Confronting Internalized Racism Workshop

by James Kuo

On Saturday, May 21, 2005, over 40 people opted to stay inside and discuss internalized racial oppression in the Asian Pacific American community in the University of Washington's Social Work Building as the U-District Street Fair bustled outside.

Attendees of the workshop ranged from a junior in high school to middle-aged professionals. Most of the people in attendance were already heavily involved in the APA community, but there still was a great diversity of backgrounds

The event, co-sponsored by a plethora of APA organizations including OCA-GS, embarked on voyage of internal discovery. The stated goals were to:

· Define racism with a common language.
· Examine how it has affected each of us on the individual, family, and community level.
· Identify themes of experience when it came to rage, how internalized racism manifests itself.
· Create positive ways of overcoming internalized racism.

 Steeped  in  the  white world's  imposed  culture,  beliefs,  values,  norms  and  institutionalized  dominance,  it  is  nearly impossible  to not  internalize their racial prejudice  toward APIs.  We were asked to explore our feelings with a number of questions. What do you do if a friend of yours makes a racist joke? Would you, at the risk of being ostracized, speak up? How do you define accountability? These kinds of questions really got a dialogue going.

I soon saw how important it is to recognize how internalized racism manifests itself in the divisions that exist  within the APA community, and why there is a need to act proactively to deal with these issues. Ignoring them is not solving them no more than ignoring racism at large is solving those problems.

Some suggestions coming out of the workshop included  having more workshops to deal with the lack of knowledge about the community and its history, understanding how race, class and gender intersect in dealing with racism, and developing skills to improve anti-racism efforts.

JACL is planning to hold a follow-up workshop in the fall that will be open to all people of color. The expectation is that the workshops will lead to a better dialogue between various communities evolving into joint efforts to “challenge, confront and overturn” racism before it becomes self-defeating according to Beverly Wong, a member of JACL's civil rights committee.

© 2005 OCA-Greater Seattle

OCA - GREATER SEATTLE CHAPTER

EMBRACING THE HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS OF CHINESE AND ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICANS IN THE UNITED STATES