These resignations reflect increasing turmoil in higher education. Although controversy on college campuses is nothing new, the Israel-Hamas war and the Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action have precipitated a new wave of battles for institutions. As accusations, controversies and resignations play out, the future of free speech, inclusion and academic integrity.

The Limits of Free Speech

On Dec. 5, three elite U.S. university presidents — Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth — testified before the U.S. Congress on the topic of campus antisemitism following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war. While the presidents recognized the rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia on their campuses and said they were taking steps to address the issue, their answers were widely condemned. When asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct, the presidents failed to provide clear answers, saying that it depended on context and whether the speech was reflected in conduct.

Politicians, alumni and university donors alike attacked their legalistic, ambiguous responses, leading to calls for the presidents’ resignations. Both Gay and Magill resigned within a month, with Gay’s resignation marking the shortest presidential tenure in Harvard’s history. Currently, Kornbluth retains her position as MIT’s president.

The congressional hearing had implications extending beyond the three university campuses, fueling debates over which forms of speech are protected by the First Amendment — especially at educational institutions dedicated to diversity of thought and perspective. Social studies teacher Laurel Howard highlighted the difficulties in navigating conversations about geopolitical conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war.

“We used to say when you’re talking about these polarized issues, you have to have both sides represented,” she said. “But as these kinds of conflicts come up, when you say you support one side, people immediately assume that means you want the death of another group. We jump to these extremes really quickly, and that makes it a really dangerous thing to have these open conversations even though they’re so important to be having.”

She explained that even with legal guidelines, there is not always a clear-cut answer for what constitutes free speech.

“We do have guidance in our constitution and in the Supreme Court cases about free speech that say if it’s speech that immediately leads to violence, it is not protected,” she said. “So that’s what I come back to personally. Is this speech trying to incite violence against another group? If so, we probably should not be protecting it. The larger conversation is, when are we getting to that point? At what point does my language lead directly to violence, and how do we determine that collectively?”

Gunn alumna and current UPenn sophomore Sage Leland believes that there’s an important distinction between legally sanctioned and morally permissible speech.

“I think that distinction is something that the university should try to make, where it’s not so much restricting speech but drawing the line of community-minded speech,” she said. “Even if legally you could say something, is it the right thing to say? Should you be saying it?”

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Gay was Harvard’s first Black president, and her resignation fueled the on-going conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — in higher education. Since early last year, conservative lawmakers and academics have sought to undermine colleges’ DEI efforts, with anti-DEI legislation being introduced in at least 21 states since 2021, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The bills aim to ban diversity training, employment and funding for DEI offices, and the use of diversity statements and identity-based preferences in admissions and employment.

As white men continue to constitute the majority of U.S. college presidents, Howard noted the intense pressure on university officials such as Gay who come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds.

“Nobody wants to be reduced to just their racial identity or just their gender identity,” she said. “It shows that the bar is so high, and there’s so much scrutiny on people who are thought to have received those positions because of their identity.”

Debates over systemic DEI are not new, but recent events have resulted in further polarization. According to social studies teacher Tara Firenzi, DEI should come naturally, and conflicts can easily be avoided.

“This question of diversity, equity and inclusion really should be a no-brainer for everybody,” she said. “It’s been manipulated in order to inspire passionate responses that often end up falling along political lines to benefit certain political actors. It goes back to a lot of the ideals of our country. We should make amends for injustices of the past in ways that are fair and equitable. These are things that most of us can agree on.”

Although Leland recognizes UPenn’s efforts to support DEI, she doesn’t always feel or see the effects as a student.

“I think meaningful diversity, equity and inclusion work that addresses all marginalized communities — not just focusing on one — and that reaches more individual students is something that is super important, instead of just pledging to do something and not actually doing it,” she said.

Academic Integrity

In addition to the controversy from the congressional hearing, Gay’s resignation resulted from an investigation of plagiarism during her academic career. The fallout was similar to that of Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation in August 2023 after he was accused of academic misconduct in and mismanagement of his past studies. More recently, former MIT professor Neri Oxman was found to have plagiarized sources such as Wikipedia in her dissertation. Oxman’s husband, billionaire and hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, was one of Gay’s most notable critics and had tried to remove Gay from Harvard’s board, according to the New York Times.

This recent pattern of events brings an underlying crisis of academic integrity to light. Yet situations like Oxman’s and Gay’s make it clear that plagiarism accusations are not entirely apolitical: They have become entangled with debates over free speech and DEI. In an interview with Politico, published on Jan. 3, conservative activist Christopher Rufo acknowledged that the plagiarism allegations against Gay were made by specific figures and news outlets to dismantle her legitimacy, especially regarding new DEI programs.

Many of these attacks stemmed from not blatant plagiarism but subtle replication of ideas with a lack of citation. Because the line be-
tween plagiarism and originality can be murky, Howard urges all of her students to be safe rather than sorry.

“It’s really common if you’re doing a lot of research to accidentally replicate something,” Howard said. “Obviously, if you’re pulling from another person’s work and if your thoughts directly match their progression, even if you use your own words, it’s really important to cite that kind of thing.”

Firenzi believes that intentionality is the key distinguisher of plagiarism.

“I think plagiarism is when you knowingly and intentionally are taking someone else’s work and representing it as your own,” Firenzi said. “And that can be verbatim or it can be in substance. I think it’s not as black-and-white as it may seem to a lot of people.”

These attacks on university leadership have brought along another wave of skepticism toward educational institutions: The percentage of young adults believing in the importance of a college degree has fallen from 74% in the early 2010s to about 40% in recent years, according to the New York Times. Still, some have questioned whether these resignations were necessary and if the backlash was too harsh.

“In all of these cases, the question of degree has been at the heart of the debate,” Firenzi said. “It really behooves everyone to be extremely careful about any time you’re using someone else’s work, and making absolutely sure that you’re giving all the credit that you can for it and not cutting corners.”

Furthermore, Firenzi highlighted the importance of understanding the nuances of these issues — from academic integrity to free speech — in Palo Alto, a highly educated community.

“These things are probably felt more prominently here than they are in a lot of other places,” she said. “That brings with it an awareness that ultimately benefits our students — that you do have to do these things in a way that puts both integrity, equity and inclusion front and center and ensures that proper credit is given for ideas and words to the authors that created them.”

