Emerging Work in Anti-Asian Racism on a University Campus

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss what anti-Asian racism looks like in the United States, referring to Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) experiences and the Asian American adaptation of the Critical Race Theory or the AsianCrit (Iftikar and Museus, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31:935–949, 2018; Museus, The misrepresented minority: New insights on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and their implications for higher education. Stylus, 2013). Multiple myths about AAPI intricately overlap to ensure that anti-Asian racism remains alive, and prevent AAPI groups from achieving solidarity within and across other racial/ethnic groups (Zheng, Harvard Business Review, 2021). Four of these myths are the Model Minority Myth, Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome, AAPIs as a monolith, and the hypersexualization and emasculation of AAPI individuals. The emerging work of the Oakland University AAPI Employee Resource Group (AAPI ERG) is informed by the tenets of the AsianCrit, and strives to drive organizational values that focus on improving AAPI visibility and representation on a Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) by being the voices of AAPI employees. The main strategies used to accomplish this goal are: (1) disseminate information to debunk the myths; (2) improve data collection and transparency of outcomes to ensure all types of racially motivated incidents on campus are captured; (3) define bias, hate, and hate speech in a way that honors all marginalized voices; and (4) improve messaging about mental health, as racism is mentally taxing. As the AAPI issue is intricately intertwined with systemic racism, this group believes that working alongside other marginalized groups is vital for the success of this work.