensitivity (four questions) dimensions. The BSI assesses symptoms, rather than diagnosis, and therefore measures a range of experiences that are not necessarily problematic to the individual. Depression is conceptualized as a collection of symptoms over a period of time that may include but are not limited to depressed mood, irritability, negative thoughts, suicidality, and low energy or lack of interest in activities. Anxiety is conceptualized as excessive worrying that impacts normal daily activities, as well as nervousness, tension, and panic attacks. Interpersonal Sensitivity is conceptualized as feelings of inferiority and inadequacy when compared with others. All items are rated on a five-point scale (0–4). Initial test-retest values with a nonpatient sample (race and ethnicity not reported) ranged from .79 to .85 for these three dimensions. Good convergence between BSI scales and similar Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory scales indicated convergent validity, and factor analysis of the internal structure of the BSI contributed evidence of construct validity.21 In a sample of ninety Asian American college students, Iwamasa and Kooreman found adequate to good levels of internal reliability for the three subscales (α = .77 to .88).22 Pretest and posttest internal reliability for our sample as a whole for the BSI subscales ranged from .81 to .88. The Depression and Anxiety subscales also demonstrated adequate internal reliability for both the control and ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • intervention subsamples at pretest and posttest (ranging from .80 to .90). However, the Interpersonal Sensitivity subscale demonstrated inadequate internal reliability at posttest with the control group (α = .61), and subsequent analyses with this variable were not conducted. Results Means and standard deviations for all pre- and posttest variables are presented in Table 2. Preliminary analyses examined relations of generational status, social status, and gender to anxiety, depression, and racism-related stress (total and sociohistorical). These analyses were run for control and intervention groups separately. Results for both groups indicated no significant relations between generation and any of the outcome variables (nonsignificant rs range from –.025 to .073), or between social status and any of the outcome variables (nonsignificant Fs range from 0.316 to 1.827). Results for the intervention group indicated no significant relations between gender and any of the outcome variables (nonsignificant rs range from –.144 to .004). For the control group, gender was significantly related to BSI Anxiety (r = –.350, p = .018). Men reported greater anxiety than women. In subsequent analyses with anxiety, partial correlations and analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) were used to control for gender effects. Do Students Who Take AsAmSt Differ from Those Who Do Not? To examine whether students who enroll in AsAmSt courses for the first time differ from those who have never completed an AsAmSt course and are not currently enrolled, we ran a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) examining differences between groups in racism-related stress, color-blind attitudes, and mental health at the pretest time; For anxiety, given the relation to gender, we conducted analysis of covariance (see Table 2 for means). Results indicated that students who chose to enroll in an AsAmSt course for the first time reported experiencing significantly more sociohistorical racism-related stress: F(1, 96) = 4.021, p = .048 (Cohen’s d = .41 small effect). Although nonsignificant, differences in the small effect size range were also noted for pretest total racism-related stress, F(1, 96) = 3.796, p = .054 (Cohen’s d = .40), and pretest color-blind racial ideology, F(1, 92) = 3.146, p = .079 (Cohen’s d = .37). There were no significant differences in mental health symptomology between students who chose to enroll in their first AsAmSt course and students who had never chosen to take an AsAmSt course (nonsignificant F statistics ranged from 0.000 to 1.872, p values between .175 and .988). 309 310 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 We also examined the relations between racism-related stress or color-blind racial ideology and mental health for the control and the intervention groups at the pretest time (see Table 3). For students within the intervention group prior to completing the AsAmSt course, sociohistorical racism-related stress was significantly positively related to anxiety symptoms with a small to intermediate effect size. Although total racism-related stress was not significantly related to anxiety symptoms, there was also a small to intermediate effect size for this relation. At the posttest time, only the insignificant relation between total racism-related stress and anxiety symptoms remained for the intervention group, still at the small to intermediate level. In contrast, within the control group at the beginning and end of the semester, there were no significant relations between any aspect of racism-related stress and any mental health variable. Do AsAmSt Classes Affect Students’ Perceptions of Racism, Mental Health, or the Relation between These? To examine whether taking an AsAmSt course affected the experience of racism-related stress or the endorsement of anxious or depressive symptomology, we constructed residual gain scores (RGSs) for each measure in order to control for the influence of preexisting pretest differences between groups by using pretest scores as covariates. We then compared the magnitude of the change. RGSs enable greater confidence that observed changes are actually due to the intervention and are appropriate when the central question is not simply whether there is a difference between two groups in the average amount of change but whether the change in one group is greater than the change in another group, once differences at the starting point are taken into consideration.23 See Table 2 for means of standardized RGSs. After computing RGSs, we examined the means and direction of the scale scores and RGSs and ran a series of ANOVAs/ANCOVAs comparing intervention and control groups with these RGSs as outcome variables. Examination of the scale scores and RGSs indicated that students who completed an AsAmSt course reported increases in total racism-related stress and sociohistorical racism-related stress and a decrease in colorblind racial attitudes. In contrast, students who had never taken an AsAmSt course stayed approximately the same. These differences were statistically significant for sociohistorical racism-related stress, F(1, 96) = 4.02, p = .048 (Cohen’s d = .41, small effect). Although insignificant, small effect sizes were also evident in examining differences between groups’ RGSs, indicating ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • changes in total racism-related stress and color-blind racial attitudes: AARRSI Total, F(1, 96) = 3.80, p = .054 (Cohen’s d = .40); CoBRAS Total, F(1, 92) = 3.15, p = .079 (Cohen’s d = .38). Comparisons across groups in posttest scale scores indicated that students in the AsAmSt group were different from students in the control group at the posttest in reporting significantly more total racism-related stress, F(1, 96) = 14.671, p = .000 (Cohen’s d = .783, large effect), and sociohistorical racism-related stress, F(1, 96) = 13.406, p = .000 (Cohen’s d = .749, large effect). AsAmSt completers also reported significantly less color-blind racial ideology at the posttest than students in the control group, F(1, 89) = 7.766, p = .007 (Cohen’s d = .593, intermediate effect). Effect sizes indicate that the magnitude of the differences in all three areas was greater than at pretest time. There were no differences between AsAmSt completers and the control group in changes over the semester in mental health symptomology (RGS nonsignificant ranges of F values = 0.000 to 1.872, ranges of p values = .175 to .988, gender used as covariate for anxiety analysis). There were also no differences between AsAmSt completers and the control group in scale scores of mental health symptomology at posttest time (nonsignificant F statistics ranged from 0.000 to 0.940, p values from .335 to .996). To further understand the ways that completing AsAmSt courses affected students, we also ran correlations between racism-related variables and mental health at the posttest time (see Table 3), comparing patterns of significance to the patterns from the pretest time reported above. There were no significant relations between any of the racism-related variables and depression for either group at posttest (nonsignificant r values ranged from –.12 to .19). For analyses involving anxiety, we again controlled for gender. Within the intervention group, after completing the AsAmSt class, there was no longer a significant relation between sociohistorical racism and anxiety. Discussion We found that students who chose to enroll in AsAmSt for the first time reported more sociohistorical racism-related stress at the time of enrollment, as compared to those who had never enrolled in or taken AsAmSt. Enrolled students may also be less likely to endorse color-blind racial attitudes and experience more total racism-related stress at the time of enrollment. Furthermore, reported experiences of overall Asian American racism-related stress and specific experiences of sociohistorical Asian 311 312 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 American racism-related stress were related to general anxiety symptoms for students enrolled in AsAmSt for the first time, but not for students who have never enrolled in or taken an AsAmSt course. Students