Before working to combat misinformation, it is essential to understand what political polarization truly is, as well as how social media has contributed to it. Britannica describes political polarization as “extreme and long-lasting partisanship in a two-party system that results in the division of a country’s entire population into two diametrically opposed political camps.” According to social studies teacher Laurel Howard, as this polarization intensifies, the incumbent party’s followers behave in a more autocratic manner to stay in power. On the other side, opponents are more willing to resort to undemocratic means to undermine their potence. Consequently, those on the opposite extremes of the political spectrum tend to be less likely to work with one other on bipartisan efforts. This is relevant now more than ever: A Pew Research Center analysis from 2022 found that, on average, Democrats and Republicans are ideologically farther apart today than at any time in the past 50 years. This dynamic can severely damage democracy and encourage citizens to become blindly loyal to their parties.

In the U.S., extreme points of view have been easily disseminated on social media in the digital age. This contributes to the widening gap between political parties by providing avenues for extreme groups to circulate fake news. In the #pizzagate conspiracy, the false theory was promoted on social media through the use of apps such as Reddit and Facebook. More recently, far-right groups helped organize the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, over social media sites.

Social media algorithms also make it easier for the average citizen to confirm their own political beliefs, rather than explore others, thus facilitating further polarization. These algorithms personalize the content that users see on the app based on their past behavior and interactions, using previously liked or shared posts to continue to recommend similar or related content that the user might want to engage with. This can lead to a bubble (or echo-chamber) effect in which users are only exposed to content that reinforces their beliefs, contributing to intense confirmation bias. Interacting with different points of view necessitates strong media literacy skills so students can draw their own opinions. Interacting with others who hold diverse perspectives, sentiments and experiences can extend our knowledge, shape our viewpoints and enhance our societal connections. However, if individuals opt out of these conversations, instead isolating themselves from those with different political beliefs, it only fosters and encourages division.

In a 2021 survey conducted by research foundation Reboot, 27% of respondents said social media made them “less tolerant” of people who have opposing points of view. When people fail to interact with those with opposing viewpoints, they lose an essential part of their critical thinking abilities. As future—or current—voters, it is crucial that Gunn students learn how to be responsible and knowledgeable citizens who are able to engage with those that may have beliefs differing from their own.

A significant part of this issue is learning to identify the information’s credibility. There are several ways to assess a piece of information’s credibility, whether it be an Instagram post discussing recent news or a retweet of an article. First, simply slow down: When skimming through an article, one may forget to be analytical and critical of the writing and might blindly follow disinformation. It is crucial to determine whether the information is echoed in multiple sources. For example, if one finds something on social media, they should look to see if there is similar content in other reputable sources, such as the Associated Press or perhaps a textbook. Additionally, people tend to get pulled in by statistics that lack context. For instance, if a news source states that 20% of people are affected by an issue, take a moment to check the subtext and see how many people were surveyed. 20% of a small sample of the population is different from 20% of the entire population. Put the statistic into perspective. Finally, it is important to assess word choice in the media. When reading the information, search for inflammatory words, specifically adjectives, that may imply biases and specific narratives that the source is trying to push. Word choice, specifically in regard to adjectives, can shift the entire meaning of a text.

These steps may seem minuscule, yet their impacts are great. Making these efforts to improve media literacy can stop the mindless resharing of the type of disinformation that pushes our society further and further apart.

So wrote school board election candidate Ingrid Campos of  “Stamped, Antiracism and You,” a book by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds discussing the racist principles and institutions embedded in America’s history and present-day institutions. In the same post on her website, titled “When has Scholastic Books become deviant publishers?” she denounced Scholastic Books for promoting a “deviant lifestyle” by including LGBTQ+ perspectives in literature for students.

Backed by the Silicon Valley Association of Republican Women, whose president started an effort to recruit members to run for November’s school board elections, Campos ran upon a platform of “traditional family values,” advocating for the end of what she perceived as critical race theory teaching in Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) schools and for the removal of texts with LGBTQ+ characters and themes from school bookshelves. (Critical race theory, as defined by Encyclopedia Britannica, is an organized framework of analysis based on the ideas that race is a social construct and that racism is inherent in American institutions. It is generally affiliated with higher education.)

Although Campos didn’t win the election, she did garner 9.5% of the vote, providing a local example of a nationwide trend with her increased focus on race and gender in school curricula: Fewer than two weeks after PAUSD’s school board elections, the Keller Independent School District in Texas elected to ban books introducing the concept of gender fluidity from school libraries. Moreover, in January of this year, the Florida Department of Education sought to block College Board’s new Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies class from Florida schools on the grounds that the course was contrary to Florida law and lacked educational value—officials took issue with topics like intersectionality and reparations.

Conversely, people have also tried to remove works that could potentially offend historically underrepresented groups. In late 2020, the Burbank Unified School District removed five novels from its curriculum list, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” due to concerns about racist language and depictions. This year at Hamline University, adjunct professor Erika López lost her job for showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad, though she had taken multiple precautions before doing so—officials deemed her action Islamophobic.

It is clear from examples like these that discussions of minority groups and narratives in curricula have become increasingly politicized, and Campos’ campaign demonstrates that Gunn is not far removed from the issue. Further investigation into Gunn’s history and its current approaches to race and gender in curricula is therefore necessary in order to trace the roots of our current culture wars; in looking at how attitudes have shifted over the decades, we can better understand our current paradigm and predict what the future might hold.

The turbulence of the 1960s

When Gunn opened as a three-year high school in 1964, it had only two years’ worth of students. With a small school and the freedom of a fresh start, the English and history departments worked together to create a coordinated curriculum. According to retired English teacher Karen Myers, who taught at Gunn beginning in 1964, students all took the same humanities classes in any given year—all students would take American history and literature in one year, for example, and rotate to the next pair of classes the following year. “The intention was to integrate other arts—music, movies, theater—to make it a humanities curriculum,” Myers said. “That was the most exciting curriculum Gunn has ever had.”

The curriculum of this era was shaped by the social upheaval of the time, including the civil rights and antiwar movements. “(The administrators) very much wanted us to reflect the changes of the ’60s, which were monumental,” Myers said. “I graduated high school in the ’50s, and our curriculum did not include anything about peaceful protest, which happened in the ’60s, or about gender issues or about racial issues. I grew up in Oregon, and I didn’t know about the Japanese internment camps that were happening in my own state. (In 1964), we felt we were cutting-edge.”

According to Myers, education on these social issues was accomplished through inquiry-based learning, which gave students the freedom to research the issues they were interested in. While there was no specific scaffolding for social justice within the curriculum, students could choose to pursue it as a topic of study. 

As teachers shaped this new curriculum, Myers noted that parents had a hands-off approach to their children’s education, contrasting sharply with today. “It’s really interesting to me that when we got to plan the curriculum in ‘64 in preparation for the year ’64-’65, the community basically turned that job over to the professionals,” she said. “Parents and politics have a lot more influence now than they did then.”

