Link to Audio Clip: https://www.bravevoices.fieldscenter.princeton.edu/princetonians-fight-for-asian-american-studies

Zoom Interview on July 5, 2020

KH: Karen Ho (interviewee)

FM: Fumika Mizuno (interviewer)

FM:

I'm Fumika Mizuno interviewing Professor Ho. I'm wondering if you could briefly introduce yourself?

KH:

Yes. Hi Fumika. Thanks for having me. I'm Karen Ho and I'm currently a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and I did my graduate degree at Princeton. PhD in anthropology.

Before that, I got a Masters and a Bachelors degree in Feminist Studies. The Master's in Education at Stanford University. At both universities that I studied, I was involved in student activism for ethnic studies and for the creation of critical race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, sexuality studies programs, et cetera.

FM:

Thank you. If you could start off by just telling me a little bit about where you grew up and the town that you're from.

KH:

Yeah. So I actually grew up in two small towns near Memphis, Tennessee. I grew up in the American South in the 1970s and 1980s. As you can probably imagine, growing up in the American South, that Asian Americans and what being Asian American means is really triangulated in between black and white.

And certainly, that framed and helped to sort of construct my own experiences and consciousness about race, about being constructed as “other”, as foreign, and certainly as non-belonging, but at the same time also being constructed as relatively valorized especially in relation to, and in disciplinary relation to, African Americans.

You are, on the one hand, and Claire Jean Kim who actually does critical race theory and political science writes about this, right, that part of the construction of Asian Americans as relatively valorized in relation to African Americans is to provide that disciplinary function from the sort of purview of the state and from the purview of whiteness. So Asian Americans can serve as some kind of a proxy.

At the same time, Asian Americans are constructed as sort of perpetual foreigners and so does not necessarily get the protections of the state or the full rights of citizenship, because one is always framed as outside the body politic, as not belonging, et cetera, et cetera.

Then those two work hand in hand. So growing up in Tennessee, one really experiences that viscerally, on the one hand being framed as a model minority for explicit disciplinary purposes against African Americans so that they could be framed as the misbehaving, or the minority that protested too much, et cetera, et cetera, and so rendered invisible the structural histories and ongoing contexts that came out of enslavement and Jim Crow.

And yet at the same time, I would get tapped at the grocery store and not only asked where I was from, but, you know, people would do Kung Fu moves on me and would ask me if I knew their cousin from Thailand who had traveled to Thailand or something like that, or their cousin knew somebody who had traveled to Thailand. Was I related to them? You know, complete strangers. Every time that happened then, I would be reminded that I certainly wasn't understood as belonging simply because of their interpretation of how I looked.

What's also interesting is growing up in Tennessee, is that you also sort of recognize that not only is there this racial binary between black and white, but it was something that Asian Americans were not simply in the middle of, but really being Asian American caused you to have a really visceral context and consciousness through which to understand what these constructed dichotomies meant.

Right? Because you are constantly sort of from the outside, right, from a standpoint of the liminal and using that viewpoint to understand what the ultimate other, and the ultimate self is constructed into being. It wasn't so much that I was trained in Asian Americanness as an identity or as a heritage, but as a lens, as a set of experiences to understand racial hierarchies, to understand racism in relation to one another. In many ways it allowed me, I think, a kind of critical insight into the politics of Asian American Studies, right?

A lot of the politics of Asian American Studies, it's of course important as issues of identity and heritage, but I think even simultaneously and as important -- or perhaps even more important -- is the ways in which it serves as the intellectual, political and social sort of critical lens to understand the hierarchies of racism and the very making of these racial categories in the first place.

They're certainly not given or static. So part of that growing up is precisely that, I should also say that I was actually not born in the US. I was born in Taiwan and immigrated here when I was three. So for all intents and purposes growing up here, but then also having a direct connection to Taiwan. My parents, my dad actually was the first OB/GYN within a 50 mile radius in Covington, Tennessee which is the first small town in Tennessee that I grew up.

Then we later moved to Millington Tennessee, which is only like 20 miles away. My father sort of being that first OB GYN from the outside, looking in, he would sort of be framed as a country doctor. But on the other hand, he was also a person that had a lot of responsibility in terms of the health care within a 50 mile radius of lots of folks who are needing reproductive and medical care here. So that sort of certainly fueled into both my experiences as being somebody who was relatively privileged, but also somebody who was other.

Oftentimes people ask me, why do I not have a Southern accent? As you know, language and culture are intimately linked and in a sense, to actually get that accent right, to cultivate that accent in some ways, one actually needs to belong. Part of my non Southern accent is indicative of the kind of exclusion as a kind of otherness.

