“We now ask for your intervention to end this silencing of Palestine and other narratives of resistance and justice.” Organizers of an April online event featuring Leila Khaled, which was shut down by private tech companies following Israel lobby pressure, respond.
As anti-Asian hate crimes surge in the U.S., Asian American scholars and activists have responded by speaking out about their authentic stories, which have often been overlooked in textbooks. Street art in Unidad Park, Filipinotown, Los Angeles, depicting Filipino farmworkers Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, who banded together with Mexican civil rights activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to boycott non-union grape growers in the Delano grape strike. Timothy Biley/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
As anti-Asian hate crimes surge in the U.S., Asian American scholars and activists have responded by speaking out about their authentic stories, which have often been overlooked in textbooks.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders need our support
NATIONAL AFFAIRS: We must continue to confront anti-Asian racism, even after COVID-19 begins to fade from our collective memory
Jericho Tang/Staff
Insistent chants rang out across South Berkeley Wednesday evening as a crowd of students and community members gathered to condemn a string of violent attacks on the Asian American and Pacific Islander, or AAPI, community.
Winding through Berkeley’s streets, protestors voiced their grief and anger over what has been a most tumultuous and traumatic year for AAPI communities.
Nationwide, Asian Americans reported almost 4,000 hate incidents in the past year, ranging from microaggressions to verbal harassment to physical assault. Nearly half of these incidents occurred in California. Countless more went unreported.
By law, the 11-member body, responsible for policy-making decisions affecting K-12 schools in the state, must approve the curriculum by the end of the month, a deadline the legislature already delayed one year. It plans to do so on the third day of its March meeting, which began Tuesday; the meeting will be held virtually and will include a comment period during which members of the public can speak for up to one minute.
Jewish organizations are expressing a wide range of opinions about the textbook-length curriculum in its close-to-final form.
Most are commending revisions they say transformed the document from one shot-through with “anti-Jewish bias” in the words of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus in the summer of 2019 to one that, if not ideal, is at least satisfactory.
Had they more time and an endless reservoir of patience, the board, the California Department of Education and the Instructional Quality Commission, which reports to the state board, could have continued to refine what and how ethnic studies should be taught. But the Legislature set an April 1 deadline to pass the model curriculum, and more iterations would not resolve the irreconcilable differences between its staunchest advocates and critics.
The model curriculum, while voluntary for districts to adopt, is intended to build upon ethnic studies courses already offered as electives in hundreds of high schools. Two of the state’s largest districts indicated they intend to require an ethnic studies course for graduation: Fresno Unified next year and Los Angeles Unified in 2022-23.