As the 1960s went on, efforts to reshape curriculum moved alongside those to racially integrate PAUSD’s high schools. On May 20, 1968, PAUSD Superintendent Harold Santee drafted a proposal for a multicultural education program which aimed to provide “a range of opportunities at all levels to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary for (students) to develop those attitudes essential for the building of a truly free and open society for all people.” The program involved adding new instructional units and courses, acquiring new instructional materials and allowing for increased interaction between PAUSD students and those in the “larger community.” 

As in the present day, this proposal to alter the curriculum generated a fair amount of discussion. According to board documents from May 20, 1968, Julie Stoneburner wrote a letter on behalf of the Ohlone School Parent Teacher Association Board in support of the program, noting that children needed an education preparing them to live as members of a multicultural world. On the other hand, former teacher then acting as a substitute at Palo Alto High School (Paly) Louise Champion said she hoped “that Anglo-Saxon values would also remain in the schools—that it must be a two-way street.”

Still, a push to diversify the curriculum was clear, as evidenced by several messages from community members to the board regarding representation of minorities in curriculum. Records from the meeting note that Robert King, then a junior at Gunn High School, felt that he “found it hard to identify as an American” in the elementary schools in the district, given that “there was no mention of any Negro in the history books and one somehow gathered the impression that the Negro had been here all these years just sitting around and not doing anything.” 

The diversification of the 1970s

In 1975, in order to save money for the district, Gunn—along with Paly and Cubberley—became a four-year high school. From an administrative standpoint, this change meant shifting the curriculum to encompass a whole new year’s worth of learning. Although it is difficult to say whether this change definitively diversified the curriculum, it is likely that with an added year of instruction, more room would be available for students to learn about different groups or to take elective courses on different groups. According to an article from a 1976 issue of The Oracle, students had even suggested the addition of an ethnic studies class by this time.

More formative to the curriculum’s development, though, was increased attention to the growing diversity of the student body. An emphasis was placed on helping limited- to non-English-speaking students succeed in schools, partially in response to a series of state laws regarding bilingual education (including California law AB 1329 of 1976, which mandated that students unfamiliar with the English language receive instruction in a language they were familiar with, and that the district provide them with equal educational opportunities).

According to Myers, teachers shifted their approach in the classroom to accommodate a wide assortment of needs and learning abilities; they attempted to find texts and activities that would better reflect the needs of a more cosmopolitan student population. “(There was a focus on) designing alternatives for coursework that met the needs of people who couldn’t be just straight down the middle, with (that) slightly old-fashioned approach to education,” she said. 

Expanding the debate: the 1980s

The ’80s, characterized as a decade of increased conservatism nationwide, actually showed a continued commitment toward including minority voices in the curriculum at Gunn. Myers, upon her return to Gunn after a decade-long hiatus, marked the efforts of the English department to make the texts used in English better represent Gunn’s student population.“I remember (during) most of the ’80s—at least, the mid ’80s—in the English department, (we were) searching for reading materials that met the cultures of the people we that were in Gunn then,” she said. “The ’80s was a much more global approach to the whole world—(the approach) to immigration, California, especially, it had just changed quite a bit from 20 years earlier when I started teaching.” 

In pursuit of better representation, the late ’80s saw the addition of several new books to the curriculum, including “The Joy Luck Club,” “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “‘Master Harold’…and the boys” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” English Instructional Lead Paul Dunlap, who began working at Gunn in the ’90s, was pleased to see the improvements but worked to add yet more underrepresented voices to the curriculum. “I joined a group of mostly women teachers, and we created a women writers elective,” he said. “But even then, we knew that there was a flaw in that thinking: If you have to have a course of just women writers, you’re probably not having enough women writers throughout all the (core) classes.”

Such progress wasn’t necessarily seen in the history department. In the late ’80s, the current social studies course progression came into existence—one year of World History, a semester each of Contemporary World History and U.S. Government for sophomores, a year of U.S. history for juniors and a semester of economics (plus one social studies elective) for seniors. This change created fewer elective slots for students, decreasing their ability to explore new narratives—electives such as Far East History and Sociology were rendered obsolete. Moreover, the Social Studies Department Supervisor at the time, John Attig, saw the new framework as favoring textbook learning over “learning by doing and primary sources,” according to a 1986 issue of The Oracle. 

Conservative attitudes nationwide also informed student concerns at Gunn. A 1982 The Oracle article by Geoff Minter titled “Educational white-washing” noted the continued reliance on a “perfect America” narrative, especially at the elementary and junior high school levels. “Elementary and junior high school teachers seldom have students do reports on the unpleasant sides of America: racism, sexism, poverty, crime, the Vietnam War, the 3/5 of a Man Clause in the Constitution, the fact that women on average earn 59¢ to every dollar a man makes and so on,” he wrote. “Even some states, including the heavily populated Texas, have started to pass laws which will eventually leave only the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ series available in school libraries for students to read.”

This clash of ideals and values was also central to Stanford University’s Western Culture debate, which erupted in 1988. The argument was centered around a proposal to drop fifteen required texts—all Western classic works—from the curriculum, abandoning the core list in favor of greater flexibility and the option to include voices of women and minorities. This decision garnered backlash, most notably from United States (U.S.) Secretary of Education William Bennett, who criticized the proposal, according to a Los Angeles Times article from 1988. “They are moving confidently and swiftly into the late 1960’s, and why anybody would want to do that intentionally I don’t know,” he said. 

The debate, recognized nationwide, rocked the boat of its local school district, if only through prompting students to reconsider their own curriculum. The debate around Western Culture and its ensuing curriculum changes made their way onto the front page of The Oracle in 1991, marking the seeds of culture wars in decades to come. 

An era of new and old: the 1990s and early 2000s

The ’90s and early 2000s saw the rise of a new interdisciplinary program at Gunn: American Studies. According to retired social studies teacher and former American Studies teacher Lynne Navarro, the program was begun by teachers Elizabeth Darby and Suzanne Aldridge in order to teach American literature and American history side by side—a callback to the humanities blocking system of the 1960s. “They just really felt like those two subjects, American literature and American history, taught together work really well,” she said. “For example, while you’re reading ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in your English class, if you’re studying the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl at the same time, both of them make more sense.”

The program, which ran every other year because of the nature of the English curriculum, wasn’t designed to be a social justice course. Even so, there was more room for different narratives because of the interdisciplinary approach, according to English teacher and former American Studies teacher Diane Ichikawa. “It did have much more of a social lens to things for the history portion of it,” she said. “We didn’t look at (the history) in terms of dates—whereas in Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH), you definitely have to memorize dates and a lot of different facts. Of course, we get facts in there, but it’s more about ‘What were the social aspects (of) the time in America, starting from Reconstruction and (moving) forward?’”

