Affinity Networks Keynote Speaker Arthur Ago ’90

- So without further ado, I do want to introduce the key speaker for tonight, Arthur Ago. It really is my pleasure to introduce you. You graduated in the class of 2016. Arthur is the Director of the Criminal Justice Projects at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Criminal Justice Project, which includes the Lawyers Committee Byrd Center to Stop Hate and it's really dedicated to fighting racism and racial bias in the criminal justice system, which is obviously a really urgent, critical need. And also committed to supporting marginalized communities and individuals targeted by hate. So thank you for your work, and I'm excited to hear more about it. Arthur supervises the project's cases and investigations, including fighting police misconduct and brutality, the criminalization of poverty, violations of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, and white supremacy. Before joining the Lawyers' Committee, Arthur spent almost 20 years at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, ultimately serving as the Trial Chief. He has also served as a supervising attorney and adjunct Professor of Law at the DC Law Students and Court program, as well as an adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University at the American University, and the University of District Columbia. Arthur received his BA in English from Amherst College and his MA in Asian American studies from UCLA and his JD from the George Washington University Law School. So it really is my immense pleasure to welcome you to speak with us. And anyway, thank you and enjoy your meal.

- All right I'm an old man, so I'm gonna put on my glasses to do this. Thank you, Kiko, for that kind introduction. I wanna express my deepest gratitude to the Amherst Asian Alumni Network. I had no idea that I was on their radar, let alone anybody's radar and so I'm humbled to be invited by you tonight. And after spending the weekend here, I've been engaged with the college this weekend in a deeper way than I have in a long, long time and so I am grateful to everybody in this room and grateful to AAAN for that and that feeling. So it's sort of really kind of a thing. Before I begin, I wanna say that I'm also exceedingly happy to see my classmate and dearest friend Jim Spencer, who I'd like to think came up from Louisiana to see me speak but in reality probably came up to spend time with my brother, and my brother Sonny who's also here. And Sonny and I went to, overlapped for one semester, here at the college and it's special to be able to spend time with him again, even though we're just one weekend, I'm here at the college for just one weekend. But really what makes me most happy is to see his daughters here. My two beautiful nieces, their cousin, my 16-year-old son refused to come up here to spend time with me over the weekend. And so that ingrate will have to watch this online. So Lena and Emma, thank you. I know that the speech is probably gonna be boring to both of you, so I'm gonna give you permission to play on your phones. That said, let me begin. You know, I was tempted to start this speech by going back 152 years to the arrival of Kanda Naibu, who was the first Asian person to attend Amherst College and to trace the history of Asian American presence at the college throughout the last 152 years but no one wants to hear that and honestly, I did not wanna research it, so I won't go back that far, but please indulge me as I start my remarks by going back 80 years when our nation was at war. In 1943, "The Saturday Evening Post" published an image of Norman Rockwell's painting, Freedom From Want. And some of you might remember it, it was Rockwell's painting of a multi-generational family of Thanksgiving. The grandparents were at the head of the table and they were presenting a roasted turkey to what appears to be their happy children and grandchildren. And the painting is also called the Thanksgiving picture and I'll be home for Christmas, and I don't wanna disparage Norman Rockwell because he painted Ruby Bridges, who was six years old at the time, young Black girl who was integrating her public high school, or I'm sorry, public elementary school, in New Orleans in 1960. But Rockwell's painting, I'll be Home for Christmas and Freedom From Want was of course a painting of a white family. "The Saturday Evening Post," though accompanied that painting with an essay by the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan. He was then in his early thirties, but he'd already lived a whole lifetime. And Bulosan wrote in that essay about America's faith in democracy and he was writing against the backdrop of World War II. "Our faith," he wrote, "has been shaken many times, and now it is put to the question, our faith is a living thing, and it can be crippled or chained." Bulosan was not though writing only about war. He was concerned with the disenfranchised, what he called the factory hands, the mill hands, the field hands and in nod to a generation of Filipino Americans, the cannery workers in Alaska. And Bulosan saw that we as a nation quote, "are bleeding under the lynch trees amidst hysterical mobs and where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit." In this way, Bulosan deftly confronted the assumption of what American means and reminds the nation of its continued challenges. He wrote, "we have moved down the years steadily toward the practice of democracy, but sometimes we wonder if we are really a part of America." 