At this week’s Round Table, Erina, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Mika Rao, Communication Partner at Transcend Education and a proud South Asian American, professional, and woman about the role her identity has played in her life and work over the past 25 years. Mika shared how, growing up in a majority white neighborhood in the 1980s, she was curiously “unraced” and didn’t really come to consciousness about her heritage until she reached college, and she’s been making up for lost time ever since. Inspired by Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we talked about how a person’s identity intersects with their experiences in education (three of us are AAPI women) and how seemingly little things–like having one’s name pronounced correctly in roll call–can affect students’ world view and sense of well being, separating you from the community and make you feel like an outsider over the years. We suspect at least 80% of students of color have had their name stumbled over, in a micro aggression that many have come to accept. This is one of the reasons Mika is so passionate about her work at Transcend, which works to foster leaps towards equitable learning that focus more on belonging and identity than most traditional school reform models do because research shows that students do better when that’s the case. We talked at length about the problems with the model minority myth and Mika shared how what used to irritate her a little bit now outrages her, because minority communities shouldn’t be made to feel we have to compete instead of to work together. She is committed to being a good ally and to recognizing how, although we ALL experience racism and micro-aggressions, the history of African Americans in this country requires all of us to work together for change around anti-Blackness WHILE working to lift up and celebrate our AAPI identities. Thank you for listening!