who choose to enroll in AsAmSt may be actively motivated to seek out AsAmSt due to subjective experiences of distress related to experiencing racism. These students may be more likely to perceive and be distressed by racism as a structural issue and perhaps more likely to perceive and be distressed by the sum of interpersonal discrimination, stereotyping, and sociohistorical experiences, which are all parts of the total racism-related stress scale. In addition, the perception and distress related to racism seems to have consequences for enrolled students’ mental health at the time of enrollment. These consequences are not shared by nonenrollers, given the significant relation of racism-related stress and symptoms of general anxiety among enrolled students only. One interpretation of this is that students who enroll in AsAmSt may be at different points in their racial identity development as compared with nonenrollers.24 Enrollers may be more likely to be in the dissonance status, characterized by challenging experiences and feelings of confusion or ambivalence about one’s racial group or the immersion status characterized by seeking out information about one’s group, affinity spaces, and feelings of idealizing one’s racial group and a rejection of the out-group. In contrast, nonenrollers may have yet to examine their experiences in a racialized society and be more characteristic of the conformity stage of racial identity.25 In sum, these results suggest that AsAmSt courses are sought out by students who are more aware of racism and who are seeking ways to manage the negative psychological consequences of racism. In relation to effects of AsAmSt on students, those who completed AsAmSt courses were significantly different from those who did not at the time of completion, reporting greater total racism-related stress, greater sociohistorical racism-related stress, and less color-blind attitudes. Furthermore, students who completed AsAmSt were significantly different from control group students in the magnitude of changes in sociohistorical racism-related stress. These findings are not surprising given that AsAmSt courses aim to increase the awareness of racialization and racism in order to empower students to resist its effects. These findings support that these classes, at least at UMass Boston, are meeting this goal. Although perceiving one’s own oppression may be necessary for empowerment and resistance,26 it is also painful and stressful.27 However, this pain or stress may be adaptive, rather than pathological. This is suggested by the finding that for students who complete AsAmSt courses, there is no longer a significant relation between perceptions of sociohistorical racism and anxiety at the conclusion of the course. ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • Thus, while taking AsAmSt does not decrease distress directly related to perceiving or experiencing racism, taking AsAmSt classes does appear to affect the relation between anxiety and sociohistorical racism. After completing an AsAmSt course students continued to experience greater stress from sociohistorical racism than control students; in fact, the magnitude of the difference between groups was even greater. However, this racism-related stress was no longer significantly related to psychological symptoms of anxiety. This may be related to being better able to attribute these aspects of racism to a structural problem, rather than internalizing experiences as personal fault or shortcoming. Crocker and Quinn hypothesized that minorities’ self-esteem may be protected by accurate attributions of discrimination to the system rather than to themselves as individuals (related to internalized racism).28 In support of this hypothesis, Tawa, Suyemoto, and Roemer found that interpersonal racism (general racism-related stress) negatively related to individual self-esteem but not collective self-esteem, and structural racism (CoBRAS) positively related to collective self-esteem but not individual self-esteem. They suggest that this finding supports Crocker and Quinn’s hypothesis that perceiving structural racism may be protective.29 AsAmSt may be a particularly effective means of increasing students’ understanding that racism is a structural and historical problem, and not an intrapsychic or interpersonal one. Simultaneously, AsAmSt courses may be less effective in ameliorating the negative effects of other kinds of racism (e.g., interpersonal racism) or the cumulative effects of multiple kinds of racism, as indicated by the fact that completing an AsAmSt course did not affect the relation between total racism-related stress and anxiety and increased total racism-related stress. Implications for Future Research, Education, and Student Services There is a great lack of research on the impacts of AsAmSt classes for Asian American or non–Asian American students. Findings from this study suggest that AsAmSt classes are meeting some of the original goals of the discipline, in terms of serving students who are experiencing distress from discrimination and meeting goals of increasing awareness and assisting students in negotiating the meanings and effects of racism and discrimination. However, one study is at best a first tentative step, especially given the inevitable methodological limitations. Limitations of this study include the relatively small sample size, the inclusion of only one university context, the use of only two time points which does not enable repeated measures or growth curve analyses, and the confounding of frequency and distress 313 314 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 in the AARRSI. A strength of our study is that our sample is not composed solely or primarily of East Asian and/or more affluent participants. The Asian American student population at UMass Boston has a large proportion of Southeast Asian American students, students who are first in their family to attend college, and students from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds; our population therefore includes a larger proportion of those Asian American college students who have been noted by prior scholarship as facing more severe barriers to success. Additional research is needed to replicate these findings and further establish the impacts of AsAmSt on academic engagement, success, empowerment, and mental health variables. This study focused on the first experience in AsAmSt and examined effects of only one class over one semester; one could hypothesize that additional classes could have greater impacts, or that the nature of impacts may change over time, as suggested by prior qualitative research.30 Future research should explore these hypotheses. Many students take one AsAmSt class, which acts as a catalyst or entrée into additional classes or an AsAmSt major or minor. The impact of a single class is, of course, quite different from the impact of a central and sustained focus, which would likely have much larger effects on worldview and other psychological variables. We actually find it somewhat remarkable that statistically significant effects are present from a single class! Research is also needed to explore the processes that create impacts, possible mediators or moderators, and possible interpretations of findings offered above. As basic effects are more fully established, research could also explore relations between impacts and specific classes, materials, or pedagogical strategies, or between particular kinds of students and impacts. In addition, our goal here was to look at the psychological impacts of AsAmSt for Asian American students, given the specific purposes of AsAmSt. We recognize that AsAmSt is not designed with specific goals to affect mental health (anxiety, depression). Better understanding the processes that create impacts could differentiate the diverse effects and aspects of AsAmSt, and perhaps enable better collaboration and integration with student services that do specifically aim to address mental health and resilience of Asian American students (see below). These findings suggest that different aspects of racism-related stress should be included in future research. Future research would also benefit from measures that enable the differentiation of perceived frequency of racism and extent of distress in response to perceived experiences. With the AARRSI, it is impossible to determine whether an increase in racism-related stress is because students more frequently perceive racism (but perhaps are ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • able to cope in ways that protect from experiencing distress) or because they are more distressed by their perceptions (that may or may not have changed in frequency). It would be important to differentiate these effects in order to develop strategies to address them while maintaining the goals of developing resilience and empowerment. Related to this, findings also suggest that the field of AsAmSt would do well to more carefully consider what we mean by empowering students, and how we can build in curricular, pedagogical, or support service strategies to help students cope with distress and transform racism-related stress into resilience and resistance to oppression. Ethnic studies is frequently very effective in addressing structural issues and advocating for healing social ills, but perhaps less attentive to individual level experiences of pain and struggle. Our findings did support a positive effect of AsAmSt in the relation of sociohistorical racism and anxiety. However, especially given our findings that AsAmSt may be less influential in relation to addressing psychological distress related to other kinds of racism, it is worth exploring whether AsAmSt or student services can