My social life was mainly family and other immigrants and not necessarily in the spaces of insideness. So I think that's in part why I was never deeply socialized into that Southern accent. This was precisely because of experiences of being foreign, et cetera. And then from there, I went to college in California.

FM:

Can you tell me about what that transition was like going to California and starting your undergraduate studies?

KH:

Going to California was you know, my parents had always romanticized California as somewhere that folks should go to the West coast for study. And part of the sort of journey of going to Stanford is that, growing up in a small town in Tennessee and all the things that, and my parents are immigrants in the sense of when we were growing up, they had no idea what the SAT was or AP classes and all that kind of stuff.

I distinctly remember being a teenager and going, wow, you can actually call a pizza shop and they can deliver pizza to your house. My parents would be like, okay, you have to do that because I have no idea how this works. So, as an immigrant kid or as a child of immigrants, there's all these kinds of things that you have to figure out how to do like order pizza. This strange thing for my parents who are from Taiwan, like you just call and order pizza delivery, how weird.

Part of it was just figuring out things, right? Figure it out. Like here I am in California on my own. We flew a plane, or I flew a plane by myself. Two big suitcases. That was it. And the whole ways in which folks are sort of well, I mean, I don't know. I know that with my kids, I would be one of those parents that drove there, booked a hotel room, helped them move, made sure their bed was on, how do you want to decorate your room, right.

I'm trying not to be too much of a helicopter parent, but as a child of immigrant parents, they were not helicopter. They had really high expectations and then when it was time for us to go off to college, we went off to college, and we had to figure stuff out on our own.

I actually entered Stanford premed, being a dutiful daughter of a physician. I tried it out for a very long time, two full years while taking history of poverty classes. I remember taking a class my sophomore year called poverty and homelessness in the US taught by Al Camarillo in the History Department at Stanford, et cetera, et cetera.

But it wasn't until surely, I can't quite remember if it's the beginning of my junior year, where I stumbled into a class in the feminist studies department. It was one of those classes that really blows your mind in the sense that you really, you begin to understand the ways in which history, culture and topologies, sociology, all of these classes.

Many of these classes certainly talk about the constructiveness of certain kinds of histories or expose you to different cultures, et cetera. But what was really unique about feminist studies, especially at Stanford, was that it really questioned your epistemology and your ways of knowing and to look at the very cultural assumptions and the power laden assumptions you make in the study of history or in the study of culture or in the study of groups and categories.

The idea of being opened up to not only an interrogation of the status quo, but looking at the ways in which ways of knowing and worldviews and epistemologies are also themselves power laden and structured according to various interests, historical conjunctions, et cetera, really opened up my eyes. It was at that moment that I decided that I was going to major in feminist studies.

Now, what was really interesting is that I remember calling my parents and telling them, you know, I've decided not to major in bio or hum bio or whatever. At the time there was this major at Stanford called human biology and people called it hum bio. I said, I want to major in Feminist Studies.

My father thought I was talking about home economics, right? Like home-ec. I was like, no, dad, I'm not learning sewing. Feminist studies, it's not like home-ec. I had to culturally translate what this meant for them. But it was an experience for both of us.

By the time I became a junior in college, I had this sort of knowledge or the wherewithal, but also the growing confidence to not just say Parents, you don't understand. Do not go necessarily down that track, but to say, what was it about you know, studying this and pursuing a PhD or intellectual life and about writing and reading and research, that really compelled me.

I realized that for them, it wasn't simply that they were upset at what I had chosen, but then I had to do the work of convincing them of making the case for why. To make it compelling for them about why I was going to give up doctorhood, becoming an MD for this. I had to actually say what this was and to be fair, they knew that becoming a physician had all kinds of wonderful things. The most important was for them, helping people. It was interesting.

My dad actually said, he goes, you know, it's not about the money. It's not necessarily even about security, even though those things are great. But we just think that you'd be a really good doctor because you empathize and care about people. And I was like, Oh, well, I can still do that. That gave me something to latch on to about how I'm doing this kind of work and this kind of research can really showcase a kind of care and a kind of empathy and wanting to make the world a better place. It wasn't maybe five, six years later as I'm getting my PhD in anthropology now. Remember also getting a PhD means that you don't necessarily know what's afterwards, right, because a university professorship job is very few and far between. For example, being in the politics department, it's not one day people go, hey, we're hiring a hundred new professors, right. It's not that kind of corporate growth area. You have a new faculty member, usually sometimes, it's because somebody doesn't get tenure or somebody tenured retires, or someone leaves a university. You really may maintain a cap on how many faculty are in a given department and especially with the social economic climate these days, it's certainly something that's not necessarily growing.

