The Invisible "Other:" Count Us In!

by maurice seaty

During a recent visit back to my hometown of Oakland, California, I was walking down the block of East 21st Street when I realized how much I missed the idea of “home” and how isolated I felt as person of color attending UC Berkeley. Granted, Oakland and Berkeley may be geographically connected, but when we consider racial, ethnic, and economic demographics, they might as well be on opposite coasts.

Why? Because I find myself as being one of only a handful of students, on a campus of 33,000-plus, who share a similar history and common experience. While I do find a sense of community and family with my peers in progressive organizations like the Southeast Asian Student Coalition, bridges, and the Berkeley Cambodian Students Association, the question we always ask ourselves is, “Where is the rest of our community? Where are the people who we grew up with as neighbors?”

What I found troubling about my visit back to Oakland was that I counted more Cambodian and Mien people on one block than I ever have at UC Berkeley. What does it mean when people who live five minutes away from UC Berkeley are consistently underrepresented on our campus? This question speaks to the larger issue of the lack of diversity not only at UC Berkeley, but across the entire University of California, and the failure of public universities to keep doors and seats of our classrooms accessible to all communities. What has the University of California done to address this issue?

One year after its formal publication, the “Study Group on University Diversity” has only restated what students and underrepresented communities have known for years: the University of California lacks diversity in the post-Proposition 209-era. In its report to the UC Regents in September 2007, the study found that “diversity [was] fundamental to the UC’s mission, quality and service to the state of California,” and that change was needed to increase enrollment amongst underrepresented communities.

However, in recent years, admissions and enrollment in the University of California has not reflected the demographic changes occurring in the state. In order to reverse these trends, the report highlighted the need to increase the admissions of “non-Asian minorities.” Upon hearing this suggestion, many students at UC Berkeley have become infuriated by the Regents’ proposal. Many Asian Americans on campus have found this term “non-Asian minority” to be not only problematic and egregiously offensive, but also marginalizing.

While it is important to recognize that as a community, Asian-Americans are connected by many common struggles both in the past and in the present, it is equally if not more important to recognize the great diversity that exists within Asian-America and the distinct, but related, issues that pertain to specific communities. When I talk about diversity, I don’t mean just in regards to race and ethnicity, but also culture, shared experience, immigration history, refugee-hood, language, generations in America, and so forth; this list of what constitutes diversity could go on forever.

An example of how the homogenization of Asian-Americans negatively effects the community is the apparent “over-representation” of Asian-Americans at UC Berkeley. “Asian American and Pacific Islander” students make up 42.8 percent of the student body on this campus. While this statistic gives the impression that “Asian American and Pacific Islander” are “overrepresented” on campus, it neglects and hides the fact that “Asian American and Pacific Islander,” as a category for this kind of analysis, totally disregards and erases the many communities that have been squeezed into this umbrella term.

For many Southeast Asian students, access to K-12 and higher education has been limited, if not completely blocked. The graduation rate of Southeast Asian males in Oakland and Richmond hovers around 50%. Of those 50% who graduate, how many are actually college bound, or even eligible for the University of California? Furthermore, what about the other half of the population that doesn’t graduate? What happens to them, and what institutional hurdles play a role in making their graduation unfairly difficult or impossible? What kind of low-income jobs will they be relegated to as a result? Due to this kind of low graduation rate, there aren’t many Southeast Asians on college campuses nationwide, yet no one really knows because those figures are concealed by deceptive, uninclusive, and undescriptive categories like “Asian American and Pacific Islander.”

The Asian and Pacific American Coalition at UC Berkeley is working to fix these problems in a campaign known as Count Me In! The UC-wide campaign seeks to further disaggregate the term “Asian American and Pacific Islander” on applications and admission data so that the University of California can better understand and address the diverse needs of Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities. Statistics might appear neutral, factual, or scientific, but the truth of the matter is that the way such statistics are collected and presented can and often is biased, sometimes with harmful effects, as the case of Southeast Asian students shows.

The Count Me In! campaign to further disaggregate the term “Asian American” is not an isolated movement, nor is it happening in a vacuum. There have been prior disaggregation campaigns, including a fight to get a category for Vietnamese applicants, that have shed light on the need for the UC-system to recognize the diversity that exists within the monolithic term “Asian American” among others.

By listening to the voice of students involved in this campaign, the University of California will help dismantle the notion that “Asian Americans” are over-represented on UC campuses, and will also help fight racist ideas that all Asians are the same. If the University of California is going to discuss and address this “diversity crisis,” it needs to include the underrepresentation of many Asian American communities in this discussion. Because Asian Americans are not just one, large homogeneous group; we are more than just “Asian American” and we are certainly more than “other.”

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Maurice Seaty is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley and an organizer of the Count Me In! Campaign.