SPARKING INTEREST IN HUMANITIES
17th annual bissell grogan symposium Virtual Speaker Series: Resiliency in a Time of Change This year’s speaker series explores the concept of resilience during challenging times through the lenses of race and social justice, climate and the environment, and how the arts and creativity have managed to pivot and thrive. “In the upcoming months, our speakers will share topics designed to make you think critically about how your individual actions can help have a positive impact on the world in which we live,” said symposium namesake Kennie Grogan ’76. “As a school that develops lifelong learners who are informed, engaged, and ethical citizens, we hope you find the entire symposium inspiring and that you will feel empowered to live out our mission.”
CAROLYN CHOU, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN RESOURCE WORKSHOP (AARW) JANUARY
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FROM STOPPING ASIAN HATE TO BUILDING ASIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY VOICE
INTRODUCED BY: HEBE QIANG ’23, GLOBAL STUDIES DIPLOMA PROGRAM, CO-PRESIDENT OF THE AAPI STUDENT CLUB
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arolyn Chou advocates tirelessly for the Pan-Asian communities in Greater Boston as executive director of the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), a member-led organization committed to building grassroots power through political education, creative expression, and issuebased and neighborhood organizing. The rise of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic has shown a real need for education, change, and action. So how can we better understand the issues impacting Asian American communities and work together to make sure that those most impacted are at the center of our efforts? “Asian American communities are diverse and include a wide range of class experiences, languages, and gendered experiences,” she explained. “My
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Brimmer Magazine
organization is focused on bringing people together to build something better than any one voice or idea could.” After coming to Boston for college, Carolyn worked in Dorchester, where she lives today, in afterschool and summer programs for youth. She noticed how much race, class, and gender mattered to the families working and living in this neighborhood. “I really got invested in Dorchester as a community,” she said. “In supporting others, I could see that I was helping to build leadership in the community, too.”
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students, she asked, “How do we unlearn what is internalized?” According to Carolyn, it starts with understanding how Asian Americans are seen. Speaking from experience, she shared that Asian Americans are typically racialized in two ways: as the model minority, a concept created to pit people of color against one another, and as the perpetual foreigner, those “not from here.” By presenting key moments in history that trace anti-Asian violence back to the mid-1800s, she shared the historical
My organization is focused on bringing people together to build something better than any one voice or idea could.
Carolyn shared with students the idea that racism, and oppression in general, functions at many levels. On an ideological or cultural level, it makes up one’s belief system – one that is maintained at an institutional level by laws and public policy. At an interpersonal level, the idea that one group is better than another becomes internalized. Challenging
context that leads to what we read about today. “A passage about civil disobedience in 1887 could be mistaken for one from two years ago,” she noted. “This is the legacy of people coming together to make change for their very survival.” In sharing the important work of AARW,