I had to make that case and also get them to kind of come along with me in the journey as I pursued this PhD and figured out what was next. Then at Stanford is when I got involved in student activism for Asian American Studies. I was part of an intersectional coalition of students who were advocating and doing work for ethnic studies in particular, Asian American Studies and Latino studies. I was part of the group of students who actually took over the faculty senate at the time. I think this was ‘95 or ‘94. I can't quite remember, but right before I came to Princeton, and it was partly that movement that got Stanford to create something called CRES and CRES actually stands for comparative race and ethnicity studies at Stanford. I think at Stanford now, it's a center. It's a center that brings together many of these programs and units to study at the intersections of these important issues.

That was what happened at Stanford and then from there, fall of ‘94, I started a PhD program in anthropology.

FM:

Hearing your story going from premed to gender studies, that's really, really amazing. I'm also thinking about going into academia so it was really interesting to hear your perspectives.

KH:

I'm always sort of, you know, go for it. But you want to be able to make the case for it, intellectually, emotionally, because this is, unlike studying for a profession where you can, in a sense, both study whatever you want, but if you're going towards a particular profession, it's linked to a potential job, right? It's linked to potential position. Part of being in academia or doing this kind of work is that they're not necessarily linked to a particular position or a particular job. Part of what you can do to attenuate for that insecurity is to really be committed to what you're studying and why it's important on a variety of registers, right? Intellectually, socially, politically, emotionally et cetera, et cetera.

FM:

That was really helpful. So how did you get involved in similar types of movements at Princeton after you started your graduate studies?

KH:

It was pretty seamless because the undergraduates at Princeton had been almost doing an exact similar thing as the undergraduates at Stanford. Now the undergraduates at Stanford had a slightly different landscape because there was actually a previous sit-in at the president's office at Stanford in 1989, which I had just entered Stanford, so it was not a part of it. There was a longer history of that kind of activism at Stanford. And yet, there were also things that weren't done after the sit-in as, you know, right from the 25 year aftermath, a student lifecycle is that they onboard and off cycle every four years. So there's a lot of loss of moment, knowledge et cetera, et cetera.

Coming to Princeton and being a young graduate student, you're sort of in the middle between still being close to being an undergrad, but yet you're a graduate student. You're bringing that experience and so as a graduate student, I'm not sure exactly how I came to know the undergraduates. But we met pretty early on in the middle of fall semester. As we got to talking, it was evident that they had had a long history. You know, five, seven plus years of meeting with administrators, putting together proposals, doing all the things that they're supposed to be doing, talk to this person. Okay. Go talk to that person and bring this person and that person together in the same room. Okay. Write a memo. Do that again. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.

When I started meeting with the undergraduates, we started another cycle of rinse and repeat. I remember putting together this packet where I helped gather sample syllabi from across the country. A sample social and intellectual justification of why ethnic studies was really crucial to not just diversifying the curriculum but really opening up and deepening and nuancing the curriculum for all students.

When you ignore race or when you ignore colonialism and when you ignore enslavement in a sense, your larger scholarship actually weakens. It weakens precisely because you're not engaging with many of the founding historical conjunctions and processes that help to seed and work in tandem with the burgeoning of intellectual thought.

And these historical processes and conjunctions happened hand in hand. So if you're rendering invisible, all these key structural processes that help to seed Western thought, then you're actually denying yourself. You're actually rendering it less nuanced and enlightening. Key events and processes and understandings that would actually help you think about society, structure, politics, intellectual history in general.

So this was the sort of conversation that we were all having, but the conversation we're also having is that many of the undergraduates at Princeton also happened to be juniors and seniors, which meant they had been fighting and struggling and trying to get administrators to listen to why the subject of study was so crucial, and they were sort of recognizing the expiration date to their own timeframe being a student, just as when I was at Stanford and being a senior. I was actually also part of when I got an MA education. So I stayed an extra year. I was there for five years. I had just come off of that sort of being at the tail end of my student career at Stanford, and recognizing that when you're at that cusp and you have this sort of long history of inaction, then it really is important to agitate, to be active. Because otherwise, it's really difficult. You leave and it's really difficult to get first years who are new to have that sense of embodied historical experience, that urgency that you necessarily sense and embody at the end of your four years.

I remember making these analogies about, okay, you'd been hitting your head against the wall for four years. It's really tough. We gotta turn on the washing machine because you know there is a sense that-- there's a fear and a very real fear that their work and their knowledge and their agitation and their convincing and their writing would somehow get lost or fall to ether and the cycle would begin again.

