Asian American Alliance launches #wearenotminor photo campaign

Tufts Asian American Alliance (AAA) last week launched a #wearenotminor photo campaign, a month-long initiative that aims to explore, celebrate and reflect upon the Asian American experience.

The campaign seeks to provide a forum for Asian American students to explore and share their experiences -- both positive and negative -- on a university-wide and a nationwide level, according to AAA President Jessica Wu, a senior.

“Honestly, Asian Americans on campus aren’t really heard, and a lot of times, when people think about racial issues, they don’t consider Asian Americans as involved with that,” she said. “The AAA photo campaign aims to raise awareness and show that we do experience racism in both subtle and major ways.”

AAA hopes the photo campaign will provide a comfortable forum for Asian American students to speak out on the subtle microagressions they otherwise dismiss, Wu and AAA Arts Co-chair Julianna Ko, a senior, explained.

“Microaggressions are short messages that people say that imply that the person that they are targeting belongs to an ‘other’ group, and they’re also discriminatory,” Ko said.

Since microaggressions can be subtle and even unintentional, they often go unaddressed, but their effect builds up over time, according to Wu.

“Microaggressions are sort of little things that happen daily -- little racial tensions or comments -- that come up that aren’t okay, but they are so small you can’t respond to them,” she said. “They happen between friends, between professors -- it happens all across campus -- and they’re difficult to counteract, but I think a photo campaign provides a way to react.”

Ko explained that the campaign is meant to address common stereotypes about Asian Americans, but also aims to celebrate Asian American identity.

“For example, last week one student wrote, 'No, I don’t get straight As' to dismantle that stereotype," she said. "We want to show Asian Americans are a range of things, not just one stereotype. It’s also a celebration of Asian American identity. It’s saying, ‘Yeah I get Asian flush,’ and embracing that.”

The medium of the campaign was inspired by similar photo campaigns that highlighted identity and diversity at Tufts and other universities, according to Wu.

“Our campaign was inspired by the ‘I, Too, Am Harvard’photo campaign for black students at Harvard and ‘South Asians of the Hill,’organized here by [the South Asian Political Action Committee],” she said. “[First Generation Student Council] did a similar photo campaign last year too, and we saw the power of all those campaigns, and I think we found inspiration through those.”

The campaign’s title, #wearenotminor, stems from a combination of influences, including Tufts' introduction of an Asian American Studies minor in 2012 and the negative connotations associated with the word “minor,” according to Ko.

“We chose that name for multiple reasons,” she said. “An [AAA Executive Board member] posted a Facebook status that said he doesn’t identify as a minority, because minor by definition means less than and his experiences aren’t any lesser than anyone else’s, and this really resonated with us. Also, Asian American Studies is a minor at Tufts and not a major, so we’re kind of just responding to that.”

Wu joined Ko in highlighting the importance of dismantling the negative connotations associated with the word minority.

“I understand the intention behind the words ‘majority’ and ‘minority,’ but there are some connotations that come up when you use the word minority that sort of psychologically push down a group of people,” Wu said. “We are not minor, our experiences are not minor and these experiences cannot be ignored.”

The photos from the campaign will be posted on the AAA Facebook page, and some may be incorporated into Voices,AAA’s literary magazine, which will be published in the spring, according to Ko.

AAA invites Asian American students and their allies to participate in the campaign by attending the AAA photo sessions at the upper portion of the Mayer Campus CenterFridays from 12 to 1 p.m. through Nov. 17 or by submitting their photos via email.