A flyer that some have called offensive to Asian people sparked an immediate reaction from the Asian-American community after being discovered in Hill Hall last Thursday.
Freshman In-Goo Kwak, who is Korean, put up the controversial flyer as a parody of one that fellow freshman Alice Pang had posted as part of her campaign for the Tufts Community Union Senate. Kwak created a flyer with a slogan, layout and picture that mimicked Pang's, and included sarcastic quips referencing common stereotypes of Asians. Pang is also of Asian descent.
Whereas Pang's flyer used the slogan, "Small stature, big ideas," Kwak's flyer cited his "squinty eyes, big vision." Kwak's poster also included a sentence in broken English that seemed to refer to the stereotype that Asians have a particularly strict work ethic. "Please vote me. I work rearry hard," the flyer read.
Kwak said he created the poster as a comment on political correctness at Tufts. "The flyer was initially intended as a satire of Alice Pang's campaign poster," he said. "It was also a satire of what I perceive to be the inane atmosphere of political correctness at Tufts." Kwak said oversensitivity to racism is harmful to the campus environment. "I feel that the atmosphere of political correctness here at Tufts is unhealthy," he said. "I think that there are more important issues."
Others view Kwak's posting to be more harmful than thought-provoking. Senior Angela Lam, a leader of the Asian American Alliance (AAA), said in an e-mail that Asian-American community leaders at Tufts "find this very offensive, especially after last semester's hate incident." She was referring to the altercation, now notorious, that occurred last semester between Korean students and a white freshman who was yelling racial slurs at them.
In an e-mail sent to the Tufts community yesterday, Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg and Dean of Engineering Linda Abriola referred to Kwok's flyer and stated that "the denigration of any individual or group based on race or ethnicity is not consistent with the kind of civic discourse that makes for a great university community."
Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman said that Tufts will respond to this incident by opening up a dialogue. "It's an unfortunate way to start the year and have students in an all first-year hall see how community members treat each other," Reitman said. "It needs to be addressed." He said representatives from the "Group of Six," a collection of Tufts culture centers that seek to promote diversity, and staff members in the Office of Student Affairs will meet this morning to choose from among several plans for organizing a "community conversation" about the incident.
After Kwak learned of the AAA's reaction to the flyer and met with Linell Yugawa, the center's director, he expressed regret about having posted the flyer and apologized to Pang and anyone else he may have offended.
"I apologized to Alice and I told her that it wasn't a personal insult and she acknowledged that and accepted my apology," he said. "I apologize if I personally offended anyone. In retrospect, there are more appropriate forums for me to express my political views, and the Hill Hall dorm was not the best place for me to express this view."
The AAA is also planning to host an event this evening open only to Asian-American students to create a forum where members of the Asian-American community can discuss the incident. "We will be creating a safe space for first-year Asian American students and other members of the Asian American community to talk about this incident. We will be considering how such a flyer negatively impacts the individuals of, and the overall, Asian American community at Tufts," senior Jenny Lau, co-president of the AAA, said in an e-mail to members of the association's distribution list.
Yugawa declined to comment on the incident for this article. A number of other leaders within the Asian-American community, including Lau and Lam, also declined repeated requests for phone interviews.
In their e-mail, Sternberg and Abriola corroborated Reitman's stance that opening community discussion was the best way to handle the situation. "This incident is an opportunity for us all to learn about the persistence of racial and ethnic stereotypes and that education can enable us to rise above them," they said.
