Uplifting Asian American and Pacific Islander Voices

On April 3, 2021, Miami’s Asian American Association (AAA) organized a vigil for those killed in the Atlanta Spa shootings. The shootings resulted in eight deaths, six of which were people of Asian descent. Over 100 members of the Miami and Oxford community showed up to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.

It was described by Miami sophomore Isabella Corder as an event open to the community.

“You can just come and go as you please. It also makes it a lot more inclusive to people who can’t stay the whole time or don’t have internet access to register,” Corder says. Corder is the social chair of the AAA’s executive team and spoke at the vigil.

Sara Lu, a senior at Miami, also spoke at the vigil.

“It was a good time, between healing from the news and actually having the capacity to act on it and speak up,” Lu says.

Racism towards the AAPI community has increased significantly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because it is commonly believed that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China, the virus was given a false association with Chinese people, and those who are or look Chinese. This resulted in an increase in racially fueled incidents as reported by Stop AAPI Hate. The self-reporting forum documented 3,795 entries of hate incidents across the country toward the AAPI community from March 19, 2020, to February 28, 2021.

Over this past year, there has also been an increase in activism and support for AAPI.

Corder and Lu are just two of the many people in Oxford who have spoken against the racism towards the AAPI community.

Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Strategic Communication program Dr. Hongmei Li spoke at her first rally at the Freedom Center in Cincinnati, shortly after the murder of several Asian-American women in Atlanta, Georgia. “I never thought I would really speak as an activist,” Li said. “But when I was standing there, I felt I had to speak out, since we cannot be silent anymore, and I feel silence is kind of complicit.” This photograph was taken by Raymond Tan at the event in Cincinnati.

One of Miami’s very own professors, Dr. Hongmei Li, has also been vocal in the antiracism movement.

Li is an associate professor and coordinator of strategic communication at Miami University. This March, she attended a rally in Cincinnati at the Freedom Center and gave a speech in support of the AAPI community. Her speech can be found on Miami University’s website under the Department of Media, Journalism & Film’s “Faculty statements on Asian hate.”

This was Li’s first time speaking at a rally, an experience that she said was well-received by the audience. She was motivated to speak at the rally because she said she cannot be silent anymore. “I really was trying to show that solidarity is very, very important,” Li said.

As someone who was born and raised in China, Li was not conscious of the kinds of race issues that are prevalent in the U.S. until she immigrated.

She attended the University of Southern California, and it was there that she learned about racism and the effects it has on people of color in the U.S. She was never personally impacted by racism until she moved to Georgia, where she was hired as an assistant professor at Georgia State University.

“Without my experience at Georgia State, I never would have developed such consciousness,” Li said. “I never thought things could be so bad.”

Every week, her university chair would document all of the faculty’s accomplishments, whether it be a conference or published paper, and send them out in a newsletter. After two weeks of noticing that her achievements were not included, Li confronted the chair and asked to be recognized. He promised that she would be, but the next week, she was once again forgotten.

She ultimately sent out an email herself to faculty listing her accomplishments. Later, she organized an important conference at the university’s business school. When she asked the same chair to send out an email to the Ph.D. students, he neglected to do so.

“I never spoke about [these issues] to anybody except my friends. I felt like I could pretend they didn’t even exist,” Li said. “I could work harder to just overcome these issues. I could just work harder, then nobody could harm me.”

That was Li’s original mindset. Now that she’s had the time to think about the impact those actions have had on her, she’s adopted a different mentality. She knows the challenges she has experienced were fueled by her race, even if the instigator did not fully realize that.

“Some of these issues probably could be viewed as microaggressions. Some of them could be viewed as unfair treatment,” Li said. “But definitely, I think race and gender

Oxford Councilwoman Chantel Raghu wants to continue implementing positive changes in our community, but she said that starts with welcoming more people into the political conversation. “To have younger people or just different people in the room that just represent all these different identities, that is the healthiest form of democracy,” Raghu said.

played a role there.”

She eventually opened up to her colleagues about what she was experiencing. After speaking with her colleagues, she discovered that they had similar experiences. One of her Japanese colleagues had begun to check each faculty handbook and publication for her name due to frequently being forgotten about.