Still, teachers encountered some backlash. Navarro recalled one of the aspects of the program that didn’t sit well with some students. “When we first added a unit on women’s history in our American studies class, we got some pushback from students,” she said. “(There was criticism) especially from young boys saying, ‘Why do we have to study this?’ (I said,) ‘Well, look at the rest of history. Look at the rest of what you’re studying—where are the women?’”

While the American Studies program continued throughout the ’90s and into the 2000s, it was eventually discontinued. Scheduling issues, as well as student interest, played a role—some students shied away from the program because it would mean losing the opportunity to take APUSH. While the Social Justice Pathway later incorporated a smidge of American Studies’ interdisciplinary nature through pairing research with history, and interdisciplinary electives such as Women’s History have run intermittently, no such alignment of English and history classes has consistently existed at Gunn since.

Nevertheless, initiatives like American Studies did little to change the fundamental Eurocentrism of the core curriculum. Social studies teacher Laurel Howard, who graduated from Gunn in 2011, noted that most of her work in her freshman year World History course was textbook-based, and that the textbook in question hardly expanded the traditional Western narrative. “It (told) a straightforward story of ‘We went from the Renaissance through the Scientific Revolution and then the Enlightenment, and then we had the French Revolution. Then we had imperialism, and that was really bad, and the wars (were bad), and then things got better,’” she said. “I don’t have a strong memory of learning about anything that happened outside of Europe my freshman year, other than if it was relevant to Europe.”

Howard also noted that the attitude toward the textbook as a source shaped how students thought about diversity in the course. “When we watched movies, when we read the textbook, it wasn’t presented as ‘Here are a bunch of different sources, and you’re going to wrestle with them and figure out what you think happened,’” she said. ‘It was more (like), ‘Here’s the history.’ So we read it with a different lens, and that meant it was also a little bit less representative.” 

Growing political tension: the 2010s

In 2013, the English curriculum underwent a major reshaping. Teachers added a number of texts and renamed courses to “acknowledge and honor the diversity of the Gunn community and to provide students with effective choices,” according to school board documents detailing the change. This was the last time alterations were made to the English curriculum at a district level. Among the texts added to the curriculum were “The Kite Runner,” “In the Time of the Butterflies” and “Bless Me, Ultima.”

While most English courses retained their main characteristics, including their names and themes, the 11th- and 12th-grade courses English Masters Honors and British Literature became World Classics Honors and World Literature, respectively. This marked a shift away from the Eurocentric curriculum of the past decades. While a Shakespeare play remained a required text in both courses, books from women and people of color figured into the curriculum much more strongly than in previous years. 

Still, as the 2010s continued, the issue of race in curriculum became increasingly controversial, a shift Howard observed as she began work at Gunn.  “(The issue) was something that really started to come up around the 2016 election, in my recollection, and we’ve had to have endless conversations about it,” she said. “When is it a viewpoint (where) there are reasonable people who could think about it differently? And when is it a viewpoint that is (harming) some of my most vulnerable students?”

Current policies, initiatives in the English department

Increased flexibility has been key to diversifying the curriculum in the past few years in English classes. In the English department, the pandemic played a major role in shaping a new approach to the curriculum. During this time, review of the English curriculum at a departmental and school level intensified in response both to the reenergized Black Lives Matter movement and the demands of remote teaching and learning, according to Dunlap. “In 2020, when it was shelter-in-place, everyone was at home and school was crazy, with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we thought, ‘Let’s go ahead and take advantage of this and try everything we can because things are not working,’” he said. “From that point on, people have felt more freedom to try different titles and to try to be a little bit more inclusive and try things like ‘The Poet X.’ I think we’re happy with that. We don’t have the standard (list of what everyone should read), but I think we’re doing a lot more to think about how we can celebrate different voices in literature.” 

Although this diversity allows teachers greater flexibility in adding to the curriculum, it also means that students’ exposure to different narratives can vary depending on which teachers they have. Some teachers might be more inclined to pilot new texts and authors, while others might prefer to stick closer to traditional, “canonical” texts, according to English teacher Virginia Moyer. 

This seems to be true—student experiences vary from teacher to teacher and from course to course. Senior Jayni Ram noted that while her courses in most years included few women or authors of color, her junior year proved to be different. “I think in most of my classes it has definitely been white authors and male authors,” she said. “But then last year in (English teacher Shaina) Holdener’s class, she had us read ‘Things Fall Apart’ and (‘Like Water for Chocolate’).”

Junior Vivien Chen’s experience followed a similar trend. “I think in ninth grade and 10th grade, it’s more traditional English curriculum, like Shakespeare and ‘Lord of the Flies,’ (though) I think they do a good job of incorporating books that are from all places (and are) diverse,” she said. “In the class I’m taking right now, American Classics, they focus a lot more on American culture and diversity.”

According to Dunlap, the goal is to include texts students would be able to see themselves in and those that would require empathy to immerse themselves in. “The balance is what we call window texts and mirror texts,” he said. “A window (text is one) you look through and you learn about somebody else’s world. A mirror (text is one) you look at and you see yourself. Too much of one or the other is not the balance that we’re looking for.”

Maintaining such a balance can be difficult, and this quandary is akin to that of the Western Culture debate—teachers must weigh the merits of classics against those of newer texts. Howard described this trade-off between window and mirror texts in her experience as a Gunn student. “I’m glad I read those classics (in English class) because they helped me out a lot—as a history person, I recognize references, and I have a frame of reference for that world,” she said. “(The classics) prepared me for living in academia, but didn’t necessarily help me see and understand the world I lived in at that moment.”

Ichikawa noted that this issue—finding a balance of classics and fresh voices—has only been compounded by the post-pandemic bell schedule. Because classes are meeting fewer times per week, reading can be assigned fewer times per week, and it takes longer to get through each book—limiting the number of texts per semester overall. 

Not only that, but it’s often difficult for teachers to truly be able to experiment with new electives or texts. Support fluctuates with administrators and funding, and it’s often difficult to get new courses or books approved. Teachers often have to jump through hoops to acquire the resources they need, according to English teacher Terence Kitada. “It’s funny, because I think the money exists in many places, but it’s just a matter of, ‘Who should pay for this?’” he said. “I’ve heard from several teachers in the department as they try to get new books to pilot that it’s been a very big nightmare.”

Overall, however, most teachers and students agree that there’s room for more narratives. Senior Tra Nguyen advocated for greater inclusion of Asian American voices. “I think I would’ve liked to see more Asian American literature (in my English classes at Gunn) because I don’t think I’ve really encountered that at all, which is a little disappointing,” she said.