Administrators, just as you know, what's happening today with the Black Lives Matter movement. We all know that that sort of, the police force is an arm of the state, that they're embedded in the social order that protects the property in whiteness or whiteness as property. That has long historical roots. People might theoretically know this, but yet if folks weren't on the streets for so long, we would never have really thought about defunding public police departments, et cetera, et cetera. We just would not have gone there. There is something about uprising that makes people feel that urgency of it.

And certainly folks wouldn't have uprised had they not been heard. You only do this if you're unheard. You only do this if all the regular channels have been exhausted. No one has time to do this. So you only do this when it's urgent and when you recognize that this is a particular confluence of moments.

I was able to draw from that experience of being at that tail end of that time frame, and then coming to Princeton and encountering and engaging with really motivated and inspired undergraduates who are juniors and seniors, who are also at an end of their time frame and who had had this experience of very well intentioned people closing the door on them, not because of hurtfulness or et cetera. But part of it was institutional inertia. And everyone needed to be galvanized. So a lot of it was just the accident of that timeframe confluence.

FM:

Tell me about the actual day itself, the sit in and your role in it. Could you give me like a play by play of what you remember from that day?

KH:

It actually took a long time to get to that moment. By the time we decided to do a sit in, it was already April. I remember the end of the semester is May. We really tried everything. I think that we had everything from signatures and petitions to 500 page packets of why this, and we had spoken to deans and we had assembled faculty and we had given them histories and timeframes and et cetera.

Even with this, and even with the knowledge that we were going to graduate or gonna dissipate. it still took until almost the end of the semester because this is not something that any of us would have necessarily aspired to do or have the time to do with, by the way, senior papers and junior papers. And for me, a preliminary exam was on the horizon.

And yet it really sort of felt that part of our job in this work for social justice and helping to transform the curriculum was to not let that work and that passion and that sort of inspiration get lost. We spent probably the last week of March and the first weeks of April going back and forth between planning, and is there something else that we could do? And how can we do this, that both makes our case and, and sort of impels the university to action as well as do it in a way that is empathetic to multiple people involved, so to speak. We weren't necessarily sure what to expect. We planned for everything from sleeping bags to snack food. Back then there weren't cell phones and that kind of thing.

We weren't exactly sure what to do, but we planned to the best of our imagination at the time. Activism is very different these days with everyone on smartphones. We also wanted to get the word out to have support from outside and inside. Because it was important to actually have rallies, to get the word out there. This is still in the mid 1990s and so we knew that we had to make the intellectual and the social case for why and so we spent a lot of time thinking. We spent a lot of time writing. To do an action, you don't just sort of plan for what you're going to put in your backpack, but you also plan for why this is compelling, why it's important. Why is it important for the next generation of students? Why is it important for academia?

We spent a lot of time thinking and writing and really sort of forcing ourselves to really understand what was socially and academically and scholarly at stake in doing something like this. We for example, did a lot of thinking around, okay, well, what if people are just saying, you're just doing this for Asian Americans. Are you just doing this for Latinos? And we would say, sure, right, certainly, this is about identity and heritage, but again, we're not taking these categories and groups for granted. First of all, these categories got constructed over time because of external racism, right? Because of the sort of founding conjunctures of immigration and enslavement and settler colonialism that's constructed, labor, exploitation, et cetera, to have constructed these groups in the first place.

These studies are about learning the larger historic social processes. It's about learning how groups get constructed and categorized and made in the first place. Not a priori. It's about how categories get put against one another and pitted against one another. It's about the relationship and the unequal relationship. We spent a lot of time thinking about why this was important and why this was important for social justice and academia writ large. What are we at school to learn? And how do we challenge the powers that wouldn't exist if we didn't constantly reproduce it? How do we throw a wrench in their reproduction, intellectually, scholarly about the learning of the status quo? What do we need? What can we do? What can we do in terms of our small part of the scholarly reproduction of unequal power hierarchies et cetera, et cetera, that's creating all kinds of problems from racism to planetary devastation.

We got to disrupt what we're passing on to the next generation. We spent a lot of time thinking and writing and talking with one another and really thinking about the voices in our head. Remember that there was also a lot of conservative students who are also taught to think that way. How would we be in dialogue and conversation with them? The argument that people, everyone sort of loves to throw up is that, well, if there's a study of this group, then how about this group and how about a study on Belgians and a course, a department on the Irish and how about, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

And we would have to talk about, well, there's the sort of politics of race, immigration and categorization of how particular European ethnicities actually became white. Part of the process of actually becoming white means that one can both belong in terms of Americanness. One’s no longer marked. At the same time, ethnicity becomes not so much a factor of instructional inequality, but just a general enhancer. So you've already sort of become American, accepted as a normative unmarked person, individual slash category. Ethnicity actually just becomes what one might call sort of symbolic ethnicity or dime-store ethnicity.