do more to also address the effects of individual-level racism-related stress by attending to more interpersonal or intrapsychic experiences simultaneously. Suggestions for AsAmSt courses specifically might include an acknowledgment (and normalizing) of the distress from interpersonal racism including a willingness to engage greater emotionality in the classroom, including more individual empowerment or resistance strategies for addressing interpersonal racism (e.g., ways to personally intervene, relational care), and integrating personal action projects that foster a sense of agency and resilience in the face of racism.31 Suggestions for student services might include racism-related stress coping workshops, educational workshops on racism-related stress, and workshops aimed to improve campus climate—to prevent microaggressions so that Asian American students have less stress because they experience less racism.32 AsAmSt faculty and students might consider their own role in advocating for such programming. On the other hand, psychology and mainstream education would do well to recognize that an increase in racism-related stress, personal distress, or interpersonal tension may not be inherently bad. The idea that education should be comfortable or unchallenging is growing as a rationale for avoiding engaging difficult topics.33 However, this idea may contribute to practices that maintain a status quo of oppression and injustice.34 These results suggest that future research in psychology or in AsAmSt may do well to examine how the discomfort that characterizes racism-related stress may be positively related to empowerment, combating learned helplessness, or internalization. In this view, racism-related stress is not 315 316 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 inherently psychopathological and may, in fact, be a step toward increased psychological health, given the social structural context of oppression and injustice. Prilleltensky makes a strong case for the interdependency of well-being and justice that could inform ethnic studies, psychology, and education more generally through demonstrating how education or other interventions that aim to contribute to well-being need also to attend to and address social justice, and vice versa.35 42% East Asians (n = 41) 27% Southeast Asians (n = 26) 10% South Asians (n = 10) 11% multiethnic Chinese (n = 11) 4% Filipinos (n = 4) 1% multiracial (n = 1) 1% unspecified (n = 1) Combined (N = 98) Social Status 17% bottom quartile (n = 17) 28% second quartile (n = 27) 20% third quartile (n = 20) 26% top quartile (n = 25) 9% unspecified (n = 9) 11% bottom quartile (n = 5) 26% second quartile (n = 12) 24% third quartile (n = 11) 30% top quartile (n = 14) 9% unspecified (n = 4) 23% bottom quartile (n = 12) 29% second quartile (n = 15) 17% third quartile (n = 9) 21% top quartile (n = 11) 10% unspecified (n = 5) • Note. Social status quartiles are based on total possible ranges rather than on sample quartiles. Bottom quartile = scores between 8 and 22, second quartile = scores between 23 and 37, third quartile = scores between 38 and 51, top quartile = scores between 52 and 66. 45 male Range: 18–39 51% (n = 43) 52 female Mean = 22.3 first gen 1 missing 11% (n = 9) 1.5 gen 38% (n = 32) 2nd gen and beyond 41% East Asians (n = 19) 17% Southeast Asians (n = 8) 22% South Asians (n = 10) 4% multiethnic Chinese (n = 2) 4% Filipinos (n = 2) 2% multiracial (n = 1) 2% unspecified (n = 1) Ethnicities 17 male Range: 18–34 76% (n = 31) 28 female Mean = 23.4 first gen 1 missing 10% (n = 4) 1.5 gen 13% (n = 5) 2nd gen and beyond Generation Control (n = 46) Age 43% East Asians (n = 22) 35% Southeast Asians (n = 18) 0% South Asians (n = 0) 18% multiethnic Chinese (n = 9) 4% Filipinos (n = 2) 0% multiracial (n = 0) Gender Intervention 28 male Range: 18–39 29% (n = 14) first (n = 52) 24 female Mean = 21.4 gen 12% (n = 6) 1.5 gen 57% (n = 28) 2nd gen and beyond Group Table 1. Participants ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES SUYEMOTO AND LIU • 317 SD n 0.72 0.86 10.73 50 10.60 49 1.05 4.44 52 4.22 52 1.00 5.07 52 4.03 52 1.00 2.49 –0.22 63.73 63.83 0.23 5.56 5.00 0.14 5.98 5.66 0.03 52 52 0.73 2.47 n 0.55 52 0.59 52 0.79 SD 2.26 2.25 –0.22 Control M 59.90 57.67 –0.15 4.62 5.37 –0.07 5.96 6.83 0.02 0.18 3.09 2.81 2.53 2.78 0.17 Intervention M 10.18 10.43 1.00 4.56 5.38 1.03 5.44 7.07 1.07 1/08 0.88 0.92 0.78 0.78 1.12 SD JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • Note. RGS = Residual gain score. Total possible ranges for each variable are as follows: CoBRAS 20–120, AARRSI 1–5, BSI 0–24. Shaded cells indicate statistically significant differences between control and intervention groups compared across groups at the same time point. AARRSI Total Racism pretest 98 2.40 0.69 46 AARRSI Total Racism posttest 98 2.53 0.74 46 AARRSI Total Racism Standardized RGS 98 2.66 0.85 46 AARRSI Socio-historical Racism pretest AARRSI Socio-historical 98 2.81 0.86 46 Racism posttest AARRSI Socio-historical Racism Standardized RGS CoBRAS Total pretest 94 61.69 10.56 44 CoBRAS Total posttest 91 60.52 10.90 42 CoBRAS RGS BSI Anxiety pretest 97 5.052 4.51 45 BSI Anxiety posttest 96 5.20 4.86 44 BSI Anxiety Standardized RGS BSI Depression pretest 96 5.97 5.24 44 BSI Depression posttest 96 6.29 5.88 44 BSI Depression Standardized RGS Total Sample M • N Table 2. Pretest, Posttest, and Residual Gain Means and Standard Deviations for Total Sample, Control Group, and Intervention Group 318 21.2 –.20 –.08 –.00 BSI Anxiety .17 .17 –.20 BSI Depression Posttest .28 (p = .049) .27 (p = .054) –.19 Intervention Group Pretest BSI Anxiety BSI Depression • Note. Simple correlations are reported between racism-related variables and depression. Partial correlations controlling for gender are reported between racism-related variables and anxiety. Nonsignificant p values range from .17 to .99. Shaded cells indicate statistically significant relations. AARRSI Socio-historical Racism .08 .02 .18 .12 AARRSI Total Racism .22 .19 .27 (p = .060) .18 CoBRAS .02 .18 .13 –.12 BSI Depression Posttest BSI Anxiety AARRSI Socio-historical Racism –.11 AARRSI Total Racism –.01 CoBRAS .07 Control Group Pretest BSI Anxiety BSI Depression Table 3. Correlations between Racism-Related and Mental Health Symptoms at Pretest and Posttest for Control and Intervention Groups. ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES SUYEMOTO AND LIU • 319 320 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 APPENDIX: Order and Wording of Measures and Questions Used for This Study Introduction Thank you for helping us improve our understanding of students’ experiences. On the following pages are several questionnaires that ask about your experiences and your view of yourself. Each questionnaire has slightly different meanings related to the numbers to be circled, so please read the instructions carefully for each part before going on to answer the questions. Please read each question carefully and circle the number that best reflects your experience. There are no right or wrong answers, just answer as honestly as you can. We know that sometimes it can be difficult to answer questions like these, because the answers might change depending on the time or the people you are with, or for some other reason. Most people, however, have a general idea about how they are most of the time. Please answer every question to the best of your ability. Thank you for your participation! 1.  Open-Ended Self-Identification (Given first to avoid priming through specific questions from standard measures. Participant criteria of identification of Asian or Asian American were also explicitly stated in recruitment material and in the informed consent form.) How do you identify, racially, ethnically, or culturally? My father’s ethnicity is: My mother’s ethnicity is: 2. CoBRAS 3. AARRSI 4. BSI 5. Demographic Questions Have you taken any Asian American Studies classes before this semester? YES NO Are you: Male Female How old are you? What is your family’s ethnic heritage(s)? In what country were you born? ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • If you were not born in the U.S.: How old were you when you came to the U.S.? If you were born in the U.S., what generation are you (check one):    Second generation (my parents immigrated to the U.S.)    Third generation (my grandparents immigrated to the U.S.)   Fourth generation (my great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S.)    Mixed generation (Please specify): Please rate how well you speak English? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 English is my first language or I speak it as well as if it were my first language I am just beginning to learn English In your family, who provided the primary financial support during your childhood (e.g., mother, father, grandmother, brother, etc.)? What was this person’s occupation/job? What is the highest education grade this person completed? Grade 6 or less Grades 7 to 9 Grades 10 or 11 High school graduate At least 1 year college College graduate At least 1 year graduate school Graduate degree THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND THOUGHTFUL PARTICIPATION! 321 322 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 Notes 1. 2. Author note: Karen L. Suyemoto, Department of Psychology and Asian American Studies Program, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Charles Liu, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Boston. This research was supported by funding from the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, by a research grant associated with the DOE funded AANAPISI grant to the University of Massachusetts, and by the University of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Grant for Faculty Research. The authors would like to express their gratitude to members of the Asian American Research Team at UMass Boston who contributed to data collection and data management for this study, and/or who provided feedback for this study: Phuong Nguyen, Stephanie Day, John Tawa, and Emily Davis. