Location: Stokel Commons, Portsmouth Middle School

Presenters:
Pawn Nitichan, Executive Director, City-Year New Hampshire
Samuel Hyun, Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) Advocate, and Public Speaker
Sandeep Bikram Shah, Senior Program Officer at New Hampshire Charitable Foundation

Moderator: Delia Konzett, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, UNH.

The mass shooting in Atlanta last year and the rise in anti-Asian attacks during the Co-Vid 19 pandemic have brought to the forefront the long history of discrimination and injustice toward Asian Americans. Since the end of World War II, the perceived success of Asian Americans — who have been wrongly portrayed as a monolithic group — has led white apologists to cast this group as the “model minority.”

This panel will address how this idea has been used to drive a racial wedge between Asian Americans and African Americans, and to allow some white Americans to continue to ignore the ravages of racism and racist policies.