You can sort of become Irish on St. Patrick's day as an enhancer or British or French, or hybrid German and Swedish. But they're enhancers that actually don't change your sort of structural belonging and investment in whiteness. We had to learn those arguments about why, what was the difference in this sort of categorization, that experience of racism, of minoritized communities and categories? What was particular about anti-Blackness? What was particular about being indigenous and what was particular about sort of Asian Americans and Latinos being inside and outside, subject to labor, exploitation, and yet not part of belonging to the nation. All of these things need to come together in relation to one another to help us see the larger picture about the making of the US.

You probably don't get this answer from a lot of people, but a lot of folks spent a lot of time thinking and talking and writing and that's partly how you get ready for these things. You realize that you're part of a larger conversation and you're part of a larger group of folks thinking about what does social justice mean academically and scholarly and in the world? So that's what a lot was happening for me during the day as well as the days proceeding is that they knew that I would have to be a thinker. I knew that I would have to be in conversation with everyone, from reporters of the Prince to administrators. And I knew that I would have to try to actually make the case for why this was an important endeavor that people were willing to risk their student status for.

Really sadly, the day of the takeover was also the day of the Oklahoma city bombing. And I remember sort of thinking, ah, this is just obviously so horrible. You have a terrorist bombing, a white supremacist terrorist bombing. Remember in ‘95, what's really horrible is that the federal government was actually busy profiling folks who they deemed to be sort of Muslim, Arab or other. It actually detracted them from actually looking at and exploring the ways in which a white supremacist white guy was actually involved in the bombing.

Again, because he's not marked, right. He's just an individual, meaning that his category is not being profiled. Because of that reason, unfortunate confluence of events, the students sit-in which is not a you know a terrorist (attack) by any means, obviously, right.

It was a very carefully and thoughtfully planned action to try to better the university and social justice movement. But of course, the news media has to cover that because of the scale and the destruction of it which meant on our side, and certainly a lot less important in that sense, given the loss of life, but iit meant that we also didn't get the media attention that we were hoping for. We were cognizant that it's not like we were gonna try to agitate for all the attention given the tragedies of what was happening. We really wanted to be careful there.

But media attention also means that I think that we probably could have had a few more concrete things come out of the action. Media attention helps to galvanize administrators because they know that they're being scrutinized. That's why it's so important to have a free press because you put your own institution that you care about under scrutiny to actually make it better. We were caught in the really hard place where we weren't trying to agitate for more attention in that sense, but it was sort of an unfair, unfortunate confluence of events where we lost the media attention because it was repurposed elsewhere. But I think had we have just a little bit more media attention, we probably could have galvanized or agitated for a few more concrete follow up and follow through of some of the demands of the day.

FM:

I'm wondering whether you think institutional inertia comes from being stuck in the status quo and not being open to new ways of thinking, or why did it take so long, do you think, for Princeton and other universities to start valuing these kinds of disciplines?

KH:

On the one hand, I think how it happens at various institutions is a really important historical component. Here's the good news, but it's also the not so good news. On the one hand, one could say that critical race studies from African American Studies to Indigenous Studies to Asian American Studies, Latino studies, post-colonial studies, feminist studies, that we've really significantly transformed the University, meaning that any discipline, whether you're in anthropology or politics or in sociology or in psychology, you're probably going to be exposed to somebody who is trained in that tradition.

As a student, you're probably sort of recognizing, Oh my gosh, I'm reading about people who are trained in the tradition of African American Studies, critical black studies and politics. Or trained in this tradition from somebody who has been doing work in Asian American Studies and post-colonial theory and anthropology, or various mixes of all of these, or somebody who's trained in feminist theory and gender studies, who's in an English department and you're reading these works and you go, you know what? They have this really great double and triple consciousness where they have to understand the received wisdom and other received wisdoms, and they have to upend them using the tools and epistemologies of these studies and philosophies to actually produce even more nuance to work. You see that happening.

I think in part, one of the reasons why it hasn't happened as much in certain universities is in part, actually the successes of these critical studies movements in the sixties, seventies and eighties is that they have succeeded in transforming all the normative disciplines. You're probably not going to have, hopefully, a new book that's taken seriously in politics or that's taken seriously in anthropology that deals with these categories or that deals with inequality and doesn't mention race. That book will probably not be taken seriously. That scholar will probably go well, you know, this person is sort of actually missing the point.