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Karen L. Suyemoto, Psychology, University of Massachusetts, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125; Email: Karen.Suyemoto@umb.edu Samuel D. Museus and Peter N. Kiang, “Deconstructing the Model Minority Myth and How It Contributed to the Invisible Minority Reality in Higher Education Research,” New Directions for Institutional Research, no. 142 (2009): 5–15. Alvin N. Alvarez, Linda Juang, and Christopher T. H. Liang, “Asian Americans and Racism: When Bad Things Happen to ‘Model Minorities,’” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 12, no. 3 (2006): 477–92, doi:10.1037/1099-9809.12.3.477; Tina Chou, Anu Asnaani, and Stefan G. Hofmann, “Perception of Racial Discrimination and Psychopathology across Three U.S. Ethnic Minority Groups,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 18, no. 1 (2012): 74–81, doi:10.1037/a0025432; Kevin Cokley, Brittany Hall-Clark, and Dana Hicks, “Ethnic Minority-Majority Status and Mental Health: The Mediating Role of Perceived Discrimination,” Journal of Mental Health Counseling, no. 33 (2011): 243–63; Stacy A. Harwood, Margaret B. Huntt, Ruby Mendenhall, and Jioni A. Lewis, “Racial Microaggressions in the Residence Halls: Experiences of Students of Color at a Predominantly White University,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 5, no. 3 (2012): 159–73, doi:10.1037/a0028956; May K. Lorenzo, Abbie K. Frost, and Helen Z. Reinherz, “Social and Emotional Functioning of Older Asian American Adolescents,” Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal, no. 17 (2000): 289–304, doi:10.1023/A:1007598007205; Jean M. Twenge and Jennifer Crocker, “Race and Self-Esteem: Meta-Analyses Comparing Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians and Comment on Gray-Little and Hafdahl (2000),” Psychological Bulletin, no. 128 (2002): 371–408, doi:10.1037/0033-2909.128.3.371; Yu-Wen Ying, Peter A. Lee, Jeanne L. Tsai, Yuan Hung, Melissa Lin, and Ching Tin Wan, “Asian American College Students as Model Minorities: An Examination of Their Overall Competence,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, no. 7 (2001): 59–74, doi:10.1037/1099-9809.7.1.59. ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES 3. • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • Debbiesiu L. Lee and Soyeon Ahn, “Racial Discrimination and Asian Mental Health: A Meta-Analysis,” Counseling Psychologist 39, no. 3 (2011): 463–89, doi:10.1177/001100001038179. 4. Christopher T. Liang and Ruth E. Fassinger, “The Role of Collective SelfEsteem for Asian Americans Experiencing Racism-Related Stress: A Test of Moderator and Mediator Hypotheses,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 14, no. 1 (2008): 19–28, doi:10.1037/1099-9809.14.1.19. 5. Chou, Asnaani, and Hofmann, “Perception of Racial Discrimination.” 6. Que-Lam Huynh, Thierry Devos, and Laura Smalarz, “Perpetual Foreigner in One’s Own Land: Potential Implications for Identity and Psychological Adjustment,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 30, no. 2 (2011): 133–62, doi:10.1521/jscp.2011.30.2.133. 7. Russell Endo and William Wei, “On the Development of Asian American Studies Programs,” in Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro, Shirley Hune, Arthur A. Hansen, and John M. Liu (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988): 5–15. Shirley Hune, “Expanding the International Dimension of Asian American Studies,” Amerasia 15, no. 2 (1989): xix–xxiv. 8. Endo and Wei, “On the Development of Asian American Studies Programs”; Hune, “Expanding the International Dimension”; Peter N. Kiang, “Pedagogies of Life and Death: Transforming Immigrant/Refugee Students and Asian American Studies,” Positions 5, no. 2 (1997): 529–55; Glen Omatsu, “Freedom Schooling: Reconceptualizing Asian American Studies for Our Communities,” in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, ed. Jean Y. Wu and Thomas C. Chen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 9. Kenyon S. Chan, “Rethinking the Asian American Studies Project: Bridging the Divide between Campus and Community,” Journal of Asian American Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 17–36; Chuansheng Chen, Kari Edwards, Brandy Young, and Ellen Greenberger, “Close Relationships between Asian American and European American College Students,” Journal of Social Psychology 141, no. 1 (2001): 85–100, doi:10.1080/00224540109600525; Endo and Wei, “On the Development of Asian American Studies Programs”; Hune, “Expanding the International Dimension”; Kiang, “Pedagogies of Life and Death”; Omatsu, “Freedom Schooling”; Min Zhou, Anthony C. Ocampo, and J. V. Gatewood, “Introduction: Revisiting Contemporary Asian America,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and J. V. Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 1–29. 10. Christine E. Sleeter, “The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies: A Research Review” (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 2011), vii. 11. As cited in ibid.; Patricia E. Halagao, “Holding Up the Mirror: The Complexity of Seeing Your Ethnic Self in History,” Theory and Research in Social Education 32, no. 4 (2004): 459–83, doi:10.1080/00933104.2004.104732 323 324 • 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 65; Halagao, “Liberating Filipino Americans through Decolonizing Curriculum,” Race Ethnicity and Education 13, no. 4 (2010): 495–512. Kiang, “Pedagogies of Life and Death”; Peter N. Kiang, “Stories and Structures of Persistence: Ethnographic Learning through Research and Practice in Asian American Studies,” in Ethnography and Education: Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Education, ed. Yali Zou and Enrique T. Trueba (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 223–55; Peter N. Kiang, “Linking Strategies and Interventions in Asian American Studies to K–12 Classrooms and Teacher Preparation,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 17, no. 2 (2004): 199–225, doi:10.1080/095183903100016538 71; Peter N. Kiang, Karen L. Suyemoto, and Shirley S. Tang, “Developing and Sustaining Community Research Methods and Meanings in Asian American Studies Coursework,” in Ethnic Studies Research: Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Timothy P. Fong (Lanham, Md.: Alta Mira, 2005): 367–398; Karen L. Suyemoto, Grace S. Kim, Miwa Tanabe, John Tawa, J., and Stephanie C. Day, “Challenging the Model Minority Myth: Engaging Asian American Students in Research on Asian American College Student Experiences,” in Conducting Research on Asian Americans in Higher Education: New Directions in Institutional Research, ed. Samuel D. Museus (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 41–55. Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major, “Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma,” Psychological Review, no. 96 (1989): 608–30. “University of Massachusetts Boston Asian American Studies Program,” https://www.umb.edu/asamst. William Barratt, “The Barratt Simplified Measure of Social Status (BSMSS) measuring SES” (Indiana State University), http://wbarratt.indstate.edu/ socialclass/ Barratt_Simplified_Measure_of_Social_Status.pdf. The published scales used and described here are available through the articles or authors cited or, in the case of the BSI, through www.pearsonclinical.com. Specific wording for demographic questions used in this analysis is presented in the appendix. Christopher T. H. Liang, Lisa C. Li, and Bryan S. K. Kim, “The Asian American Racism-Related Stress Inventory: Development, Factor Analysis, Reliability, and Validity,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 51, no. 1 (2004): 103–14, doi:10.1037/0022-0167.51.1.103. Liang, Li, and Kim, “Asian American Racism-Related Stress Inventory.” Helen A. Neville, Roderick L. Lilly, Georgia Duran, Richard M. Lee, and LaVonne Browne, “Construction and Initial Validation of the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS),” Journal of Counseling Psychology 47, no. 1 (2000): 59–70. Helen A. Neville, P. Paul Heppner, Peter Ji, and Russell Thye, “The Relations among General and Race-Related Stressors and Psychoeducational Adjustment in Black Students Attending Predominantly White Institutions,” Journal of Black Studies 34, no. 4 (2004): 599–618. ASIAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • SUYEMOTO AND LIU • 20. Leonard R. Derogatis and Nick Melisaratos, “The Brief Symptom Inventory: An Introductory Report,” Psychological Medicine, no. 13 (1983): 595–605, doi:10.1017/S0033291700048017. 21. Ibid. 22. Gayle Y. Iwamasa and Harold Kooreman, “Brief Symptom Inventory Scores of Asian, Asian-American, and European-American College Students,” Cultural Diversity and Mental Health 1, no. 2 (1995): 149–57. 23. David J. Hand and C. C. Taylor, Multivariate Analysis of Variance and Repeated Measures: A Practical Approach for Behavioural Scientists (London: Chapman & Hall, 1987). 24. Janet E. Helms, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990); Janet E. Helms, “An Update of Helms’ White and People of Color Racial Identity Models,” in Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, ed. Joseph G. Ponterotto, J. Manuel Casas, Lisa A. Suzuki, and Charlene M. Alexander, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 181–98. 25. Helms, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice ; Helms, “An Update of Helms’ White and People of Color Racial Identity Models.” 