Only the First Step

Last week, following a graffiti-themed party at Lowell Grille, students in the Chinese Students Association found racist remarks including “Chinese people perform genocide” and “Chinese people suck” scrawled on the walls. Responding in outrage, several Asian-associated student organizations—including the Asian American Brotherhood, Chinese Student Association, Harvard Vietnamese Association, Asian American Association, Half-Asian People’s Association, Harvard Philippine Forum, and Korean Student Association—united to organize a rally that took place yesterday decrying this act of racism.

Though I am proud to be Chinese, I fundamentally disagree with the way in which these organizations responded to the messages left at the party. The rally was a symbolic and reactionary gesture that did not begin to address the underlying, Harvard-specific issues that may have incited these incendiary comments in the first place. Though it may have raised some awareness about issues of discrimination and intolerance, the blanket statement it issued against racism was so uncontroversial as to be ineffectual—in the end, the rally was just action for action’s sake.

It’s a shame that the Asian-American response was not more substantial, for anti-Asian racism is a real problem that deserves serious discussion. Subtle racism is particularly pervasive in the American media; the reporting on Chinese affairs in the New York Times, for instance, is not so different in spirit from the comments left on the Lowell walls. Take for example, a recent New York Times article on the “50th Anniversary of Democratic Reforms in Tibet,” which has a headline reading, “Tibet Atrocities Dot Official Chinese History.” The first line of the article succinctly sums up hundreds of years of history with one line of anti-Chinese rhetoric: “Gone from Tibet are the shackled slaves, the thumbscrews and the scorpion pits that awaited serfs who defied their masters.”

The words at the graffiti party expressed similar sentiments, but they were especially hurtful due to their simplicity. They took misconceptions and stereotypes like those of the New York Times and boiled them down to their most black and white expression. The starkness of those messages that “Chinese people suck” and “Chinese people perform genocides”—their immediacy and lack of any attempt at explanation or qualification—are what we find so provocative.

In that sense, then, perhaps the slurs were a mixed blessing—though they were hurtful, hate-laden, and extremely inappropriate, they spurred us into action. This is not the first time we have heard slighting remarks about the Asian population, but, now that they are appearing on our own walls, we cannot ignore them as we do when we see them in our newspapers. It is unfortunate that we need to wait for the writing on the wall to be motivated into action, but at least a moment for awareness has now come.

Real change, however, won’t come through a rally alone. Rather, we need student organizations on campus to teach us the unique aspects of each culture so that we can have the tools to deal with the discrimination. Cultural events like Eastbound do more to combat intolerance than a weeklong rally, because instead of preaching to us about a pervasive problem, they inspire us to find common ground and appreciate diversity.

The rally was a good opportunity for students and student leaders to unite. Now comes the time for the real efforts in fighting discrimination to begin.


Marion Liu ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a molecular cellular biology concentrator in Dunster House.