80 years later, even after the Civil Rights era, the 1960s and 1970s, the promise of American democracy, one that is equal, equitable, and truly participatory, remains elusive. But even if the future that our parents imagined for us has not quite materialized, I can tell you that it is closer today than when I left the school in 1990. If we remain vigilant, understand our identities, and work to maintain our rightful place in America, the future, that future that they had imagined for us, will arrive and that's what I'd like to speak with you tonight. That's what I'd like to speak about with you tonight. So there's a lot that's changed since 33 years ago when I graduated from this college but two things seem to have remained consistent and constant. For four years, young people leave their homes and sequester themselves here and immerse themselves with true liberal arts, liberal arts education. And that education still involves courses that are frequently interdisciplinary, but always emphasize a critical examination of the world. If graduates from the college truly access that education, they leave here with a way to read, write, and think that will inform them at the next stages of their lives, if not their entire lives. The college provided all of us who graduated, and all of you who are currently here, is providing you with the tools to engage with our great democratic experiment. Those tools don't just prepare us for the obvious paths, right? Public policy, the law or governance, the graduates of this college also follow roads in the arts and literature, and they build on the work of Native American generations past, European immigrants, as well as immigrants from the Americas and of enslaved people. They also pursue paths in the sciences and the medicines and in medicine, and they always question in those fields, not only what seems to be established, but they also think about where their work fits in society. And I was speaking with Kelvin the other day and talking about how some of his classmates and colleagues in the sciences do not know how to write at the same level that he knows how to write. That's what this college provides us today. College graduates teach future generations of American citizens and residents, and perhaps most gratifyingly and not to ignore sort of the fundamental aspect of where we are in society. Graduates make homes for their families all across this diverse country. But in the spirit of critical examination that this college taught me, I wanna say that Amherst, for many years, was deficient in the way that it nurtured Asian American and Pacific Islander identity. When I arrived here in the fall of 1986, there were no Asian American studies courses. My introduction to liberal studies, which was the only course that was required of all incoming students at the time, was called War. I vaguely recall that we studied the Peloponnesian War and other sort of historical moments of conflict, but there was not a single class during that course or even a single reading assigned on the colonization of the Philippines, Japanese American internment, or the Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian diasporas. When I graduated four years later, there still were no American Studies courses. And more than 10 years after I graduated, the college refused to join the five college APA certificate program. The only school refused to do so at the time. But in the spring of, or, but I'm sorry, in the fall of 2015 during the Amherst uprising in true Civil Rights era fashion, Amherst students agitated for Asian American studies classes leading to the hiring of professors like Sony and Christine, the commitment to the cohort hiring and the consequent creation of several Asian American centered courses, as well as the appointment of Professor Franklin Odo, whose life we celebrate this weekend. Today, seven and a half years after that uprising, I am happy to see the growth of Asian American studies at the college and the rich discussion that we have had this afternoon in terms of the course of where we are going as a college. It is a slow growth, but it is steady. And I'm happy to talk about that because of how central Asian American studies was to my life and it is my hope that Asian American and Pacific Islander students at this college, both now and the future, will enjoy the same benefits that I did from my experience from that course of study. I was introduced to Asian American studies three years after I graduated from Amherst, when I enrolled in the Master of Arts program at UCLA. And the course was based on the ethnic studies movement of the 1960s and during that movement, Asian American and Pacific Islander students recognized that there was an academic Black hole in the critical examination of the history and sociology and art and other subjects related to Asian Americans. The birth of Asian American studies in the late sixties and early seventies as a true academic discipline, mostly centered on the West Coast, was not only a celebration of identity, but also an act of resistance to colleges and universities that had for centuries adopted a western culture centered curriculum. It was a message that what was being taught on campuses around the country did not reflect what was truly Asian American and by extension, what was truly American. Now, of course, I am telling most, if not all of you something that you already know and with its earth and early growth, Asian American studies revisited traditional approaches to academic disciplines. And so, as an example, I wanna talk a little bit about history, which was naturally studied as part of an Asian American studies curriculum but the way that it was studied was expansive. And what I mean by that is Asian American scholars collected contemporary primary source material like flyers announcing community events and weddings. and birth announcements and obituaries and these scholars called that material history and taught it as part of their courses. So in the mid to late 1990s, when I was in law school in the District of Columbia, and when Professor Odo was starting his tenure at the Smithsonian, I saw firsthand that that perspective was continuing. The Smithsonian hosted Asian American scholars whose presentations of history included photos of their own families and of their communities, and it was a view of history as both personal and ongoing. So in this way, Asian Americans claimed their places in and added their many voices to the American narrative. Again, I am telling you, I tell most of you, if not all of you, something that you already know. In the end, I suppose that that's my entire point, which is that Asian American studies provided me with the means with which to articulate the things that I already knew. It gave me the grammar, it provided me with the confidence that I already had a place in this great democratic experiment and the means to express the confidence. And as the discipline grows at this venerable college, I am hopeful that it will provide the current and future students with that same confidence. It has already impressed me in terms of what's happening