26. Craig C. Brookins and Tracy L. Robinson, “Rites-of-Passage as Resistance to Oppression,” Western Journal of Black Studies 19, no. 3(1995): 172–80; Stephen M. Rose, “Empowerment: The Foundation for Social Work Practice in Mental Health,” In Mental Disorders in the Social Environment: Critical Perspectives, ed. Stuart A. Kirk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 190–200. 27. Elaine Pinderhughes, Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Power: The Key to Efficacy in Clinical Practice (New York: Free Press, 1989). 28. Jennifer Crocker and Diane M. Quinn, “Racism and Self-Esteem,” in Confronting Racism: The Problem and the Response, ed. Jennifer Eberhart and Susan T. Fiske (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 169–87. 29. John Tawa, Karen L. Suyemoto, and Lizabeth Roemer, “Implications of Perceived Interpersonal and Structural Racism on Asian Americans’ SelfEsteem,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, no. 34 (2012): 349–58, doi:1 0.1080/01973533.2012.693425. 30. Kiang, “Stories and Structures of Persistence.” 31. Suyemoto et al., “Challenging the Model Minority Myth”; Karen L. Suyemoto, John Tawa, Grace S. Kim, Stephanie C. Day, Susan A. Lambe, Puong T. Nguyen, and Julie M. AhnAllen, “Integrating Disciplines for Transformative Education in Health Services: Strategies and Effects,” in Asian American Voices: Engaging, Empowering, and Enabling, ed. Lin Zhan (New York: NLN Press, 2012), 209–28. 32. Derald W. Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley 2010). 33. For example, J. Greenberg, “The Story Of The Seattle Race Curriculum Controversy Finally In Print,” and cited articles, Popular Resistance, Oc- 325 326 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.2 tober 2015, https://popularresistance.org/the-story-of-the-seattle-racecurriculum-controversy-finally-in-print/ 34. Sleeter, “Academic and Social Value.” 35. Isaac Prilleltensky, “Wellness as Fairness,” American Journal of Community Psychology, no. 49 (2012): 1–21, doi:10.1007/s10464-011-9448-8. "To 'P' or Not to 'P'?": Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies Vicente M. Diaz Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, October 2004, pp. 183-208 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2005.0019 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184553 Access provided by Claremont College (10 Oct 2018 06:32 GMT) TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • “TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’?”: Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies1 vicente m. diaz I a great Pinoy joke told to me by Gus Espiritu. Its humor comes from the particularities of Filipino rearticulation of Shakespeare’s famous question (the joke also resonates among Carolinian speakers from Micronesia, and perhaps among many other Austronesian-based Pacific Island language speakers), but I also want to suggest that its stronger force likewise comes from a kind of lightness of being that self-mockery can make of ontological fundamentalism. Self-mockery is a serious weapon of cultural resilience and resistance—and as someone waiting in line, somewhat impatiently, I want to re-aim the line of “P’s” trajectory in the direction of another culturally and historically specific mode of becoming. The converted question, “To P or not to P?” becomes, then, my way of marking the present territory, a slippery, even sticky sea of historical, political, and cultural determinations that exists between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in a more turbulent ocean of United States imperialism and colonialism. Choppy too, of course, is the no less innocent world of institutionalized study of these struggles, no matter how noble the motives may be. In this essay, I want to address the tensions raised by the “P Question” in relation to Asian American Studies from the vantage point of one who has been located in Pacific Studies as viewed from the Islands, particularly from Guam in Micronesia, where I was born and raised, and where I taught in the 1990s. But, I was also trained at the University of STOLE THIS TITLE FROM JAAS OCTOBER © 2004 • 183–208 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS 183 184 • JAAS • 7:3 Hawai’i, and though I did my doctorate in California, Hawai’i—through tremors that rocked the field of Pacific Studies as it intersected and was led by scholars housed at the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS), the East West Center, and especially Kanaka Maoli scholars at the Center for Hawaiian Studies—continues to be generative in and of my own intellectual, political, and scholarly development. A robust and busy crossroad as well as homeland, Hawai’i draws up and projects out theoretical, cultural, and political movements from across the Pacific Island region and beyond the seas to make it a particularly fruitful location for intellectual and political production, especially for the kind that pays specific attention to the nuances of travel and mobility in relation to the staunch determinations over land that anchor Indigenous struggles.2 But lest my attempts at nuance fail, let me make one thing absolutely clear: for whatever productive dialogues there may be between Pacific Islander Studies and Asian American Studies, under no circumstance should Pacific Islanders, or Pacific Islands Studies, be subsumed under the institutional framework of Asian American history and experiences. Though I’m sure nobody wishes this to be the case, the question of just how Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies are articulated together will always raise the specter of unequal power relations. At the same time, however, I think it is vital, in order to maintain the integrity of our respective struggles and projects, that our resolve to keep the differences clear and equal not reify in any way any of the categories in question. To avert this unwanted outcome, I want to highlight the various sites or locales from which we practice our respective crafts. These different, differential, and differentiating sites of and for the situatedness of knowledge and politics, I believe, not only make a world of difference in our work, but are also themselves as much constituted by as they help constitute that work. Thus, I want to emphasize at the outset that the critiques of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies look very different from within the shores of the various Pacific Islands. But, I also want to assert that an Asian American inquiry must strive to comprehend the kinds of historical and political struggles that Native Pacific Scholars are trying to articulate, just as Native Pacific Scholars need to understand the specificities of Asian histories as they are bound up with the American TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • imperial project among and amidst Native Pacific Islanders in the continent and in the Islands.3 THE SUBSTANCE OF “P” From the vantage points of where and how I come, the substance of “P”— the contested and constesting sign in question—is the fluidic yet steadfast political and cultural histories of Pacific Islanders as Indigenous people in the Islands and in the continental United States. But, the ground covered by “P” also includes Islands and Islanders not formally under United States rule, as well as Islands and Islanders under U.S. rule who continue to live lives that are not entirely subsumed under U.S. hegemony. For example, one cannot understand the social and political experiences of American Samoans (from the eastern part of the Samoan archipelago, that has been under U.S. rule for over a century) without comprehending their residual and formative relations with those from the western islands (formerly known as “Western Samoa” but now called “Samoa”), who have never been under formal U.S. rule. Moreover, like their more distant cousins from the Kingdom of Tonga, another Island group that has never been under U.S. political control, there are many “Western” Samoans in the Polynesian Diaspora in the continental United States. The “P” in this case is at once inside, outside, and more importantly in transit in and out of, the United States and the Islands. This is also the case with other Pacific Islanders, such as Chamorros from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, or the Kanaka Maoli from Hawai’i, whose islands are officially classified as “American” (Guam is an “Unincorporated Territory of the United States”; the Northern Marianas are a “Commonwealth of the United States”; and Hawai’i is the “Fiftieth State.”). Though all three are formally associated, in varying degrees, with that republic called the United States of America, the Indigenous societies of each also precede and even exceed American political and cultural conventions.4 This “P” stands, then, for the need for a framework that can flex nationally, internationally, transnationally, sub-nationally, supra-nationally, and even extra- and post-nationally, and in such a way as to accommodate the many “nations” involved (namely, the United States, Tonga, Hawai’i, The Marianas or y Nacion Chamoru (as Chamorro nationalists 185 186 • JAAS • 7:3 call it), and “Samoa” (of which “there is only one,” according to my colleague, Damon Salesa). We might even mention Aotearoa/New Zealand in this list (which is not meant to be exhaustive, of course), insofar as it constitutes an important scape/circuit that triangulates with the United States and the aforementioned (Polynesian) Islands of Samoa and Tonga in the social, cultural, and political experiences of their Diasporic Natives. Let me be clear, by the way, that in naming these particular groups I do not