Recently, many Ithaca area residents have expressed concern about the lack of accountability from ICSD administrators for the poor performance of our schools, and I would like to share my own experience.
We have been members of the ICSD community for 13 years, I have 3 children and they have all experienced frequent racist harassment at school – racial slurs, teasing about their food, being asked to teach vulgar words in the language we speak at home, being given slanted eyes, the list goes on and on.
Recently, I witnessed the harassment my youngest son experienced with my own eyes. The incident happened in a public place, in front of a large group of people, including students from various schools and family members. I can’t imagine what it must be like when you’re in a school building with very few people around. My son was competing in a local track meet. As he was heading to the field to run, a group of students from the school called out my son’s name. One of them yelled “ching chong” at him and they started laughing. My son completely ignored them and walked away. I confronted the group and reported the incident, but my son said, “No one cares about Asian slurs. It’s not that serious. It’s a waste of time.” Sadly, I know exactly what he’s talking about because I’ve been treated unfairly as an Asian too.
Since ICSD has been working on promoting an anti-racism culture, I expected a better response from them, but I did not get a proper response from any authority in ICSD.
After reporting, I was disappointed with the interactions I had with ICSD administration regarding the athletics incident. It didn’t seem like they had any policy regarding racism, especially against Asians. I was told that the perpetrator was immediately disciplined, but as for the victim of the incident, no one interacted with my son until I raised my concerns. That was 8 days after the incident. How will ICSD educate the perpetrator if they don’t include the victim’s voice in the conversation? Isn’t that why racism doesn’t stop? To convince them that ICSD treats all racism incidents equally, I asked them several questions but got no answers and was offered a meeting instead. I declined the meeting and asked for answers before the meeting. I was told, “I pray that you find peace.”
While I was emailing back and forth with ICSD administrators, I showed my son the message and talked to him about it. He kept saying “No one cares. You’re wasting your time.” My other children agreed that no one cares about racist slurs against Asians. Is this the anti-racism culture that ICSD has been promoting? It seems like it’s already normal for Asian students to be subjected to racist slurs at school.
I don’t know if it will have any effect, but the government official I dealt with met with my son, talked to him about the incident, and offered to support him. This was three weeks after the incident. It’s definitely better than nothing, but I still feel a little uneasy.
It’s very easy to say, “We are an anti-racist community,” but what are they actually doing to promote that culture? How have they evaluated the effectiveness of what they’ve done to promote actual “anti-racism,” or culture?
The same can be said about literally everything that ICSD claims to do. They claim a lot of great things, but do we know what is really going on? What may be very beautiful from one side may not be so beautiful when you try to look at it from another side.
