On February 19, the School came together over Zoom for a Community Conversation on Pan-Asian identity. Students and faculty were required to attend the event.
The topics discussed included questions about whether Pan-Asian-identifying members of the community have experienced increased anti-Asian and xenophobia after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic; whether asking about people’s names in their native language is offensive; and why conversations about Asian identity often center on East Asian ethnicities.
Many students and faculty expressed positive feelings about the event. Rhea Shah ’22 thought the conversation provided a helpful reminder that “Asia is a continent, and all Asians are not the same.”
The event follows a February 3 Community Conversation on the same topic, although attendance at the first event was optional, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the Choate community. Attendance to conversations in the fall, including ones on Black and queer identity, had been required. The lack of a similar stipulation for the February 3 event felt like a microaggression to many members of Choate’s Pan-Asian community.
“It rubbed me the wrong way,” said Hugo Chung ‘22. “I think when the first one wasn’t required, it sent a certain message to the Asian community at Choate. It felt a little contrived that the second one was happening now.”
To Sofia Galarza ’23, the chain of events made it feel all the more important for the School to continue facilitating Community Conversations. She said, “The reason we have conversations like this, because people unknowingly do things that are offensive and that hurt others.”
Director of Equity and Inclusion Dr. Rachel Myers has said that scheduling the first conversation so that it did not overlap with other school events — and so that all students and faculty could attend it — was “immensely challenging.”
Dr. Myers said that she “completely understood” the pain some community members felt by the guidelines of the first event, adding, “It was hard personally to hear that some took it as me being anti-Asian or not fully supportive of all identities in our community.” She promised “to uplift shared conversations and understanding of all identities” on campus.
Still, Dr. Myers said, not all future Community Conversations will be mandatory, especially when they begin to occur in person. “When I designed this program, it was designed to take place in person,” she said. Anonymously asking and answering questions in real time is not only logistically difficult but fraught with emotional risk. “I feel it would be harmful to force people who are being vulnerable and honest in a space to have to look around at people who would rather be anywhere but in that space,” she said.
Upcoming Community Conversations, which students and faculty will be required to attend, include one in March to be centered on Jewish identity and another in May focusing on mental health.