mean to say that they are the only Pacific Islanders on the continent, and I especially do not want to further the tendency to view all Pacific Islanders under the category of “Polynesia.” Hardly natural, certainly not innocent, the term “Pacific Islanders” has become the accepted appellation for the Indigenous people from the Pacific “basin,” as opposed to the “Asia-Pacific Rim.” Arif Dirlik is right in cautioning us about the term’s (“Asia-Pacific”) overdeterminations in mutual histories of Oriental and Occidental colonial desires and anxieties, recharged by late global capital.5 Likewise, in Pacific Islands Studies—whose composite and sometimes contradictory “fields” I will describe shortly—and in the Pacific Islander communities in the United States, there has long been a conscious effort to demarcate Pacific Islanders and Islands from the generic and totalizing “Asia-Pacific” category. This is precisely why Pacific Islanders “qualify the ‘P’ with the I,’” as J. Kehaulani Kauanui has expressed it in one form or another over the past decade. You should also know that there is a strong current in Pacific Island Studies, exemplified and embodied in the work of the Tongan postacademic (or is it the post-Tongan, post-academic?) Epeli Hau’ofa, and Teresia Teaiwa (another Pacific Native writer whose works likewise burst all available genres) to replace the term “Pacific” with “Oceania.”6 For these two, at least, the term “Oceania” best captures a seafaring heritage that wields the potential to disrupt the insularity and essentialisms attached to the term “Pacific” without, as Teresia has theorized, “losing the Native” altogether.7 But for now, I want to suggest that discussions about Pacific Islander histories, placed alongside an Asian American frame, require an understanding of the composite fields of Pacific Studies and Pacific History as they are shaped by tensions arising from Native struggles for self-deter- TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • mination and decolonization, and by the condition of flux in academic theorization and practice.8 To stage such tensions, including those that obtain in the question of institutional relations between Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies in and for the continent and the Islands, I rely on a genealogy of struggle and study, as institutionalized in the academic fields of Pacific Studies and Pacific History and my coming of age in them through graduate training, teaching, and research in Guam, Hawai’i, California, and, of late, Michigan. This genealogy offers just one illustration, one vantage point, that features central themes in Pacific Islander struggles in the United States, struggles which continue both to feed off and to inform experiences and relations in the Islands, which in turn continue to shape Islander realities inside and outside the fold of the “American” experience (and I emphasize the quotation marks around the term, “American”). If there is a commonality between Pacific and Asian American histories, without the big “H’s,” it is this force-field called “America,” or, more precisely, the various “Americas” that are located both on the continent and on the various islands. These Americas, I should like to suggest, are themselves charged with their own forms of cultural and historical exceptionalisms, whether in the Asian American or the Pacific Islander American (re)articulations or inflections. Consider, alone, Guam’s official slogan: “Where America’s Day Begins!” Tun Pedro “Pedang” Cruz, in a documentary about Chamorro experiences during the Japanese Occupation of Guam, captures the intensity of Chamorro political and cultural investment in America. Trembling with emotion, a tearful Cruz clenches his fist and jaws: “To this day, when I see that American Flag . . . I tell you, I would rather live in Hell under America than live in Heaven under any other country.” 9 To be sure, this sentiment does not exhaust the range of Chamorro sentiments towards the United States, whether during or after the Japanese Occupation,10 but it does signify, nonetheless, an America that has in fact been the privileged locus of Native Chamorro investment in ways that fortify American claims on the world. Thus, a second critical point for considering both Asian American and Pacific Islander (in this case, Pacific Islander American) histories, still with the little “h’s,” would be the need to critically interrogate what 187 188 • JAAS • 7:3 (and where) we mean by invoking the term, “America.” For me, the promise in a dialogue between Asian American and Pacific Islander histories is precisely in their shared potential to destabilize prevailing ideas of United States Culture and History—with the “Big C” and the “Big H” as well as those other “Cs” and “Hs” that come from all those other “Ps” that have historically articulated their political realities and identities in relation to America. For example, though I am a newcomer to the study of Asian American history in the continental United States, I have long lived and grappled with the entangled histories of Asians and Pacific Islanders and versions of America as played out in the islands, particularly those of Filipino and Filipino American articulations in the “American” Pacific Islands of Guam and Hawai’i. There are Asians in the islands, and not just in Hawai’i, as canonical Asian American history texts seem to believe. In the U.S.-controlled islands, there are Asians because they want to come to “America” and/or because they are “pulled” to it for any number of structural reasons. Sometimes, to complicate the matter, Asians are pulled into the islands by Native elite agents eager to augment or fortify their economic or political interests, though clearly these efforts have not been without tremendous anxiety, such as the occasional outcry by Chamorro or Palauan political and economic leaders over the influx of Asian and Micronesian immigrants, whose presence, again, is partly accounted for by the legislated need for available (“cheap?”) labor for the islands’ economic and social growth. Moreover, in the Pacific Islands, whether or not they are part of the United States, there are competing versions of what it means to be a Native Pacific Islander, as well as what it means to be a Pacific Islander American,11 in addition to the competing versions of what America is all about. In the Islands (“we do it island-style,” as a pop tune from Hawai’i goes), these versions also are consistently elided by “mainland” versions. Is it really possible to continue our work as if “mainland” versions were normative and still not replicate the colonial and imperial perspectives that are problematic to begin with, and which constitute a big part of what the critical Asian American project is all about? How might we proceed conceptually and politically without either privileging any one particular geo- TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • graphic or temporal and cultural locale and do so without losing, at the same time, the important particularities and specificities that make up our respective histories, without essentializing any of them? Let me transpose this problematic in terms more familiar to practitioners of Asian American Studies than to practitioners of Pacific Studies: already institutionalized in various forms, in various universities and colleges in the U.S. Midwest, is an emergent “East of California” agenda, whose motive is to emphasize the geographic and discursive diversity of the field and movement, and to counter what some have called the West Coast hegemony (but oh, how I’ve often longed for the West Coast hegemony in the past four years at the University of Michigan). Indeed, it is vitally important to discern the specificities of Asian American—and Pacific Islander—experiences in places like the U.S. Heartland. My colleague, Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman, likewise has begun to inventory the specific role that places like Cleveland, Ohio played in the national production and international dissemination of “Hawaiian” Sheet Music, as well as the Midwest’s significance in the production of Tiki Culture.12 Similarly, in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program at the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture, we have begun to identify other specific connections between the U.S. Midwest region and Oceania.13 Yet despite, or perhaps as a way to strengthen, my new institutional location in the U.S. Heartland, I find myself calling for something like a West of California criticism—and even a West of Hawai’i, or elsewhere from Polynesia, criticism. On the other hand, since, at least from Oceania, California is east (making East of California our Far East), I could continue this reorientation to argue for displacing California as the privileged term/space/historical agent with the more fluidic Oceania and privilege, instead, something like an East and/or West of Oceania agenda. Perhaps we should rename AAAS “Oceanic Studies,” and perhaps do so in order to better equip ourselves to supplement the “Atlantic Studies” initiatives that seem, at least to me, to be radically reimagining the space of American Studies through their own racial and cultural rereadings.14 I’m not arguing for this move, of course, for there are just way too many problems with it, the least of which, for some of you, would be the 189 190 • JAAS • 7:3 complete subsuming under an entirely foreign agenda of the various and varied stakes that presently sit under the sign of Asian American Studies. Moreover, as Chris Connery reminds us, the Oceanic imaginary isn’t innocent either.15 Though I write in jest, I am dead serious about my belief in an Oceanic critique’s potential