Bear-Arms
Mentor
AsianWeek Staff Report, Jul 14, 2006
Chinese for Affirmative Action, also known as the Center for Asian American Advocacy, held its 37th anniversary dinner last month, marking recent changes in leadership of APA community organizations, and challenging APAs to question their place in American society.
It was executive director Vincent Pan's first annual gala. He became the fifth executive director in four years after permanent director Diane Chin resigned and was succeeded by interim directors Ted Wang, Brian Cheu and Charles Greene.
"I was beginning to think CAA had made interim director a permanent position," joked Pan.
Pan noted his ascension coinciding with other nonprofit leadership changes, including the retirement of CAA board member Rolland Lowe from his medical practice, and CAA founder Ling-chi Wang as a full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
CAA's work for justice and equality is continuing with programs like developing parent leaders in Visitacion Valley, retraining former Chinatown garment workers, and fighting prejudice.
CAA honored Sandra Lee Fewer of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, API Equality for their work to end marriage discrimination for LGBT couples, Alan Wong and the late Larry Jack Wong for successfully introducing the 1960s and 1970s War on Poverty programs in the Chinese American community.
"An Orwellian notion of color-blindness has infiltrated our public policy and is rolling back decades of racial [progress]," said Pan of the challenges ahead. "These policies create not a society blind to race, but rather a society blind to racism. Public schools have re-segregated. Glass ceilings persist. New barriers to opportunity and democracy confront immigrants, language minorities, and communities of color."
The keynote address was delivered by Professor Michael Omi, chair of the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley.
Highlights of Omi's keynote, 'The Unbearable Whiteness of Being;
Positioning Asian Americans'
"A dominant black/white framing of race in the U.S. has meant that little or no attention was given, for example, to the nearly 20,000 Vietnamese refugees who fled Louisiana and Mississippi for Houston, Texas," Omi noted. "And the illegal immigration debate is seen as a Latino issue even though it is estimated that 13 percent of the nation's 12 million undocumented immigrants are Asian."
Omi said that as whites lose their majority status with the increased number of Americans of color, they may seek greater assimilation of Asian Americans as a "function of preserving white privilege."
"This puts a different spin on the topic of whether Asian Americans are becoming white. Perhaps the issue to be addressed is not whether the category of 'white' is expanding to include Asian Americans, but why, given the current racial scene, is there a move to expand our notion of whiteness."
Source
Chinese for Affirmative Action, also known as the Center for Asian American Advocacy, held its 37th anniversary dinner last month, marking recent changes in leadership of APA community organizations, and challenging APAs to question their place in American society.
It was executive director Vincent Pan's first annual gala. He became the fifth executive director in four years after permanent director Diane Chin resigned and was succeeded by interim directors Ted Wang, Brian Cheu and Charles Greene.
"I was beginning to think CAA had made interim director a permanent position," joked Pan.
Pan noted his ascension coinciding with other nonprofit leadership changes, including the retirement of CAA board member Rolland Lowe from his medical practice, and CAA founder Ling-chi Wang as a full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
CAA's work for justice and equality is continuing with programs like developing parent leaders in Visitacion Valley, retraining former Chinatown garment workers, and fighting prejudice.
CAA honored Sandra Lee Fewer of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, API Equality for their work to end marriage discrimination for LGBT couples, Alan Wong and the late Larry Jack Wong for successfully introducing the 1960s and 1970s War on Poverty programs in the Chinese American community.
"An Orwellian notion of color-blindness has infiltrated our public policy and is rolling back decades of racial [progress]," said Pan of the challenges ahead. "These policies create not a society blind to race, but rather a society blind to racism. Public schools have re-segregated. Glass ceilings persist. New barriers to opportunity and democracy confront immigrants, language minorities, and communities of color."
The keynote address was delivered by Professor Michael Omi, chair of the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley.
Highlights of Omi's keynote, 'The Unbearable Whiteness of Being;
Positioning Asian Americans'
"A dominant black/white framing of race in the U.S. has meant that little or no attention was given, for example, to the nearly 20,000 Vietnamese refugees who fled Louisiana and Mississippi for Houston, Texas," Omi noted. "And the illegal immigration debate is seen as a Latino issue even though it is estimated that 13 percent of the nation's 12 million undocumented immigrants are Asian."
Omi said that as whites lose their majority status with the increased number of Americans of color, they may seek greater assimilation of Asian Americans as a "function of preserving white privilege."
"This puts a different spin on the topic of whether Asian Americans are becoming white. Perhaps the issue to be addressed is not whether the category of 'white' is expanding to include Asian Americans, but why, given the current racial scene, is there a move to expand our notion of whiteness."
Source