Still, there’s a fine line between uplifting underrepresented voices and tokenization—something Kitada emphasized. He also noted that teachers must focus on the types of narratives from minorities they bring in. “If you bring in stories that are by African American authors, but the stories (only) deal with trauma or gun violence and a whole bunch of students read that, it’s just reinforcing those stereotypes of ‘Oh, this is the Black American experience,’ and  I don’t want students to feel like that that is the case,” he said. “As a student, I always hated it. I read one book about Asians in high school when I was in high school 20 years ago, and it was about Chinese Americans working on the railroad. It was (about) things like Chinese foot binding. (I remember) reading this and (thinking) ‘Oh, this is weird.’ And I was the one Asian kid just feeling, ‘Oh my gosh, this is not my culture. This is not right.’” 

Current policies, initiatives in the history department

Although core texts might not be as central to curricular development in the history department, given that textbooks aren’t used heavily in most courses, it certainly makes up part of the issue. According to Howard, the very nature of high school textbooks is flawed: Many are ghostwritten and don’t have footnotes, making it difficult to assess their sources, and their presentation of history can also be problematic. “(Some textbooks) present history as if it’s all solved and done, and we understand it all, because that’s just not (true)—history is this vibrant, dynamic, interesting field,” she said. Howard added that ideally, she’d have students learn mostly from secondary and primary sources.

Because textbooks often prove insufficient for instruction, the onus of providing diverse supplementary materials is often left on the teachers, again providing for variation across classes and courses—an issue Gunn graduate Thomas Li pointed out in his 2020-2021 Advanced Authentic Research project on Indigenous representation in PAUSD K-12 social studies curricula. “Much of the effort to bring in more Indigenous stories is supplementary to the main curriculum, so there could easily be inconsistencies across the school district where some teachers do not highlight Indigenous Peoples to the same extent as our interviewed teachers,” he wrote. “The lack of higher-level direction or professional development for teachers to learn about Indigenous history could mean that teachers themselves are not fully aware of the complexities of Indigenous history.”

Another issue Li mentioned in his paper was that of the deficit narrative—one that defines a group of people solely by the problems they’ve had in the past or the oppression they’ve experienced. Li noted that just as it is important to learn about the horrors of imperialism and slavery, so too is it important to learn about those who fought back.

Similarly, when learning about non-Western cultures, students have found that these groups are only explored in relation to the West, according to Student Equity Committee Board of Student Leaders member junior Sofia Hussain. “Whenever we look at things, it’s through a Western lens—(so when we’re) learning about the Middle East or Asia, it’s ‘What did the British have to do with it?’” she said.

One method currently employed in the department to address these issues is weekly Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings, as well as department meetings. According to Social Studies Instructional Lead Jeffrey Patrick, during PLCs, teachers from a certain course gather to discuss goals, objectives and supplementary materials, which aids in minimizing teacher-to-teacher variation. “There does tend to be a dominant narrative for history and people (teach) the narrative they are familiar (with),” he said. “Over time, as we’re having those discussions in our PLCs and in the department, people will get a chance to hear the counter narrative and think about ways to include that.”

Teachers have found creative ways to incorporate underrepresented groups into historical narratives. Howard uses warm-up activities as a way to incorporate primary sources featuring minority groups into otherwise textbook-heavy courses like APUSH. “A few years ago, I changed (my curriculum) so that every source you read during the American Revolution comes from a woman,” she said. “I’m not sure that students actually noticed that, but it is the kind of thing that I pat myself on the back for because you have to read between the lines to get those sources, but they’re out there, and they’re really fun to talk about.”

Those in the history department also occasionally use resources from the Stanford History Education Group, as well as Brown University’s curriculum from its Choices program, which provide supplements for history classes. 

In some United States History courses, teachers have begun to employ thematic teaching. Rather than going through the history in chronological units, teachers group together movements and trends across history into related categories, like “Movement of People” and “Culture.” According to Navarro, such an approach fosters a more open curriculum. “The thematic approach does make it a lot easier to include a lot of different voices,” she said. “You can have a whole civil rights unit where you’re looking at all of the different civil rights movements that have happened, whether you’re talking about African Americans or women or (the) LGBTQ (community). It’s easy to look at all of those things and do a lot of compare and contrast.”

However, students like Chen have found this method of teaching difficult to follow. “There is no chronology, just because each unit skips around and only has the events that are related to the unit theme,” she said. “You’re not really understanding how American history is progressing, but you get to understand these certain events that had an effect on the history.”

There are also opportunities for exploration through electives and other programs. The Social Justice Pathway, which began during the 2019-2020 school year, provides a three-year course of study for students particularly passionate about social justice, integrating present-day research alongside history. Ethnic Studies, currently an elective but slated to become a graduation requirement in 2029, also offers an opportunity for students to explore different narratives.

(Re)opening the political conversation

As Gunn steps into the year 2023, it appears as though race in curriculum will continue to make up at least some part of the political discussion (judging from November’s school board races alone). Although Campos didn’t win the election, her appeal to some in the community has been undeniable: More than a few comments in support of her views were left on articles during her campaign.

“I’m voting for Ingrid. Enough with PAUSD pushing CRT and gender ideology, queer theory, intersectionality, and not teaching reading, writing and math,” read a comment left on a Palo Alto Daily Post article on Campos.

“I’m for having a diversity of voices on the school board. I also want focus on growth and achievement in reading, writing, arithmetics. This state is currently dumbing down, fast, in public education. I’ll vote for her,” another said, commenting on a Palo Alto Online feature of the candidate.

In a way, the election served as a wake-up call: If these debates around race in curriculum are reaching an area as liberal as Palo Alto, what might the future hold? Given the political climate, the issue has hit close to home for teachers. For some teachers, like Navarro, the situation has become disheartening. “I honestly don’t know what to do about it, and I’m really tired of people just throwing around terms like ‘critical race theory’ when they don’t even know what they’re talking about,” she said. “Critical race theory is a subject that’s taught at the college level, like gender studies. And if a kid in the fourth grade reads one book that’s about slavery, then people are saying things like, ‘You’re teaching critical race theory to fourth graders.’”

According to Navarro, changing the curriculum in any way is bound to garner backlash. “If you change anything too quickly or too radically, then people are upset, and if you don’t ever change, then a different group of people is upset,” she said.

Still, Li noted that the fact that representation in curriculum has become politically tinged doesn’t make it taboo. “If we avoid things that just happen to be political, then we avoid (issues) altogether, and then that means that we aren’t having these discussions about diversity and how to make curricula more inclusive,” he said.