here. And Gabby was one of our presenters earlier today. I don't think that she's with us tonight, but she was one of our presenters earlier today and in our small group, we discussed Asian American studies and she asked me, "well, what did you study at UCLA?" And all I could think of, I rattled off sort of the areas of study, you know, the disciplines of study that I, so sort of history and literature, sociology. But what I didn't tell her was, I probably studied something far more basic and fundamental than what you were studying here today. And I would, you know, sort of love to see what she comes up with her thesis. And that is sort of what keeps me quote, right? And it, and the confidence, right? And what was also particularly gratifying about meeting everyone today and discussing this is my 15-year-old niece who is barely thinking about starting college right now, was fully engaged in that conversation. That's where we are today and that's how different it was from what, where we were in 1990 when I graduated from here. A large part of my confidence after graduating from UCLA flowed not only from seeing my experiences reflected in the academics of Asian American studies but also from what the discipline itself valued. At UCLA, my classmates and I could work toward an academic future in scholarship, or we could pursue a career in engagement with Asian American communities and both paths were encouraged. Scholarship, service, or frequently both, comprised the tradition of Asian American studies and really all of ethnic studies born out of the 1960s. It was during that period, the Civil Rights era and its attendant struggles that I found most compelling. And it was the resistance and resolution of people like Fred Korematsu who refused to comply with government orders of Japanese internment, Japanese American internment. That was most motivating to me. And once again, I'm gonna tell most if not all of you, something that you already know, which is that that struggle and resistance and resolution is ongoing. Fred Korematsu left us at two 2005 but his work is not done. The places that Asian Americans, people of color and members of the LGBTQ plus communities hold in American society are neither secure or guaranteed. We must work every day in ways large and small to keep those places. For those of you who have committed to working on issues related to Asian American studies and to working with APA communities, you are probably confident in your sense of place in American democracy and your identity. After I graduated from law school, and even though I thought that civil rights and specifically Asian American civil rights was my path, I could not resist becoming a public defender. And let's be honest, I did it for selfish reasons. I loved being a trial lawyer and I was an English major here so practicing law, where I could bend the government's narrative to tell my client's stories felt like second nature. But in the spirit of continued honesty, there were times when I questioned my sense of place and identity as a Filipino American whose clients were all Black and Latino. Even with all of the confidence that my time at Amherst and UCL gave me. Because I was working with and for people of color as a public defender, though my questions about place and identity never caused me much self-doubt. And it is something that I encourage all of you to think about in terms of Asian American studies and the place of Asian Americans in this great country to the extent that the way that we define our struggle is the way that we think about our struggle with the majority. There was a relationship with other people of color that we need to think about and question and constantly keep in the back of our minds in terms of the work that we do. My job made it apparent, as a public defender, that there exists in this country a system of government oppression of people of color through our nation's criminal justice acrobatics. And to be clear, sustained government violence under the guise of criminal justice is felt most profoundly and most painfully by Black people. The experiences of other races and ethnicities are not comparable but we all know that the government will criminalize other races when it wants to and when it needs to. We saw it with Japanese exclusion in the 1880s, through the treatment of Hmong teens and young men by the police in the 1980s, up to just a couple of years ago, and let's be real, government encouraged anti AAPI violence as a result of the coronavirus. My work as a public defender helped me articulate what I already knew, which is that working against the criminal justice system was a matter of racial justice. And after 20 years that work led me back to where I thought I would start, which was civil rights. Even now as a civil rights lawyer who works on issues related to criminal justice as well as white supremacy, there are moments when I think about my place and my identity. Most of my clients are Black because Black people suffer the worst civil rights abuses at the hands of the police, the criminal justice system and white nationalists. And again, it's not hard to imagine Asian Americans and other people of color suffering those same abuses because those abuses have already happened in our lifetimes. In the years after September 11th, 2001, one out of 10 Sikh Americans in the San Francisco Bay area where the victims of hate motivated crime, hate motivated violence,. And in a town outside of Sacramento, during that time, two Sikh men were killed because they wore their turbans. You just have to ask Bethany Lee about her work with all that for you to understand the civil rights abuses that Asian Americans suffer even today. And although I don't work for an organization that is dedicated to AAPI civil rights specifically, I do not feel out of place among my colleagues because we share a singularity of purpose. Ultimately because of my sense of identity, I remain as competent in my place in American democracy and in the struggle for civil rights as I have ever been. But when I arrived at this college from New York City 36 and a half years ago, I admit that I felt lost. I had barely heard of Robert Frost. And the first few poems that I had read, my first reaction was, I am not sure that I understand. You might recall his poem, "After Apple Picking" and his