The same colleague went out of town for a while, and while she was gone, the chair circulated a document. In this document were recorded interviews where students talked about specific professors. One interview labeled a white male professor as the best in the department, while another interview in the same report placed her Japanese colleague in a negative light, saying, “She’s the worst professor I ever had, and I never understood her. She spoke with such a strong accent.”

These experiences forced Li to learn about racism firsthand. Her speech at the Freedom Center in Cincinnati this spring was an accumulation of all the emotions and lessons she wants to share. Three lessons, in particular, are the most important to her.

“I want to convey the message that racism should not be equated with whiteness… People of different ethnicities and races can adopt racism,” Li said. “Second, the racial map is more complicated. It’s not just between white and Black; Asians and Hispanics and Native Americans and so on should be included in the discussion about race. And the third message is that I really want people to come out together, form solidarity, and fight for justice, equality and freedom for all.”

Students at Miami can help make this happen. Li advises students to reach out to AAPI students on campus to help all international students and AAPI students feel welcomed and heard. By listening to their stories, students can become better allies.

“I definitely think that young people tend to be more accepting, so I am hopeful,” Li said.

Miami students can work together to prove her right.

Another member of the wider Oxford community, Councilwoman Chantel Raghu, has worked in the local government to make a difference. Raghu moved to Oxford from Texas with her husband after completing veterinary school. She has always considered being a politician to be her dream job, and on Oxford’s City Council, her dream has come true.

“I wanted to turn outwards and try to help and serve my community in politics,” Raghu said.

In the wake of COVID-19 last spring, Raghu introduced a resolution condemning hate speech and discrimination in Oxford. A challenging aspect of hate speech and discrimination is that incidents often go unreported. The self-reporting Stop AAPI Hate forum is an important tool in this regard because it helps track anti-Asian incidents.

“The hard part is… [the incidents] that might be more microaggressions or hate speech, a lot of those go unreported. And that’s the same for any marginalized community or for women,” Raghu said. “A lot of them are just not captured unless it escalates to a point like we see here recently where elder AAPI people are being beaten and assaulted on the streets.”

It’s been a year since Raghu’s resolution was adopted on May 5, 2020. Still, racism against the AAPI community is rampant across the nation.

“I think that the most important thing for me [to remember] is that we’re all in this together. Every single marginalized community… It’s not competing interests,” Raghu said. “It’s Black Lives Matter; it’s talking about non-binary people and about women; it’s about all these groups. It’s about undocumented Americans. It’s that all of us are staying together.”

Raghu also emphasized how the AAPI community has a richness to it that often goes unnoticed and unappreciated. The Asian population is not a monolith, she says. There are many different cultures within it, each with their own nationalities, languages, cuisines and religions.

“Talk to people who don’t look like you or think like you… Just talk to different groups of people or people who live in different neighborhoods,” Raghu said. Another issue fueling anti-Asian racism is problematic policies. Raghu explains that the U.S. immigration policy is skewed to let people in who have the highest education and the ability to make the most money. By letting in only a certain demographic, it eliminates the true richness of the entire AAPI community. Raghu calls for reform in the immigration policy, which, like many other policies that impact the community, contributes to our current system of inequality.

Raghu recently attended a Stop Asian Hate rally in Huber Heights, Ohio. It was organized by Huber Height’s Diversity and Cultural Committee, which formed after the murder of George Floyd last year. She learned about the rally through her involvement with Ohio Progressive AAPI Women’s Leadership (OPAWL). Raghu’s participation in the anti-racism rallies, OPAWL and her participation in the antihate resolution are all examples of how she is trying to fight this racism.

“All of it is really just trying to uplift other AAPI voices that have gone unheard for so long and trying to add that to all the other voices, so that we can speak collectively for fairness,” Raghu said.

Raghu recommends that students at Miami and those in the Oxford community get involved by encouraging a diversity of people to become politically engaged. She assures that the City Council is always ready to listen to and help students and community members, and she invites everyone to attend public meetings.

“If you’re of an identity that constantly gets ignored, or a marginalized identity, but you’re in the room, it becomes a lot harder to ignore you,” Raghu said.

Li, Raghu and the members of AAA are only a fraction of the people who are fighting for change in Oxford. This change would make the community not only more inclusive and accepting, but also more accountable for its past and future actions. By holding others to these standards, they hope Oxford can be a welcoming home to all.