This is especially true since PAUSD is far from an embattled district—there remains a commitment to diversity at some level, something teachers like Dunlap have expressed gratitude for. “(When) I taught ‘Beloved’ I held it up and I said, ‘I’m so glad to teach in a district that can teach you this and not feel like I might get fired, or I might hear parents protest,’” Dunlap said. “Because that’s one of the top (things) that people who don’t understand critical race theory say: ‘People should not read this book because it might make soft white people feel bad about our heritage.’ And so as a white male of privilege, it’s my responsibility to help other people feel more empowered.”

The issue, then, becomes not about what teachers cannot do, but what they can do. Most teachers agree that the best way to approach the current situation is through a lens of inquiry and exploration—a callback to the spirit of the ’60s. “I, ethically, don’t believe that I should ever be telling a student what to think or what to believe,” Howard said. “That said, I acknowledge that I’m in a position of power over my students, and I’m in the position where I get to choose what I bring before them, and that’s a big responsibility. So I try to ask open-ended questions.”

This holds for the English department as well. “I think everyone should have more questions than answers,” Dunlap said. “The more you can say ‘What is life like for you?’ instead of ‘Life is this way,’ I think that’s how we move forward.” 

Dunlap noted that this approach works well with the goal of literature as whole—to empathize. “That’s one of the things I love about teaching English—that we’re reading stories about humans,” he said. “I can read what it’s like to be a Black woman (though) I’ll never be a Black woman. I’ll never be an Indian woman, but I can read stories and say, ‘You know what? I feel that too.’ That’s human.”

Empathy between students and teachers is equally important, especially when it comes to these sensitive topics, according to Howard. “Sometimes, when I’m talking to other teachers, I say, ‘Maybe I wouldn’t (teach) it this way. Maybe this feels a little problematic,’” she said. “Teachers will say, ‘Well, most students have never said that to me.’ And I always have to say, ‘Would you have the words as a 16-year-old or a 17-year-old? Or would you just know something’s off and not be able to say why?’”

Student involvement and initiatives

Although students at Gunn may not be able to vote, there are a variety of actions students are taking to address the issue of representation in curriculum. Gunn’s Student Equity Committee, founded in 2020, currently has a curricular review subcommittee who has three main tasks for this year. The first is to revise the English and history curriculum through the lens of diversity and equity, an endeavor that will require an audit for which participants will need training. The second is piloting books in the English department at the high school level and the middle school level, and the third is helping to develop the Ethnic Studies curriculum. Throughout the process, the committee will be soliciting feedback from students, allowing their voices to be heard. 

According to Hussain, student engagement with those in power is what spurs change at a larger scale. “One thing that I’ve found (helps create change) is really getting involved in committees and talking to the people in power because when you set a requirement, when you persuade the head of the history department to (make a change), that means that all the teachers do have to do that,” she said. 

There are also opportunities for students to join textbook selection committees, which review and evaluate textbook candidates. At meetings, they can share their opinions on the texts, including their thoughts on diversity and representation. Li, who served on the 2018-2019 United States Government textbook selection committee, found the experience to be a positive one. “It was cool to work with teachers and admin in a more informal, casual manner, and it felt like I was contributing to something,” he said. 

Li added that going to the school board can also be an effective method for students to voice their opinions, as there are opportunities for public comment. Students who are interested can reach out to School Board Representative senior Daniel Pan.

Even simply talking to teachers can do a world of good, Dunlap said. “If you’ve read something on your own and you think your teacher might appreciate it, share the title,” he said. “When we are piloting titles, we’ll tell students, and so that’s where you say, ‘Hey, I want to try this title.’”

Although it’s often not always clear how much small things like these can help, they can lead to larger initiatives. Navarro has faith in the ability of the student body to enact change. “I hope that (this) generation can be smarter than the other generations,” she said. “Actually, if you look at the statistics, it is true that younger people have way less conflict over diversity and inclusion. Maybe there is hope.”

On March 16, in Atlanta, Georgia, Robert Aaron Long drove 27 miles to three different Asian-owned massage parlors and opened fire with a 9-mm gun, murdering eight people—Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue—and injuring another. Out of those eight, six of the victims were Asian women.

Yet in media outlets across the nation, people debated whether or not the incident was a hate crime.

In breaking news press coverage, major news outlets such as the New York Times misrepresented victims’ names, splitting up and wrongfully abbreviating Korean names. In journalist Bret Stephens’ column in the New York Times, he accused news outlets of sensationalizing the Atlanta shooting, asserting that because the shooter said the attacks weren’t racially motivated, that they must not have been. Many people were outraged by the press’s handling of the shooting, believing that the coverage diminished the racial aspect of the crime.

A spokesman for the Cherokee County Police Department, Jay Baker, referenced the crime as a result of a “bad day” for the shooter, inciting anger among the public at minimizing what many saw as an important issue. Baker, who was later removed from the case but otherwise not punished, has had a history of racism against Asian Americans, specifically against Chinese people. On Facebook, Baker promoted t-shirts with the slogan “COVID-19 imported virus from CHY-NA” multiple times in March and April of last year. “Love my shirt,” he said. “Get yours while they last.”

Events in Georgia have hit close to home for many.

In the eyes of local Palo Alto mother and Asian solidarity rally organizer Gloria Huang, the media’s downplaying of the shooting and refusal to mention race was another slap in the face. “There was a lot of silence about the recent tragedy that I didn’t expect,” Huang said. “I also saw outright denial that the shootings had anything to do with race and that almost felt like a second strike to what was happening.”

In a year that’s seen a significant increase in acts of violence and hatred against Asian Americans, the murders in Georgia were the straw that broke the camel’s back, finally pushing Asian American stories and narratives into the national spotlight. Online movements such as #StopAsianHate and #StandForAsians received larger platforms and greater support, with many celebrities and civilians alike—including NBA star Jeremy Lin, actor Steven Yeun and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Amanda Nguyen—beginning to speak up about the Asian experience in America.

Yet despite the increase in press coverage, this year hardly marks the beginning of anti-Asian hatred in America. In reality, the history of discrimination and violence against Asian Americans runs as deeply as two centuries back—it’s only now that Asian American voices are being heard.

A History of Discrimination

When people think of Asian Americans, their minds might wander to 2018 film “Crazy Rich Asians,” stereotypical tiger moms or sitcom character London Tipton—in other words, they might imagine a relatively affluent and well-educated minority in America, and one that has only been here for a few decades. In reality, the systemic oppression of Asian people in America runs long and deep. Even before the racism caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Asians have faced discrimination for more than 200 years in America.

