06-03-2015, 07:23 PM
Enjoy those CPEC statistics while you can, Brown eliminated CPEC early in his first term. Decades ago I was Stanford's student rep to CPEC--a worthwhile agency.
The problem with the whole conversation about the Bamboo Ceiling is that it fails to distinguish between very different sub-groups withing the Asian American community. Pacific Islanders, for example, do not necessarily share the same issues as do Korean-Americans or Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans or Indo-Americans. And what box should our growing number Afghan students check? The whole concept of "Asian-American" is a construct that says very little. My wife hates the term. She is Chinese-American if she is forced to use a hyphen at all. At least that says something meaningful about her cultural heritage--something Asian-American does not.
Then there are my kids. I don't actually know what box on his applications my son checked. And I have not talked to my daughter about what box she will check. I have never heard either of them refer to themselves by ANY category, come to think of it. Never have I heard them say they are Caucasian, or white, or Asian-American. These broad mega-categories do not seem to be a part of their identity. Half the kids in Palo Alto seem to be of mixed heritage of one sort or the other. If a multi-ethnic society is what we have now, increasingly we will live in a society of multi-ethnic individuals.
The problem with the whole conversation about the Bamboo Ceiling is that it fails to distinguish between very different sub-groups withing the Asian American community. Pacific Islanders, for example, do not necessarily share the same issues as do Korean-Americans or Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans or Indo-Americans. And what box should our growing number Afghan students check? The whole concept of "Asian-American" is a construct that says very little. My wife hates the term. She is Chinese-American if she is forced to use a hyphen at all. At least that says something meaningful about her cultural heritage--something Asian-American does not.
Then there are my kids. I don't actually know what box on his applications my son checked. And I have not talked to my daughter about what box she will check. I have never heard either of them refer to themselves by ANY category, come to think of it. Never have I heard them say they are Caucasian, or white, or Asian-American. These broad mega-categories do not seem to be a part of their identity. Half the kids in Palo Alto seem to be of mixed heritage of one sort or the other. If a multi-ethnic society is what we have now, increasingly we will live in a society of multi-ethnic individuals.