So what are the successes of these critical studies is that they have so transformed mainline disciplines in a good way that some universities might not feel it as sort of critical or a necessary to invest in these critical units and departments.

Now the downside is that they have to happen simultaneously. Always. You have to have the spaces where you are continually engaging and producing the cutting edge of feminist theory, of African American Studies, et cetera, et cetera, because often line in main line departments, they might have been transformed by these studies, but they're also not necessarily going to push these epistemologies forward. You're always going to need the transformation of mainline disciplines ongoing and the investment in these critical studies units. The frameworks and the archives and the conversations that they open up and make space for are really crucial.

So for example, today, you're going to see a lot of disciplines talk about settler colonialism. When I was in undergraduate as an undergraduate, few folks talked about settler colonialism. That sort of the process by which, especially in the US that you actually have settlers or white immigrants coming in and saying well, I'm the new native. I'm basically displacing for me to stay. And then I refashioned myself. They sort of knew when one thing's nativist in the US, one thinks of white folks who are claiming the land as their own. That's the new origin story.

These kinds of processes and understandings that are now taken for granted throughout many politics, and sociology and anthropology departments wouldn't have happened without critical indigenous thought. Right now, every discipline is sort of like, well, you gotta take into account settler colonialism. Yes, you do. But it's not going to happen without the co-production that's happening in these critical units. That's something that many universities take advantage of. They don't realize how important it is to have to the two together and depending on the history of the university or the institution, they might use that slippage to do something or not do something.

But it takes concerted student and faculty action over time. You have to take advantage of that four year window, and you also have to work with faculty and graduate students who are going to be in support of it. The student timeframe also is something that prevents a lot of institutions, but I think, what leads to that inertia is that they don't think of these things as going hand in hand.

FM:

So after you graduated from Princeton, did you go immediately to your University of Minnesota position?

KH:

I actually was a visiting professor at Wellesley for a year where I think I actually taught an Asian American Studies class. It was great. So I was a visiting assistant professor in the anthropology department, but I taught two classes. One was a little bit more directly on my own research on corporate financialization and inequality. The other course was on the social construction of race with a focus on Asian American communities and thinking through how Asian American Studies helps us actually better understand race and racial hierarchies in the US.

I taught there for a year but since then, I've been at Minnesota ever since.

FM:

How do you think now that you are a part of the faculty, how does your activism continue on the faculty side now?

KH:

For example, the involvement I had from 2017 to 2019, I was director of the RIGS Initiative here at the University of Minnesota, which stands for race, indigeneity, gender and sexuality studies. And part of that work was to really continue on to extend and field from the ongoing work that faculty do. This is happening from multiple sides and from multiple levels.

Many faculty also work to look at the ways in which their work, at many of these critical units, are necessary for the 21st century education of students, both graduate students and undergraduates. Part of it was just to support that and to really sort of galvanize that work from a departmental to a university level.

Why this critical work was important for folks who are in the education school, folks who were in civil engineering, folks who were within liberal arts, right-- why this sort of work was actually critical to really understand better community engagement, why this work was important to the folks who were in mainline disciplines, right. And yet they oftentimes don't realize how much they have to learn from and how much they have taken from these critical units. So my job was to really amplify the critical intellectual voices of these units to the larger university at large.

For example, in 2017 and 18 and 19, I was RIGS director in the wake of Trump. What RIGS meant at the level of the university really significantly and viscerally changed. After my first semester, immediately Trump does the racist travel bans, right? Immediately. He does the Muslim ban immediately. A few months after he starts putting children in cages, family separation at the border, racist profiling of Latinos, Mexican, Mexican Americans really bolstering the carceral state.

So what does RIGS do? RIGS organized a teach-in. And this is actually really crucial because the folks who are seeing the children in cages at the border and folks who are studying Chicano, Latino studies and borderlands, they recognized immediately that the US has a history of family separation, mainly native kids. So indigenous kids were put in boarding schools, separated from their parents as part of the whitening project, as part of the quote, kill the Indian, save the man project. This is the whole part of the way in which the destruction of culture became thought of as a good thing to foster Americanness.

And yet on the other hand, because it was always also about property and land, folks were never fully accepted. But we were because again, of the history of what RIGS does and means, we were able to link the family separations with what was going on with indigenous and American Indian boarding schools set up by the US government, right. They're part and parcel of the same processes of racism and separation of the “other” and border policing and the carceral state.

Similarly, at this teach-in, we made the connection between what was going on with the Muslim ban and Islamophobia and what happened with the Japanese American internment/incarceration. So you have almost exactly the same language about suspicion and enemy and travel bans that you had with the experiences of Japanese Americans in the middle of World War Two. There were actually folks who did a presentation between the Korematsu case and what was happening with the Islamophobia and Muslim travel ban.

