Unite, Fight for the Betterness of America
Chuck Li
Ladies and Gentlemen, our respected and honorable guests,
We thank you for attending the second conference of CAA, Chinese American Alliance. In particular, we thank our local organizers Jessica, May, Fan in Boston and Laura Gu from Chicago, together with a lot of other volunteers, whose endless efforts have made today’s conference so rewarding.
Talking about the future of CAA, since we Chinese Americans live in the United States, the future of America is our future. If the US is strong, CAA will be strong, and our Chinese Americans will be strong. Therefore, we, and the people sharing our values, need to get united, get organized. Together we fight for the betterness of United States of America.
For the future of CAA, I will cover three topics: American Socialism, American Identity Politics, and Imbalanced American Education.
I came to US in the summer of 1993. Twenty five years has passed, there have been a lot of changes. One significant change is on the socialism trend in this country. When I first arrived at Minneapolis/St Paul International Airport in 1993, although I didn’t know where I would have gone from there, breathing the fresh air in the new country, I had a feeling that socialism was drifting away from my life: there was no political broadcasting on the street, no political propaganda on the walls, there was no weekly political study times any more. Today, I have to say I was wrong. Today, American socialism is growing to a new level. Folks openly promoting socialism are getting elected to US Congress and Senate. Socialist talks, rally, media coverage promoting government controlling everything are all over places. More and more congressional candidates are getting elected on a socialist platform such as Medicare for all, Housing as a human right, A federal jobs guarantee, Abolish ICE, Free higher education for all. Had lived in the old styled socialist China in our younger life, we all know well what kind of socialism those people are talking about and what it looks like, poverty, government assigned jobs, low productivity. We all know those countries including China who had practiced that kind of socialism had given it up because that kind of socialism could not have brought prosperity to their people. In China, more than 30 years reform over the old styled socialism demonstrated the socialism promoted by those socialist democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would not work for US either. Chinese Americans believe in common sense. To have a thing, we know we need first to earn it ourselves. While we all sometime need some helps, we know we can’t rely on free giving, handouts forever. We had no much freedom in choosing jobs, in choosing where we would live in one part of our life and we know how much we treasure the freedom and opportunities we have now. This American socialism is in contradiction with what we believe, in contradiction with the values we cherish. Therefore, we need to fight against this ever growing trend of American socialism. This is a tug of war. If we don’t fight, we are going to lose what we have today.
Using identity politics to govern people is not new idea to a lot of people in this room. A lot of us in this room had lived in a society with artificially created social identities, poor and lower-middle class peasants, landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad guys, rightists, you name them. In that kind of society basic human rights were ignored; no law and no order; political mobs controlled people’s lives. We had enough of all of that, and we don’t want that any more in our lives and our children’s lives. We want to live in a society that we are not judged by our color, where we were born, where we were from. We want to be judged by what we can do. We want Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream to come true. Harvard admission policy uses artificially created admission criteria to favor some selected student groups while punish others like Asian Americans. It is a form of identity politics, similar to the 1960’s and 1970’s in China when only the children of upper classes of the society could go to colleges. We thank to Mr Ed Blum for leading the fight for us, for our children. Folks, we are in the 21st century, not in the 18th century when innocent people’s rights could be violated freely and invaded barbarically. We will continue to fight, fight all kinds of identity politics.
In the past two years, there have been a lot of debates on AAPI data dis-aggregation, an initiative initialized by former President Obama and his Department of Education. AAPI data dis-aggregation is another form of identity politics, use data to rank ethnicity in AAPI populations in term of resolving educational gaps and disparities then to allocate resources based on the ethnicity ranking. We want to challenge those self-claimed elite researchers who tried to establish a relation between ethnicity’s economic well-being with educational gaps: (1) while there may be correlation between the individual’s economic well-being and educational disparity, that correlation is not a cause-effect relation; (2) Every ethnicity group has people who are doing better and who are doing worse. AAPI data dis-aggregation in term of resolving educational disparity issue is in contradiction with what Chinese Americans believe in. We need to help whoever need help, based on the need, not their skin color, not where they come from, not where they live; (3) Educational learning has its own internal drive factors and external drive factors. The keys to drive educational excellence are (1) building strong communities; (2) strengthening student’s internal drives; (3) Helping whoever needs help. We will continue to fight for repealing the data dis-aggregation laws in those states such as Minnesota, Washington State, Massachusetts and any other states planning to establish the Asian data dis-aggregation laws etc. We will also fight against those college admission vendors such as Common App which has been using dis-aggregated data collection sheet on only Asian American high school students.
Talking about the unbalanced American education system, you may wonder what I am talking about. It seems America has the best education system of the whole world since so many foreign students come to US for their educations. Recently I read an article written by Mitchell Langbert, a Professor of business at Brooklyn College. The title of the article is “Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty”. He researched a sample of 8,688 tenure tracked, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges on these professors’ partisan affiliation. His research indicated that the D(emocrat):R(epublican) ratio in the faculty in the sample is 10.4:1. More than that, if not including two military schools West Point and Annapolis, the D:R ratio is 12.7:1.
I was a student majoring in Biological Science when I was in college. I did a lot of biological scientific researches as a student, a teacher, and research scientist before I became an information technologist. One thing I did was preparing medium/foods to grow biological cells. To allow cells to grow healthy, we need to supply balanced nutrients to the medium unless when I wanted to generate cells with some sort of nutrient/functional deficiency. Colleges are the places our children grow before they step into adult society. These professors are the feeders of knowledge nutrients to our children. What these instructors provide to our children would have great impact to them in term of what they would learn and what they would grow up to. As you know, nowadays, a lot of knowledge has political implications. For example, weather and global warming, religion, communications etc. I heard numerous complaints that the colleges in this country are all in one color. That could be creating students with knowledge deficiency, and our children grow out of American colleges would not be able to build a complete view of our society. To address the issue, we need advocate and organize researches on this important subject, promote educational balance for the sake of society health. We can’t give up college campuses. For the betterness of America, we need to start to create a balance education policy for K-12 schools and colleges with balanced educational resources, so that the education staff of US schools and colleges are a full representation of American people.
54 years ago, a great American leader, Ron Reagan gave a speech. That time he had not been elected as the President of United States. The speech was titled as “A Time For Choosing”. In the speech, he told a story of two American businessmen and their Cuban refuge friend: “Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, ‘We don’t know how lucky we are.’ And the Cuban stopped and said, ‘How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to.’ In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to.”
——- The End ——-