On the Repeal of Asian American Studies Programs in Colorado School Districts
The Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Colorado writes today in opposition to the recent decisions, by three Front Range school boards, to discontinue Asian American Studies coursework at the secondary level.
For thirty-five years, this chapter has represented the legal community of Asian Pacific American Coloradans. We are attorneys, judges, and law students. We are also parents, neighbors, and people whose family stories are inseparable from the history this curriculum is designed to teach.
The argument for repeal — that these courses are divisive, or that they lie outside the core curriculum — does not survive contact with what the courses actually contain. Asian American Studies, as taught in Colorado public schools, traces the legal history of Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, and the long arc of citizenship as it has been extended, denied, and contested in this country.
This is not a divisive curriculum. It is the curriculum that names how the legal system has, at moments, been turned against the people it was meant to protect — and how it has, at other moments, been turned back.
Governor Ralph Carr opposed Japanese internment in 1942, at significant political cost, because he believed that the protections of the Constitution applied to all residents of his state. The judicial center that bears his name stands two blocks from where this letter was drafted. We invoke his example because we believe Colorado, at its best, has always understood what the curriculum at issue is now being asked to teach.
We urge the affected boards to reconsider, and we offer the resources of this chapter — including pro bono legal review of any First Amendment concerns raised in the deliberation — in service of that reconsideration.
Christine M. Yamamoto
CHAPTER PRESIDENT, APABA COLORADO