What led us to start this nonprofit

Right before my third-grade year, my family moved into a neighborhood, one that was drastically different from the last. As a new student, and one of the only Asian boys on campus, I found it hard to fit into the tight-knit community as I now lived in a predominantly-white world. 

Growing up in a neighborhood where there was no specific race that dominated the area, I always found a place where I could fit in with people who were similar to me in one way or another. 

At first, I made friends with some of the white kids. Our carefree yet naive minds allowed us to frolic about on the playground together. When both sides started to mature, we grew aware of the awkward divide between the people of color and whites of the real world. We could not sit with the “popular” kids at lunch. They only used my friends and me for answers to the toughest math problems or summaries of the longest English chapters. Both groups in my grade pushed each other into corners, isolated from one another.

Recently in my US history class, we learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and previous to the course, I had never heard much about this. In middle school, my literature teacher briefly brushed over the Japanese Internment during World War 2. I believe that ethnic study classes are slowly gaining traction in the US school system, however, Asian Americans still remain largely erased from the history they played a large role in. 

I still remember my fourth-grade social studies project— our class was studying the Gold Rush, something all California fourth-graders learned. I was excited because I had asked to research Chinese immigrants during that era. Growing up in California, I knew that “San Francisco” translated to “Gold Mountain” in Chinese. The name had stuck ever since Chinese immigrants arrived on the shores of Northern California in the 1850s, eager to try their luck in the gold mines. Now I’d have the chance to learn about them. My excitement was short-lived. I remember heading to the library with my class and asking for help. I remember the librarian’s hesitation. She finally led me past row after row of books, to a corner of the library where she pulled an oversized book off the shelf. She checked the index and flipped to a page about early Chinese immigrants in California. That was it. One page. In my entire school library that was it. It was around that time that I began questioning how I, as a 10-year-old Asian American boy, fit in. It seemed I didn’t. The history books didn’t include Chinese Americans or Asian Americans as a whole. With the exception of a few token roles, Asian Americans were invisible on television and film. Although the role of Asian Americans and their importance in society has definitely improved over the years, when I sit in my history classroom, I am still not sure how Asian Americans like myself, became part of the fabric of the United States. 

I used to think that history was all facts, that it was just black and white with nothing in between, but it is far from that. The way history is taught in our classrooms is problematic as textbooks continue to glorify white people who have supported and contributed to slavery. What these textbooks fail to include is the history and oppression of people of color. When thinking about US history as a whole, the textbooks used in our school system is pretty much limited to slavery and the civil war, Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights Movement- all of which are told from an exclusively white perspective. They teach us that slavery is over while failing to talk about prison labor; they tell us that the Civil Rights Movement gave everyone the right to vote, but don’t talk about voter suppression; the list goes on and on. It is our job as a generation to educate the next generation on all aspects of culture and the differences that these history books fail to teach. 

Experiences like these fuel my passion for making a change in our community, specifically the younger generations. Introducing and welcoming cultural differences in young children could go a long way in our future of acceptance and the embracement of diversity.