to disrupt the categories under question without necessarily losing their political potential. Indeed, more than the question of being firm in our categories is the question of how we move, and how we are moved by, these categories. This is my way of keeping the tension between drawing our politics from our identities and drawing our identities from our politics, as George Lipsitz reminds us to do.16 STUDYING “P”; “P” HISTORY I come into this discussion from a Pacific Islands-based brand of Pacific Studies, despite, or especially more so since, my recent move to the U.S. Midwest. Pacific Studies as an academic occupation has a long and complex history, but still can be understood in the general terms of European and American discovery and conquest of the region and as materiality for European and American self-fashioning.17 I’m referring here only to the West, whereas a fuller story would also include “Asian” explorations and incursions—such as state-brokered projects like Japan’s Nanyo in Micronesia between World War I and II; or its earlier negotiations with Hawai’i sugar barons around cheap labor; or the Philippine Government’s own version that helped provide labor for the massive U.S. postwar military build-up of Guam; or a critical accounting of Asian settler complicity in the neocolonization of the islands.18 These are only the starting points. Still, the systematic study of the Pacific for much of our purposes is derived from and structured by European American strategic interests in the region. Essentially orientalist, Pacific Studies in the last two decades also has been shaken up by assaults from two fronts: Native struggles for self-determination and decolonization, and the epistemological upheaval in academe along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disciplinarity, colonialism, and postcoloniality. 19 The critique of postcoloniality is another entry point for a discussion, but one which I believe must be negotiated very carefully, considering the ways that it has TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • been invoked in the Islands to reassert academic imperial authority, viz the contested character of the historical struggles for Native sovereignty and/or self-determination.20 The history of the field of Pacific History in the Pacific region is instructive as well.21 Its formal development is linked somewhat romantically to Professor James Davidson of Australia National University (ANU), who is sometimes called the “Father” of Pacific History, and who sat as its first Chair at ANU’s School of Asia and Pacific Studies.22 The Pacific wing at ANU also founded and still publishes the Journal of Pacific History, the field’s flagship journal, and it hosts the annual Pacific History Workshop. The political genealogy of the formal study of Pacific History goes like this: in the late 1950s, Professor Davidson and like-minded colleagues began to urge historians to shift their foci of attention on the Pacific from European and American imperial and colonial concerns, and become island-centered or oriented. Until then, Pacific History was exclusively about the successes or failures of European American incursions into the region. In that vein, the Pacific was tabula-rasa, with history proper beginning in 1521, and its principle subject and drama was European and American political and cultural self-replication. If Islanders ever figured into the drama, it was on terms fatal.23 In short, the agenda for a Pacific Island-oriented history and historiography would give way to calls for Pacific-Islander orientations. At a time when fashionable high academic theorizing turned to structure, discourse, and post-structure—and the end of the subject—Pacific historiography championed Islander agency.24 Of course, these nationalist struggles were also contemporaneous with the Civil Rights Movement and the highly politicized emergence of Ethnic and Women’s Studies in the U.S., thereby providing a historical and social moment of solidarity. The political trajectory of long-time Chamorro rights activist, scholar, and now statesman, Robert Underwood, was partially inflected by the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by a nascent Chicano movement in California, just as his leadership would influence pan-ethnic coalitions and caucuses of Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans through his post as a U.S. Congressman in the 1990s, especially as a ranking member of the powerful House Armed Services Committee.25 191 192 • JAAS • 7:3 But, it was not merely coincidental that Pacific History as a field that privileged Islander agency emerged contemporaneously with formal decolonization in the Pacific Island region. First to gain political independence, for instance, was “Western Samoa” in 1962. It is also no mere coincidence that Davidson, canonized Father of Pacific History, was also a Samoan “specialist” who had very particular ideas about how the new nation should look, given the history he could help imagine.26 Pacific Historiography reflected a conscious effort to keep apace with decolonization and Indigenous intellectuals’ and activists’ calls to discard European American narratives in favor of Native and nation agency. Indeed, local and regional Native struggles for decolonization played no small role in challenging, if not altering, the terms by which non-Native academics studied the region and its peoples. Anthropologists, for example, now had to deal with metropolitan-educated leaders who were now placing conditions on field research. But specialists, too, if they were savvy, could parlay knowledge into service and become advisors and consultants. In Guam, for example, a cottage industry has emerged around history: a government commission revises public school history textbooks along more politically-correct perspectives that, while critically engaging foreign perspectives in anticolonial mode, remain remarkably silent about local, Native-ordered gendered and class hegemonies. Alongside government-sponsored projects, retired ex-patriot educators write general history text and coffee-table books, some whose superficial nods to Islander agency seem more interested in riding the wave of Native nationalism to the bank with nice royalties in hand than in trying to openly contend with, or even honor, that dimension of the history.27 In addition to exercising national and geographic flexibilities, we need to keep in mind the productive tensions between the history of disciplines and academic institutional processes and imperatives on the one hand, and Indigenously-oriented political and cultural struggles on the other. Quite frankly, I’m already worried that the specific socio-historical and institutional trajectories shaping the study of Asian American history in the United States will marginalize those aspects of Islander history that are ferociously local and Indigenously-ordered, and not the other way around. I am certainly not alone in that worry, and I will return shortly to these concerns. TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • By the 1970s and ‘80s (it is often said, as if it were a natural occurrence), the tide of political decolonization had rolled northward to Micronesia, producing new, quasi-independent nations out of the U.S.administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The TTPI, as it was called, was part of the United Nations trusteeship system through which the U.S. was granted fiduciary responsibilities over the island region that, immediately prior this point, had been under the Japanese Mandate system, and before that under German and Spanish rule. U.S. responsibilities and obligations were to facilitate social, economic, and political development, including decolonization.28 But, the new microstates were Native-driven, and were achieved against the grain so to speak, for the U.S. was more obsessed with exercising its strategic interests—including nuclear testing—than with permitting such acts of self-determination.29 In response to such clamoring, the U.S. pumped millions of dollars into the coffers of the new administrations (out of a mix of guilt and outright desire to buy favor). And yet, the overall effect was that even by the 1970s Micronesians (excluding Chamorros in Guam and the Northern Marianas) were living at a standard below pre-war levels under the Japanese Mandate. Another byproduct of the “compacts of free association” with the United States, for citizens of these so-called “Freely Associated States” (namely, The Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), The Republic of Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands), was unrestricted travel to and residency in the United States, meaning, for the most part, Hawai’i and Guam but also the U.S. West Coast. Thus, as I was polishing this essay on my laptop in a gym in Greenville, North Carolina—where I was spending the Winter-Spring break—I sat within view of two “Native” Greenville County Recreation employees, sisters born and raised here, whose parents had moved to these parts from their home atoll of Pulap in the Central Carolines, just after the creation of the FSM through the signing of its Compact of Free Association with the U.S. in the late 1980s.30 In Guam, Native Chamorros had also revived a political movement for greater autonomy, but in the 1970s and especially by the 1980s it would become articulated in terms of Native self-determination and sovereignty.31 My political and cultural identity as a Pohnpeian and Filipino scholar has been and continues to be shaped profoundly by the contingencies of birth and upbringing in Guam, despite my recent relocation to Michigan. 