These are the connections that are really important to make at the level of the university because you're looking at these broad policies that again, think about how they're framed as neutral. They're framed as a travel ban. Anybody who travels. And yet we know that they're not, right, because you have to attach the history of it. You have to look at what's being alighted. And it's not surprising that it's the RIGS units and that level of thinking of the history that’s sort of being paid attention to and the frameworks that can make these links between children in cages today and children in cage boarding schools a century ago or less than a century ago.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things that RIGS does, and it happens through both a student as well as sort of faculty work. So this is ongoing, to continually try to make the case for why these studies are important for academia writ large.

FM:

So I'm wondering whether you could talk about how those kinds of conversations have surrounded the George Floyd protest and how critical studies faculty and students have been understanding what is going on through their work.

KH:

Especially in the wake of the George Floyd murder, it becomes even more important for example, that folks understand the ways in which anti-Blackness and the processes of enslavement and segregation and Jim Crow really have framed an exclusion from property, from wealth, from belonging. These are actually really important histories that, well, in 2020, why are people still out in the streets? It's been, what has it been? It's been 1960, at 70 years since the civil rights movement, that's a long time. What's happened in the intervening 70 years?

Again, the critical units become really crucial to show this, and I would say that the really important reasons why the critical units are so crucial is that it's really history.

It's really easy to erase the sort of cultural and historical tracks that have actually created inequality or that have created the norm or have created unevenness. So for example, folks will often say, well, you know, it's been 70 years since the Civil Rights Movement, since housing, since equal opportunity and yeah. Why aren't we in a colorblind world yet?

It’s really important to mobilize this understanding that the market and property was always racialized. It was founded on segregation in a sense that only if you were white could you get the loan and not be red lined. And it's only if you actually lived in a racially homogenous -- framed as white -- neighborhood that your property values would rise. Because in a sense, the property markets were built-in where race and racism actually shaped whether your property could rise. Race and racism actually shaped supply and demand.

If you think about it, the ways of which sort of things are structured in the US, the moment a neighborhood integrates in terms of Black folks, immediately, given that integration in the US is a negative cultural value, it's a negative economic value, especially in the eyes of the dominant, then immediately in that neighborhood there will be a lot of supply and very low demand. And what happens when we have a lot of supply and very low demand, the housing prices go down. So one of the key factors in actually the growth and the ability to accrue property and accrue wealth was whiteness itself.

Yet, if we frame it as just about markets, as just about housing markets or just about property, it's thought of as neutral, right? What is the free market if anything but framed as neutral. And yet it's anything but neutral. Capitalism has no humble beginnings, right?

It's only through these processes that we talked about, the theft of land and labor, that capitalism actually receded in the US in the first place. So part of the work of these critical studies is to look at the ways in which things get framed as innocent, things get framed as free. Certain kinds of processes like markets get framed as neutral, and yet they’re shot through with racialized assumptions and inequalities in its very making and the very way in which property is accrued.

It's up to the critical studies to show this right, because many folks who are not in the critical studies accept these processes at face value. They take the terms, and they can do a great study around the terms if accepted at founding at face value, then you're going to see that they're going to have all of these other histories and makings dropout.

Oftentimes it's on the shoulders of these critical studies units that make the case for why innocence is being constructed here and not and, and one shouldn't take that at face value.

FM:

How do ethnic studies areas like Latino, Latina studies and Asian American Studies help provide nuance in a lot of times what is a black, white binary around race?

KH:

Both Latino studies and Asian American Studies and all these critical studies are transnational in nature. If you think about how Asians Asian Americans get crafted as a category, it has everything to do with American imperialism and war. We get crafted in the category. And markets, right? Us not wanting to intervene against other national and self-determined movements, projects, fights against you know, the Vietnamese were fighting off the French, right?

There's all these sorts of processes, but we want them to be capitalists like us, to be sort of a market. This is part of the whole project of the Cold War. So issues of race and war and militarization, imperialism go hand in hand in the framing of what constitutes Asian American in addition to sort of it being in the US you know, Asian American labor, et cetera. On the one hand, it's through Asian American Studies, you get a window into the larger transnational projects and the larger transnational global linking of people and processes.

To give you another example, many of the sort of Chinese -- and I'm putting here in quotes -- “Coolie” labor was first recruited in the US in the wake of the Civil War. So you know, late 1860s, and the reason being, there's a wonderful book called the Mississippi Chinese, the sociologist, James Loewen. And what he, for example, talks about is that imported Chinese male labor at the end of the Civil War was actually done to scare newly freed enslaved people.

