MARCH 29, 2021
Dear Stanford Community,
I write to let you know that my extended five-year term as Faculty Director of CCSRE concludes at the end of August when I will return to my role as full professor in TAPS, AAAS, FGSS and of course, CCSRE. During the last five years, we have seen the approval of a Ph.D. minor, an increase in degree conferrals to our students, the recognition of staff, the awarding of internal faculty research grants, and national funding for humanities and racial research from the Mellon Foundation and from the Public Interest Technology Network to support our Racial Justice and Technology work. The assistance of the administration—the President, Provost and especially Deans Saller, Satz and Anderson—enabled us to update our building, redo our website, create a faculty steering committee, host postdocs, add more graduate fellows, welcome new FDI faculty and begin to work even more closely with our Alums and Board members. I hope that our proposal for a university-wide institute for race studies or another significant structure comes to fruition.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with brilliant students, alums, Board Members, visitors, numerous units across campus and faculty here and abroad. The talented and hard-working CCSRE staff deserve special mention for their unwavering commitment to this unit. I believe that CCSRE is poised to welcome a future leader who will build upon the intellectual and fiscal trajectory we have begun. I look forward to June 4thwhen we celebrate CCSRE’s 25thanniversary and get to laud the student activists whose vision helped to bring this unit to fruition as well as all the members of our community. (In other words, this note is not goodbye!) In my remaining months, I will do my best to continue this legacy and usher in what many of us believe is an auspicious period for changing race relations and the study of racism at Stanford and across the globe.
Wishing everyone well in what remain truly trying and yet transformative times.
Warmly,
Jennifer DeVere Brody
Faculty Director of CCSRE
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Be Bold, Be Proud, Speak Up:
Raising Asian American Daughters Now
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Ellen Oh's daughters. Image provided by Oh. |
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BY ELLEN OH | March 21, 2021
Originally published in TIME
I hesitated to write about the tragic events of the last few days and the swell of racist attacks on Asian Americans over the last year. Being biracial, maybe I’m not Asian enough. Why would people want to hear what I have to say? I’m not a writer. I should do what I always do – stay in the background, create platforms to uplift others, keep my head down, but how Asian is that?! I’m fighting decades of ingrained impulses to write this, but here goes.
Both of my daughters had birthdays this week. One turned eleven, the other seven. I’ve been focused on ordering
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cupcakes, prepping for a zoom party, and thinking of all the ways I can make their days extra special after a long, strange year. Everything felt extra hard—like I was slogging through a swamp with an invisible weight on my back. But I didn’t have time to stop and think about the heaviness or the dark clouds overhead. I needed to deliver Birthday Happiness for my girls!
Now that the parties are over, I recognize that weight as sadness for our country, for fellow Asian Americans, for my daughters.
What does it mean to grow up as an Asian American woman now? How do I teach my girls to be strong and bold and proud when Asian-fetishizing misogynists or white supremacists could gun them down just because they are having a bad day? When our elders are getting pushed and punched on the street just for being Asian? How can I protect them? How can they protect themselves?
But even as I wonder how I’m going to save my daughters, I’m starting to realize that it is my girls and their generation who will save me, save us. They are growing up amid a cultural awakening that will disrupt the toxic norms of the past before they sink too deeply into my girls’ subconsciousness.
Read Ellen Oh's full post on CCSRE's blog here.
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Ellen Oh is the director of programs at Stanford ARTS, a long-time collaborator with CCSRE, a mother, and Midwest-transplant living in the Bay Area. She has worked in the arts & social justice space for years but is still learning to find her voice.
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The long, sickening history of
anti-Asian violence in America
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BY GORDAN H. CHANG (History)
March 26, 2021
The sickening spate of recent anti-Asian hate, most dramatically highlighted by the horrific murders in Atlanta, is not anomalous, but is the current manifestation of an undercurrent of murderous racial violence against Asians that has long plagued the country. Atlanta was a wake-up call to confront that history of anti-Asian sentiment, often over-shadowed by the horrific histories of Native genocide and anti-Black violence.
Cowards and thieves preyed upon individual Chinese in California’s mountains and mining areas in the mid-19th century. Perhaps hundreds were murdered in cold blood for profit and sport. Mobs viciously and brutally killed others throughout the West: 18 Chinese were lynched and mutilated in Los Angeles in 1871; at least 28 were shot and their bodies burned in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885; villains killed 34 Chinese in Hells Canyon, Oregon in 1887. These acts of mass murder were blatant, sadistic, and committed with impunity of legitimate authority.
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In the 1930s, Filipino farm workers were commonly brutalized in California’s Central Valley. Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor were attacked as looking like the enemy, with their homes, shops, and persons assaulted. Assailants walked up to Japanese-appearing individuals and shot them in public or right in the beds of their own homes. Other Asians, taken as being Japanese, were victimized too.
The most infamous example of anti-Asian racism is the murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in 1980. Two unemployed white auto workers bludgeoned Chin to death on a Detroit street after accusing him of being Japanese and stealing their jobs.
In 1989, a gunman in military fatigues opened fire on a Stockton, California elementary school. He killed five Asian children between the ages of 6 and 8. He wounded more than 30 others, most also of Cambodian and Vietnamese background. Their ethnicity was not an issue: only their “race.”
...Former President Trump’s association of COVID-19 with race (the “Chinese virus,” the “kung flu”) opened the can of racial scapegoating. He legitimized the anti-Asian violence that steadily mounted this past year. The Atlanta atrocity emphasizes the danger of stigmatizing Asians as social threat and the implications of international politics on U.S. domestic life: the emotional rhetoric that has accompanied the sharp decline in U.S.-China relations has fueled racial hatred. Read the complete opinion piece here.
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WHAT IS POPULATION?
Investigating Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry
In Genomics Research
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APRIL 7 | 4p PT
Alice Popejoy is a Stanford postdoctoral scholar who studies biomedical data sciences, and speaks to the role — and pitfalls — of race, ethnicity and ancestry in research. In clinical research, scientists often invoke race, ethnicity and ancestry to better understand underlying factors that contribute to disease. But while race- or ancestry-based information can play an important role in health research its use in science can be misguided.
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BOOK TALK
A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crime and What It Means for Justice
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RACE, TECH + CIVIL SOCIETY
Webinar
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FACULTY RESEARCH FELLOW
Chautauqua
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RACE IN MEDICINE
Speaker Series
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RACE IN MEDICINE SPEAKER SERIES
Spring '21
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in partnership with Ethics in Society
May 5: Anti-Racism Workshop (no speaker)
in partnership with Ethics in Society
May 26: TBD
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AMERICA's BLACK-WHITE DIVIDE
Held on March 18, 2021
Speakers:
Lawrence Bobo (Harvard)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Harvard)
Claude Steele (Stanford)
Moderated by Margaret Levi
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Have news or events to share? |
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We invite news and stories written by and about our CCSRE community—including from faculty, students, staff, alumni, and on and off campus partners—as well as race-centered events submissions to feature in our newsletter and blog.
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