193 194 • JAAS • 7:3 I continue to grow—and sometimes regress—at a time of tremendous flux. By the time I was in high school in the mid-1970s, Chamorros had already begun to question in print the wisdom of their loyalty; the appropriateness of their gratitude to the U.S. for “liberating” them from the Japanese; and the colonial structure of local governance and U.S. citizenship.32 In the 1960s and ‘70s, and wildly in the ‘80s, Guam had undergone rapid changes in its physical, social, and cultural terrain. Between massive military buildup, the implementation of a cash economy, and the emergence of an Asian tourist industry (that rivals Waikiki in attracting Japanese white— but especially blue-collar-workers as well as hormonally-enraged young adults and their older counterparts, the honeymooners), Guam experienced spectacular growth made possible by Filipino and other Asian H2 and Micronesian “non-quota” labor. The Island’s later linkage—positively and negatively—to the Southeast Asian economy via Taiwanese and Korean capital also played no small role in its political and cultural redevelopment.33 When in 1962 the U.S. lifted its Security Clearance requirements for travel in and out of the Island, Guam also became “Guam U.S.A.”—gateway to America for Asian and other immigrants looking for a piece of the mythical pie, or at least an American passport and U.S. citizenship. By 1980 the Chamorros for the first time in history had fallen to under 50% of the total population of the Island, from about 95% before World War II.33 Concomitantly, Chamorros in the Diaspora—following military bases in Hawai’i and the U.S. West Coast—began to exceed the number who remained at home.34 A minority in their own homland for the first time in history, Chamorros began to push for Native self-determination. Guam, like Hawai’i, had become a new multicultural place (there is an older “multiethnic” history), and Chamorros did not appreciate being reduced to one among a group of “ethnic” minorities.36 Moreover, non-Chamorro residents were being seen increasingly as accomplices and collaborators for U.S. colonialism.37 And if self-determination for Guam was to be genuine, it had to be reserved exclusively for the Indigenous Chamorros. Chamorros were also being compared to, and began to network with, Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples in the Pacific and around the world. In an article published in Amerasia in 1979, Katherine B. Aguon, the first Chamorro woman to earn a doctoral de- TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • gree, wrote, “The Chamorro shares with other Indigenous peoples the legacy of having come under domination for no other reason than having been born on a valuable piece of real estate. They have first rights to land, water and air. Sovereignty inheres in them by their very existence.”38 This was, and still is, the view of Native Chamorro nationalists, and this is the milieu that continues to shape my intellectual and scholarly production, particularly as I find myself located farther and farther away from the Islands. As one whose homelands were elsewhere, but whose very presence in Guam owed quite clearly to its status as a U.S. colony,39 these views began to ring true to me. When I transferred to the University of Hawai’i in 1979, it wasn’t hard to tune in to the Native Hawaiian struggle, then most visible in skirmishes between the State of Hawaii and Hawaiian “squatters”—as the state and the media depicted them—over so-called “public lands.” My own coming of age was also shaped, albeit from a distance, by the Protect Kaho’olawe Ohana’s (PKO) campaign to stop the bombing of that Island.40 As a student in the University of Hawai’i Political Science Department, I quickly learned about a lineage of Micronesian and Filipino activists and rebels who had passed through Manoa and the department, and who had actively challenged U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and the Far East.41 I was inflamed by an anticolonial sentiment that was anchored firmly by a perspective that championed Native self-determination in all things. My interest in decolonization and in the revival of Native traditions and practices has furnished me with lessons and facts of Islander history and knowledge impossible to gain in Western classrooms and textbooks, and which has sharpened my critical sensibilities. I still believe in this cause, including the need for its engagement on the “academic,” especially on the theoretical, front, although I also have come to see the need for the struggle to engage simultaneously with the national, racial, ethnic, classed, and gendered ways that Indigeneity has been self-articulated in relation to colonialism. Still, this evolving, moving, standpoint is very clear politically and intellectually: decolonization in the Pacific Islands must be determined by the Indigenous people of the land in question, and non-Indigenous people—and scholars no less, or all the more—need to understand how 195 196 • JAAS • 7:3 they are also implicated in colonialism. Such self-realization won’t automatically solve our problems, but it is as much a necessary part of scholarship and analyses as it is a precondition for social justice in the Islands. Undergirding this view are adamant and indefatigable discourses of Indigeneity, of cultural and spiritual rootedness and stewardship in and of the land and sea. These roots are undoubtedly contested from within, but they are also resilient and steadfast in the face of encroachment, especially encroachment by rude people. The genealogies are to pre- and extra-western pasts and futures, to ever-changing cosmologies and epistemologies; and, as articulated recently by the Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, they involve the need for Indigenous methodologies to boot.42 PROBLEMS “P-ING” Reflecting the wider social and political struggles of the Maori in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Smith’s call to engage in Indigenous research and studies underscores the recurring themes and motifs of Native alterity and difference from mainstream and immigrant societies and scholarship. It also recalls productive tensions between academic study of the Pacific Islands and Native Pacific discourses of sovereignty and self-determination to which I’ve alluded earlier. Just how these tensions will now play in the institutionalized setting of Asian American Studies, especially under the framework of Ethnic Studies on the continent, is unclear and worrisome.43 For example, from my vantage point outside the field, there appears to be something provincial and provincializing about the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies within American universities, even as I am now seeing first-hand the need to strengthen the Ethnic Studies project and resource base in relation to the field of American Studies. I also worry about the potential for conservative and liberal college administrators to use Ethnic Studies departments to manage the messiness or contain the demands of diversity and U.S. Minority political discourse. Or worse yet, I am concerned about the trotting out of Ethnic Studies as a way for universities to disavow or mask the persistence of racial inequalities in society or in academia, or how critical studies of race and ethnicity tend to be ghettoized as the preserve of Ethnic Studies programs in ways that get other disciplines off the hook of having to actually deal with them in their work. TO ‘P’ OR NOT TO ‘P’? • DIAZ • As for linking with Asian American Studies in order to secure positions for Pacific Islands Studies, I remain troubled by how the numbers game that helps justify the creation of positions in Asian American Studies also will automatically militate against the hiring or retaining of Pacific Islander faculty, and against the development of Pacific Islander Studies curricula. On this latter point, I wonder how Pacific Islander-oriented and Pacific Islander-specific content and material, voluminous in the Island region but practically unknown on the continent (except to anthropologists and an increasing number of literary critics), can ever get the airtime they need in course syllabi and program development. In teaching a graduate seminar on U.S. Imperialism in the Pacific, for instance, I have chosen to include the Philippines. But, the inclusion of the Philippines in this course, in a place like Michigan, which has tremendous primary source materials on U.S. imperialism (because of its direct involvement in it), nonetheless has the potential to take up the entire semester and effectively wash out, to keep the “P” metaphor going, the other Pacific material. Another graduate seminar, restricted only to the Pacific Islands (called Pacific Radicalisms) and focused exclusively on materials from Guam, Hawai’I, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, also made it very clear that we needed at least one semester to cover each group. Above and beyond the potential for marginalizing Pacific Islander content, I continue to worry about whose critical frameworks will get to interpret and evaluate these materials and experiences, and about the direction of Pacific Islander-oriented research, particularly as it takes place in the continental United States. Perhaps the biggest difference between Pacific Islander and Asian American histories, struggles, and studies is that binary between the condition and status of Indigeneity versus Immigrant/Settler identity under the sign of America, recent emphases on Indigenous travel and mobility notwithstanding. Often couched as an opposition between the quest for equality or civil rights on the one hand, and equity and sovereignty on the other—and even these are not unproblematic or unproblemati...
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