In her 2020 History of Education Society Presidential Address, Dr. Yoon K. Pak insisted, “What must be done better is to question the framing of educational research that now maintains a Black/Brown vs. White/Asian binary.”Footnote 1 Dr. Sharon Lee's An Unseen Unheard Minority is a step towards addressing this necessary task. In her study of Asian American student activism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lee exposes the extent of the absence of Asian American experiences in education history research.
Lee's book is a critical intervention in challenging the racial binary in the historiography. Lee dispels the notions that proportionate representation and the model-minority myth indicate Asian American students have achieved parity by documenting the long and diverse efforts of Asian American student activists (p. 117-18). The book locates students at Illinois in a local, regional, and national context of struggles for Asian American higher education rights in the postwar era. Drawing from a well of oral history exceeding fifty interviews, Lee documents the experiences of “racial purgatory” (p. 32) experienced by Asian American students struggling on campus with both being subject to a racial binary and being routinely mistaken as an international student (p. 41). Overlooked by equity and diversity programs aiming to achieve proportionate statistical representation, Asian American students insisted on advocating for their own distinct educational needs and insisting on the right to have those needs met (p. 116). Complicating this activism and advocacy is the diversity within those categorized as Asian Americans.
Intragroup diversity and the regular turnover of student communities through graduations meant that forming and maintaining a pan-Asian American community was a constant challenge. Over three decades, from the 1970s through the 1990s, student organizations such as the Asian American Alliance, Asian Council, Asian American Artists Collective, Asian American Association, and Asian Pacific American Coalition formed and dissolved, but each expressed an increasingly pan-Asian American identity in student activism. These groups regularly utilized a combination of social and cultural events in conjunction with political education to organize Asian American students at Illinois. These organizations emerged from students representing a variety of overlapping affiliations with other ethnically specific organizations, demonstrating the diversity of students who identified as Asian Americans. While the activism undertaken by these student organizations varied over the course of the decades between the 1970s and 1990s, several demands remained consistent.
As early at 1971 Asian American students on campus at the University of Illinois were demanding academic enrichment, a program of Asian American studies, and a student cultural center. These demands always coincided with Asian American students’ involvement with broader coalitions of student activism focused on issues including the War in Vietnam and racism and discrimination on campus. Lee documents the way that Asian American activists adopted a distinct “variety of strategies” and “various forms of activism” over time (p. 90). For example, in the 1990s students came together to form the Asian-Pacific American Coalition to Combat Oppression, Racism, and Discrimination (ACCORD) and demonstrated their solidarity with coalitions of students demonstrating against Columbus Day, protesting the racist Chief Illiniwek mascot, and in support of Latinx student sit-in protests (p. 83-85). Asian American students increasingly organized “across organizational lines” under a banner of “Unity Thru Diversity” (p. 91-93) to advocate for their own educational needs. They established an alternative orientation called “Asiantation” (p. 105), and utilized petitions and legal strategies to continue pressuring the university to address their demands to be seen and heard after three decades of protest. This long struggle of Asian American student activism bore fruit in 2000 when the university established an Asian American Studies Program (which was made a department in 2021) and approved an Asian American Cultural Center in 2003 (p. 113-14).
Students at Illinois also collaborated with and cultivated a regional and national network of Asian American student activists. The students initiated the formation of the Midwest Asian American Student (MAAS) network and Midwest Asian American Student Union (MAASU) and transformed their campus community into a center of student activism, bringing together students across the Midwest for years at an annual conference hosted at the university (p. 72-75). These organizations brought students at Illinois together with Asian American activists like Paul Brock from the University of Connecticut, forming networks that yielded increasingly sharp critiques of statistical “parity” used to establish student (under)representation (p. 94-95). These networks also demonstrated the capacity for coordination of political action across campuses and beyond campus or regional limits, as when, in 1995, Asian American students at Northwestern University outside Chicago went on hunger strike, inciting similar protests on the coasts at Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton (p. 104-5). Such events demonstrate how, by the 1990s, Asian American students at Illinois and across the nation were demanding education rights and recognition.
An Unseen Unheard Minority follows other studies of student activism at Illinois, including Joy Ann Williamson-Lott's Black Power on Campus (2003) and Michael Metz's Radicals in the Heartland (2019). Lee's research also adds to work such as Karen Ishizuka's Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (2016) and the edited volume Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies (2019). This book is a valuable addition to them by addressing overlooked student communities and the variety of alternative forms of student activism they deployed. It extends historical inquiry in higher education student activism to consider the long three-decade struggle of Asian American students demanding to be seen and heard. As Williamson-Lott writes in the foreword of Lee's book, “No matter the decade, student activism has been the catalyst that has forced institutions of higher education to wrestle with the divide between their reality as oppressive spaces and the promise of what they could become” (p. x).
Lee's significant study of Asian American student activism at Illinois raises critical questions for historical education researchers and stresses the need for further inquiry into local, regional, and national histories of Asian American educational experiences. The history of racialization, discrimination, segregation, exclusion, and internment of Asian American and indigenous Pacific Islander students has yet to be adequately considered in the existing analytical binary. Lee's book adds rich material to the growing body of research on the long struggles for Asian American rights that have insisted on the importance of the cases of Tape v. Hurley (1885) and Lum v. Rice (1927) and, in education history, the cases of Guey Hueng Lee v. Johnson (1971) and Lau v. Nichols (1974). Lee's work exposes absences and suggests new opportunities to further collapse the racial binary in education history research.
