She continued that activism at Duke University, building on the work of past organizers in calling for the creation of an Asian American studies department on the Durham, N.C., campus. In February, after a two-decade effort, the university finally established a minor in Asian American studies.“Ethnic studies gives me a lot of historical context that I carry with me … especially as an Asian person growing up in the American South,” said Khoo, who is Malaysian and was born in Singapore.
Just as these student actions came in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the current push for ethnic studies curriculums follows a wave of protests in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of White law enforcement or vigilantes across the United States and a global pandemic that has disproportionately impacted people of color.
Research on ethnic studies programs already in existence suggest positive outcomes. In 2020, the San Francisco Unified School District voted unanimously to implement a pilot ethnic studies course in high schools. Eighth-graders with a grade-point average at or below 2.
Esther Kim Lee, a professor at Duke and the director of the Asian American and Diaspora Studies program, came to campus in January 2018 to interview for her current position. Students were still on winter break, so Lee was told that the campus would be very quiet. Yet when she was giving a talk as part of her interview process, a group of Asian American students unexpectedly walked into the lecture hall and sat in the front row.
After the Atlanta-area spa shootings in March 2021, the group released a set of demands that included Yashita Kandhari, a senior at Davidson College studying sociology and gender and sexuality studies, was one of the five original members who drafted demands for the Asian American Initiative.The group printed out its demands and pasted them to the pillars of the main academic buildings and the statues and sculptures on campus at night, a tactic also employed by similar groups like the Who’s Teaching Us campaign at Stanford University.
I think it doesn't matter they are come from, as long as they are genius and have high intelligence to wins the programs i think is ok , not also come from the asian country , but any different races and gender can do it very well