Speaker shows voice within

The Worcester Consortium ALANA Support Network held the first "Crossing Boundaries" event this past October. Several WPI EMSEP members attended the networking opportunity at Clark University to form a means of communication between schools dealing with multicultural issues. Administrators and student attendees conversed on ways to share ideas, relay informational resources, and better support programming events among the Consortium.

Keynote speaker Helen Zia, an activism journalist and author, topped off the evening. She started by telling of a time when a man asked her, "Where are you from?" She responded that she was from New Jersey. The man repeated, "No, where are you from?" Perplexed by the question, Zia hesitated, saying she did live in New Jersey. The man had assumed that because Zia is of Chinese descent she must have been born in a different country. The man continued, "My people are from America" to which Zia notes, "As though mine could never be."

Helen Zia works with the invisibility imposed on Asian-Americans in the United States, as with the case of Vincent Chin, a victim of a hate-crime murder in 1982. Chin was severely beaten with a baseball bat because he was of Asian descent during the heightened anti-Japanese sentiment surrounding unemployment in Detroit. Because Vincent Chin was Chinese, the court gave a significantly lighter sentence to his killers, which brought about an investigation on the treatment of Asian-Americans in the city.

Dim ideology contends that Asian-Americans are not a significant part of society. The view persists to some, partially including WPI, that Asians are not a "real" minority to mainstream culture. If anything, in the 1970s they were viewed as the "model minority," which was used to pit the stereotyped "hard-working" Asians against other minority groups. This "divide-and-conquer" strategy managed to lower the social status and increase racial tensions.

However, Zia does not limit herself to Asian-American issues. "In order to make a change to the world," she says, "I had to make that change." Working in the Third World Liberation Movement, she was able to see first-hand different social causes trying to vie over which was more of a priority and deserved attention first. Internal prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia took away from the individuality of those involved in order to conform. Zia endured a small witch-hunt because the other members believed that her being a lesbian would adversely harm the group's appearance.

By relating her personal experience, Helen Zia motivated direct involvement in school social activism. She states, "Some issue will move you to action. Take what you have learned here and those leadership skills will take you wherever you want to go." Zia's recent book Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People includes her main goal of telling the stories of individuals whose voices are "hidden from view" and not being heard. "If you believe strongly enough in something," Zia states, "then you will take action."

For more information about ALANA, contact the WPI Minority Affairs Office or the Colleges of Worcester Consortium.