description of the two-pointed ladder sticking out of, sticking through an apple tree. And my reaction was, what is that? Frost and Amherst and the United States are inextricably intertwined. We all remember that JFK, John F. Kennedy, had Frost read at his inauguration and that when our library was named for the poet some years later, Kennedy came here and spoke at the dedication. And that rich history when I arrived here in the fall of 1986 simultaneously made me happy that I chose this school that was so linked to American history, but also little trepidatious because I was not certain that I would fit in. But over the years and during the years that followed, I recognized that I belonged. I belonged here, and you belong here. Many of you caused this college to confront the dearth of Asian American studies. It was you who made a place for Franklin Odo and many of you here are working to maintain that place because you understand that that place is neither secure nor guaranteed. And I want to be 100% clear that if that place is not secured, it is not your fault. It is because of what happens at this college. There is a story about when the college, that many of you probably know, when the college went co-ed, and there was a group of people from Amherst that met with, in particular, the president of Wellesley College at the time. And the Amherst Group, their perspective was, why would we withhold this valuable education from the women in the world? And the president of Wellesley said, "Don't worry about the women, worry about your college." And that's what I'm here to tell you today. Don't worry about yourselves, worry about this school, and the school should worry about this school. You recognize that while the future that our parents imagine for us remains attainable, the difficulties of our national and collective past are not over. Two days ago on April 20th, we commemorated an important moment in our nation's history. And there are some of you who think that I'm talking about National Weed Day. I would not be surprised if it was more than some of you, I don't judge, that's not the day that I'm talking about. I'm like, I'm talking about April 20th 152 years ago, when the United States Congress passed and the president signed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That act was meant to combat the Ku Klux Klan then only four years old, but already known for racial violence against formerly enslaved people. Section three of that act provides, in part, that two or more people who conspire to deprive any person or class of people the equal protections of the law can be sued and held liable for any damages caused by their actions. So why am I speaking about the KKK Act a century and a half after it was ratified? Because we still need it and use it today. Last October, I was part of the team that sued a white supremacist group for destroying a mural, celebrating the life and achievements of the Tennis star and humanitarian Arthur Ashe. The mural was painted in a park in a historically and still predominantly Black neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, which is Arthur Ashe's hometown. And it was a park that even after Jim Crow, had the only public swimming pool that Black people felt comfortable using. The message that the white supremacist who spray painted over Arthur Ashe's image and his achievements, conveyed, was not lost on the neighborhood. And I could go on and on about our legal theories underlying our lawsuit, but that would be boring for the vast majority of you. The bottom line is that we sued this group pursuant to the KKK Act of 1871. So a century and a half later, the struggle is ongoing because our places in the United States are not guaranteed. Let me begin to wrap up by saying this, claiming our rightful place in America is not always confrontational. Our college is committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and would never silence our voices. Our responsibility though, is to use our voices so that we will be heard. And claiming our rightful place in America in no way means that we each must commit ourselves to the path that I have chosen for myself, in fact, frequently, the most effective way to claim our places are far away from the courthouse and instead in book stores and museums and in theaters. John Cho will be here in a couple of days to talk about that. But 80 years after Carlos Bulosan questioned what it meant to be American, Lin-Manuel Miranda, his collaborators wrapped that up when they produced and put on Hamilton by casting Black and Brown actors, including the Chinese American actor, Phillipa Soo, they emphatically reclaimed America and American history for people of color. Miranda's message was clear. We were always a part of the history of this great democratic experiment and we will work to be an integral part of this future. This is the future that our parents imagined for us. This is the future that we will attain. This is the future that we have a right to and this is the future that we deserve. I thank AAAN for inviting me. I thank all the students and alumni for meeting here. I thank the staff, always thank the staff, for assisting us with this great dinner and I am so happy to be here this weekend. Thank you.

- Arthur, thank you so much. We, I think all of us have a lot that we're wrapping our heads around. One thing that you said that really stuck out to me is that Amherst gave you and I include myself, gave us the means to articulate what we already know. Really powerful and also I think, really speaks to like why we're all here too. That we know that we belong here. We know that this is a place for us and it's really wonderful to know that in years to come, there will be this gathering again where we can share these moments and share our knowledge with each other. So really looking forward to that. Thank you and thank you all for sharing this evening with us. It's really wonderful again, to be in community together. The weekend is not over. There's a full schedule tomorrow. There's even more tonight. I welcome you all, if you are so inclined at Amherst Coffee, we have some tables reserved. Please join us for a nightcap if you want to. We're gonna head over there around 9:30. And yeah, enjoy the rest of your time here. Enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you.