In 1850, whispers of striking it rich in the California gold mines brought immigrants from all over the world, including China, to America’s west coast. This was the time when Asian individuals first entered America in large numbers, but nativism—the perpetual fear and hatred of foreigners—and anger at the growing competition in the job market ultimately led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an immigration ban prohibiting all Chinese laborers to enter the U.S. As of now, it remains one of the only immigration bans solely on the basis of nationality.

Stanford history professor and Associate Vice Provost Gordon Chang, who has researched and studied American history and published books that highlight Asian American contributions to American history, highlighted the deep-rooted nature of anti-Asian discrimination. “What history shows me is that the violence directed against Asians in America is not new, but very long-standing, and has been a part of American history from the earliest beginnings of Asian migration to the U.S.,” he said. “Violence against Asians has often been overshadowed because of the terrible violence that we know more about against Native Americans and African Americans and others, but Asian American violence has been quite terrible too. And that is not as well known.”

Chinese Americans were also the victims of one of the nation’s worst mass lynchings. On Oct. 24, 1871, around 500 white and Hispanic people entered Los Angeles’s Old Chinatown and killed 19 Chinese Americans while looting businesses and assaulting Asian citizens. The Chinese Massacre of 1871 bookmarks a painful period in American history for many Asian Americans, yet according to United States History teacher Laurel Howard, it was not an isolated incident. “[A mob] lynched 19 different Chinese people who were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said. “But that’s just one example. Up to 200 different Chinatowns across the West all faced violence in the late 19th century.”

As a result of occupational and geographic immobility, Asian immigrants were often forced to live in ethnic enclaves, squeezed into tight spaces that became unsanitary due to lack of state funding for public services, creating the stereotype that Chinatowns were more susceptible to disease.

Howard wrote her thesis in college about how diseases were often used against immigrant communities. “In the 19th century, before we understood a lot about how disease spreads, it was really easy to look at a lot of immigrant communities getting sick and say that they were getting sick because they were immigrants,” Howard said. “There’s nothing about your ethnicity that makes you more vulnerable to a certain disease, but that association still remains for us; the fear of the outside and the fear of illness tends to combine together.”

Later, during World War II, worries that Japanese Americans would betray the U.S. war effort prompted then-President Franklin Roosevelt to send hundreds of thousands of Japanese American families to internment camps along the Pacific coast. Many were uprooted from their businesses and homes, staying in the camps with minimal belongings and poor conditions for over five years. “In the aftermath of the internment camps, all of these people don’t really have a place to go anymore because their businesses, their farms and their households have been empty for three to four years,” Howard said. “This marks a massive redistribution of wealth.”

Palo Alto City Councilmember Greg Tanaka’s family has suffered greatly at the hands of anti-Asian discrimination. His great-grandfather died of tuberculosis in an internment camp, and when his family was released, they’d lost all of their belongings and assets. Many Japanese families faced the same situation: Internment camps tore down any financial stability that Japanese immigrants had worked so hard to build. “My dad lost his dad and then his family when he got out of the camps,” Tanaka said. “The whole business was gone, right? Because you’re basically in prison for five years.”

Even Asian Americans whose grandparents are native to America may find it difficult to stop being perceived as perpetual foreigners in their home country. When World War II came around, Tanaka’s father—an American who knew no other home—felt as if he had to prove his loyalty to America. “My dad signed up for the Marines, and he served the country as well as his brother,” Tanaka said. “They put life on the line for the country, because they wanted to prove that they were good Americans.”

The Asian experience in America is not only limited to violence and tragedy, yet history books often overlook Asian-led accomplishments or achievements. Gunn 2016 alumna Shawna Chen, a volunteer Editorial Director at the Yappie, a news publication reporting on Asian power, politics and influence, noted that even when she was learning about American history in high school, she rarely felt represented in textbooks or curriculum. “I only remember two times that I felt represented in U.S. history,” she said. “The first was when I read one line in my textbook about Chinese laborers building the transcontinental railroad, and it didn’t say anything about the kind of exploitation or abuse they faced—just said that they contributed. The second was one paragraph about Japanese incarceration during World War II, and again, it didn’t really talk about how much people suffered, or how it hurt.”

Racism During COVID-19

With the COVID-19 pandemic killing more than 500 thousand people in America, anti-Asian hate crimes have become more widespread, especially in places with a higher proportion of Asian residents, such as New York and the Bay Area.

Since March 2020, marking the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in America, hate crimes against Asians have increased by nearly 150% in America’s major cities, despite overall hate crimes dropping by 7%. NBC News reported that hate crimes more than doubled from 2019 to 2020 in major cities, making a total of 122 just last year alone.

In Feb. 2021, a 36-year-old Asian man was stabbed in the back while walking in New York City’s Chinatown. On Jan. 28, 2021, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year old Thai man, was violently pushed down while taking his routine hour-long stroll through his neighborhood in San Francisco, and later died from his injuries. On Jan. 31, a 91-year-old Asian man was shoved to the ground by a teenager in Oakland’s Chinatown, who was suspected to have attacked two other Asian elderly on the same day.  In March of this year, an Asian woman was sexually assaulted in a San Jose train station; her assaulter was reported to have yelled racial slurs targeted at Asian people at her before a bystander intervened. Across many major cities, scapegoating Asians for the pandemic has turned into cases of violence and murder.

Along with physical violence, reports of verbal abuse have also increased in the past year. The Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Hate Reporting Center recorded 2,808 anti-Asian incidents from March to December of 2020. 70.9% of these cases were verbal harassment complaints, ranging from racial slurs to targeted COVID-19 affronts. Other reported attacks such as spitting or coughing on people have also increased in the past year.

This increase in violence and verbal abuse stems from the fact that many American citizens blame the Asian community—more specifically the Chinese community—for the pandemic. Among the 2,808 reported incidents, more than 40% of the attacks were reported by Chinese Americans, with 15% by Korean Americans and 8% by Filipino Americans.

The actions and words of a government can make a crucial impact in the way its citizens view a global crisis. In the past year, the Trump administration linked the virus to ethnicity by popularizing terms such as “China virus” and “Kung flu.”

In the eyes of Palo Alto “Littlest March” organizer Kalee Whitehouse, former President Trump weaponized the virus against Asian Americans in order to mask his administration’s failure to adequately institute protective measures in America. “I’ve had to explain to my children that in the same way Trump misrepresented ballot counts, he has lied about coronavirus,” Whitehouse said. “He didn’t want to take responsibility for ignoring the virus and failing to protect American citizens.”