We don't need you anymore. We have these Chinese folks. And yet, when reconstruction failed because the federal troops were taken out and Southern planters actually reconsolidated their power, they re-coerced African Americans to come in and become sharecroppers.

But how Chinese labor gets imported here as a disciplinary action, but also as a, we don't need you anymore; we have foreign labor. But also the extent to which they depended on captured and coerced labor from African Americans so that immediately you're in the center, right? The sort of racial playing off each other just by virtue of your first point of entry here is that you're in the middle of debates about freedom and emancipation and labor. And who's going to work in our fields, post emancipation.

At the same time, as you have folks try to figure out how to reconsolidate and recapture that labor and then what to do with all these Chinese men that are now here, once African American laborers got recaptured, then you actually have these foreign people, right?

So all of this mix is happening. There's these two anthropologists Paulla Ebron and Anna Tsing, who write these really great articles across minority discourses. And they talk about that African American men are framed in the US racial imaginary as being not only constructed as criminal, but as hyper-masculine, as really bodily as masculine, as sort of almost all body. Athletes, et cetera, et cetera. So there's this construction of physicality.

On the flip side, you have Asian American men who are oftentimes construed as being very smart. It's all mental, they're all brainy. They're all great at math. But they don't have, they're not sort of embodied in that sense. So what Tsing and Ebron say is that Asian American men are framed as the bodiless mind. And African American men are framed as the mindless body. And aren’t those two things different sides of the same racist coin?

Absolutely. Right. But you see how of course we want to upend binaries, but we have to take seriously the binary. Because Asian Americans get mobilized and they get used and abused within this binary to further render normative whiteness-- who has a normal brain and the normal body -- to further normalize whiteness and to further discipline African Americans. So we're in the middle, but we're also deployed for and against. But we also can shine a light on it as a window into these larger processes.

It's not so much that we need to create necessarily, a “where do we fit in the middle?” We're always there, right? That showcases how these dichotomies work as well as how they are being deployed. It’s not so much that the binary is not enough. Of course it's not enough, but the binary is really crucial to think with, because we're being used and mobilized to double down on those binaries.

FM:

I feel like I'm in a seminar. I think those are the questions that I wanted to ask. I'm wondering if there's anything that you feel like I haven't touched on that you'd like to say.

KH:

It's been a pleasure talking to you and it's been really delightful. I can't think of anything off the top of my head right now but if you want to send me a follow up email or continue a conversation on something that we forgot to talk about or ask, I'm happy to engage further, so we don't have to think about everything just now.

FM:

I just want to say thank you so much again, I feel every person I talk to brings their own perspectives, and I think you, in your academic background, your ideas, everything I hear, I'm like, Oh my gosh, there's so many levels of analysis. And it's just so interesting and insightful to listen to and pushes me to kind of go beyond the very simple ways that I think. I really learned a lot from this conversation.

KH:

Thank you Fumika. I think you got me to really recognize and talk about that part of the project of student activism and advocacy, especially around a study and especially around a critical study and how much learning is involved. How much reading and learning is involved because you sort of you have to understand normative philosophies and worldviews just to get at what's being alighted and obfuscated and obscured and and it's precisely the critical studies that really open up those lenses for you to get at and think through how to construct better philosophies, as well as being in conversation and engage with these other philosophies.

A lot of activism is also an intellectual project. And making the case and part of, for me, sustaining and galvanizing activism it is by actually putting together and bringing together an embodied critique. It's only when, and just to use the sort of canned phrase of the personal is political, but it's only when you bring together your own social, political, and intellectual trajectories with that of what's going on with other groups and peoples and other sort of injustices that are occurring-- it's only when you forge those together, that your critique can be even more trenchant. It can't be trenchant without being embodied. And it can't be trenchant without also engaging with the cutting edge scholarship.

So you have to put cutting edge scholarship with embodiment together with a larger understanding of injustice. It's only when you have those three things together that you can better make your case. That fuels the passion. If the passion is just for one particular person or a background or single community, that's just not going to cut it. You have to make the case in which they're related because they are related.

But we're often taught to frame it either as an individual lens, the particular heritage lens, or each group getting a study for themselves. It's not. It's a larger critique. We're part of a larger conversation and a larger scholarly enterprise about knowledge and what is knowledge for in the service of larger questions about humanity and also about justice at the same time.

When we think about these critical studies, we have to always put them together because it's so easy for folks who don't know anything about this history to frame them in ways that are belittling or that ghettoize them, or name a critique. If you think about these three things together, always, already, they really strengthen the importance of this cause. So talking to you really got me to re-remember many of those things. So I thank you for that.