The Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) Employee Resource Group at Oakland University held a Zoom panel presentation of OU AAPI women faculty and staff members about the intersectionality of race and gender.

Organized by a group of faculty and staff members at OU that are part of the OU AAPI Employee Resource Group – Ambvika Bhargava, Felicia Chong, Ji-Eun Lee, Kuniko Nielsen, Jo Reger, Mi Hye Song and Tomoko Wakabayashi, the one-hour-long Zoom meeting involved discussion of microaggressions, stereotypes, generalizations and their impact on the OU community.

The presentation began with a video of the result of a survey conducted amongst the AAPI community. They were asked, “what is your experience as a female AAPI employee on campus?”

The following are some of their voices:

• “We (people of color) are often excluded from department events.”
• “I am expected to do more because I am a woman of color.”
• “I found out from the web posting that I had been assigned to teach a new course, and my other course was canceled – there was zero communication from the chair.”
• “Over the years, several students wrote in their evaluations that I should not teach at OU because I have a foreign accent.”
• “I was asked if this individual could call me something else because my name was very difficult.”

The following are some of the personal experiences of the panel presenters they shared during the Zoom meeting:

Jo Reger (Ally to the AAPI Employee Resource Group and community and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work and Criminal Justice)

I felt like there was a conversation that needed to be had. So, I’m on this panel not as an AAPI woman faculty member but as an ally to that community. The reason why we are calling this panel (we are using the word “intersectionality”) is that a lot of times, we talk about intersectionality, we talk about having multiple social identities. But what intersectionality really means is that there are times when you have social identities that are so tightly intertwined that you can’t really separate out how you are being treated because of one and how you are being treated because of the other. SO, we are really here to talk about what it means to be put in the category of AAPI, in the category of women and in the category of faculty, and how these things intertwine for specific kinds of treatment.

Tomoko Wakabayashi (Co-founder of OU AAPI Employee Resource Group and Associate Professor of Human Development and Child Studies)

I was in the [OU] community trying to distribute flyers for my research studies. I found myself in front of the wrong building. Two men came out of the building and offered help in finding where I was trying to go to. One man asked me what I was doing here, so I showed my IRB-approved flyer of my research study and I pointed to the OU logo on my jacket I wore to recruit potential part research participants. This man asked again. “So, what are you doing here? Are you here for a massage?” It really wasn’t until I was in my car and on my way back to the campus that I realized that despite me showing my flyer and pointing at my OU jacket, I was still mistaken for a masseuse.

Mi Hye Song (Member of OU AAPI Employee Resource Group and Associate Professor of Biological Sciences)

It is critical for each faculty member to have equitable access to essential equipment and research infrastructure to become a productive researcher preparing. [Here] the question is, does each faculty member have an equitable research environment toward research productivity and teaching that involves how many courses are taught and how many new courses are developed, and some class hours and classroom choices as well as course release due to other services? On the other side, our current teaching review heavily relies on student evaluation. Is there consideration of equity? For example, can we consider revising the student evaluation process to limit the inherent biases that affect women and minorities [at a higher frequency]? Does each faculty member have an equal opportunity to serve on the committee? 

Ambika Bhargava (Member of OU AAPI Employee Resource Group and Associate Professor of Human Development and Child Studies)

“Because you’re East Asian looking uh, so it doesn’t matter. I know one word of Chinese.” “You’re really cool for being an Asian. You’re not like other Asians.” These are just some of the kinds of questions and statements we have experienced. There are so many more, and I think all of us got together. We could probably, you know, fill a whole book with things that we’ve heard which are really dumb, offensive, which are upsetting and which we wish people wouldn’t say to us.