According to Chang, the Stanford professor, the way public health crises have been politicized and used to blame certain minorities can lead to stereotypes and stigma. “Unfortunately, a lot of diseases are given ethnic names,” Chang said. “These are all unfortunate and terrible associations because they stigmatize different social groups, and people do that because they’re looking for scapegoats.”

Hate Close to Home

Nestled within Silicon Valley and neighboring a world-class educational institution, many see Palo Alto as a city where tolerance and acceptance are commonplace. Asians also constitute 33% percent of the Palo Alto population, far more than the national average of 6%. Yet living in Palo Alto doesn’t protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from racist incidents.

In May of last year, to his shock, junior Justin Lin witnessed a cashier verbally abusing an elderly Asian woman in a local grocery store. “This happened in a place that was pretty close to my community, and there are a lot of Asian people around us,” he said. “I didn’t expect something [to happen] so close to us, and so close to my grandmother and my family members.”

Lin and his father were victims of a similar verbal altercation at another local grocery store. “A man looked at my dad and said, ‘Aren’t you Chinese? Aren’t you the one that brought this coronavirus?’” he said. While other bystanders were able to break up the incident swiftly, it resulted in lasting fear and apprehension among Lin and his family. According to Lin, his family began to make conscious decisions to avoid certain areas of Palo Alto where people are known to be intolerant of the Asian community.

Sinophobic sentiments have even affected prominent political figures in the area, including Greg Tanaka. While Tanaka was biking down Middlefield Road last March, a vehicle pulled up next to him and rolled down the windows. “[The vehicle occupants] started yelling at me, saying ‘you brought the virus from China,’” Tanaka said. “And I’m thinking, gosh, I’m on City Council. Isn’t this liberal Palo Alto? I’m fairly well known here, but probably not well enough. Or they just don’t care.”

Such occurrences have caused junior Corrine Zhao to become more alert when she ventures out in public. “At the beginning of the pandemic, when I went out with my Chinese friends or with my mom, people would just look at me weirdly,” she said. “They looked at me like I was spreading the virus, even though oftentimes they were the ones who weren’t following the guidelines.”

Legislative action to address anti-Asian hate, even in Palo Alto, has been slow. Following the Black Lives Matter movement last summer, Palo Alto’s City Council passed a resolution to address and investigate racially motivated violence against Black and brown communities. However, when Tanaka proposed adding attacks against Asian Americans to the investigation, he was unable to get support from the other City Council members. “Not a single one of my colleagues would second that motion,” Tanaka said. “They felt like Asians didn’t need it. We didn’t need protection. We didn’t need people to look into the racism that happens to Asians. What’s wrong with that picture?”

The Model Minority Myth

The idea of a model minority, originating in the 20th century, first began as a way to characterize Japanese Americans as affluent and successful, but quickly expanded to include the general Asian American population as well as Jewish Americans. By the 21st century, the concept of Asians being a model minority has been deeply ingrained in the Asian American experience: Asians are characterized as silent, law-abiding and successful individuals who do not challenge traditional systems of white supremacy—in other words, living proof that people of color can succeed in American society.

Yet the model minority myth can be just as harmful as overtly negative stereotypes. For one, the model minority myth is used to mask widespread Asian American poverty in major cities. In 2017, for example, Asians had the highest poverty rate in New York City, and many of those impoverished were elderly residents.

The stereotype of the model Asian is harmful not only in veiling the struggles that Asians face, but also in insulting other minorities. “The idea of the model minority did not originate from Asian Americans,” Chang said. “It was a description placed upon Asian Americans by social commentators who highlighted the different aspects of Asian American life, not so much to praise Asian Americans but to criticize other minorities.”

Chang elaborated on the model minority myth as a way for politicians at the time to ignore issues raised by the Black community, citing Asian immigrant success stories to combat theories of white supremacy in America. “The idea of a model minority suggests that other minorities are not models, that they’re not so good, and that pits different communities against each other,” he said. “Beginning in the 1960s, there were commentators who wanted to criticize African Americans because they were protesting for equal rights and wanting to have improvement in life, and they used the model minority myth to do so.”

In addition, grouping Asians under an umbrella of assumed affluence can have a muzzling effect on activists wishing to voice their thoughts on Asian-related issues. “This [model minority status] is used against Asians to say that Asians don’t have anything they really complain about,” Chang said. “So whenever Asians do [voice their opinions], people actually then turn around and attack Asians for being unappreciative of life in America. It’s really a double-edged sword to attack Asian Americans in addition to other minorities.”

The model minority myth still affects perceptions of the Asian community today, causing rifts between minorities, notably the Asian and Black communities. In light of the recent attacks, many people have noted that select perpetrators in Bay Area crimes have been Black, insinuating that anti-Asian hate is a problem that primarily plagues the Black community. However, in addition to historical tensions between the communities, efforts at achieving Black-Asian solidarity have also been widespread. 25 years after the 1992 L.A. riots, often seen as an eruption of Black-Asian race tensions, leaders from both Korean American and Black communities came together to support unity and solidarity. On Feb. of this year, organizers in Oakland rallied for Asian-Black unity, building coalitions in a time of tension.

Chang notes that while individual perpetrators may come from other minority communities, there is an important distinction between an individual and a movement. “You don’t see, for example, African American leaders or Latinx leaders or Native American leaders calling for the wholesale attack against Asians,” Chang said. “You don’t see these leaders using stupid terms like the Gong flu or the Chinese virus. They’re very much more respectful and call for unity.”

At the March 28 rally against anti-Asian hate, Palo Alto High School sophomore Johannah Seah spoke to the importance of uniting against racism and hatred. “Change looks like standing together against racism,” she said. “It looks like standing with Black communities, Indigenous communities and other communities of color. It looks like addressing the system and the government, not just the people.”

Local Asian activist Monica Yeung Arima, who helped spread the word for the Town and Country Stand for Asians rally on March 20, believes that the race of the perpetrators is a minor issue in the grand scheme of anti-Asian hate. “Whether it’s black or [Asian] or white, when someone is hurt, we all bleed,” Arima said.  “I think people need to have common sense that these kinds of things shouldn’t happen at all.”

Even with the help of organizations such as the Stop AAPI Hate website, where Asian Americans can report hate-related incidents, Asian Americans often do not self-report crimes, believing it easier to move on rather than linger on the past. “I think in general […] we stay silent about it,” Tanaka said. “We don’t complain. We just let it go. A lot of Asians don’t want to cause a ruckus, so they don’t want to report it as a hate crime. They just kind of take it.”

As a result, many anti-Asian stories are left untold, and the problem is minimized to the extent of disappearing completely.

Silent No Longer

Since the Atlanta shootings and countless previous attacks on Asian Americans, Asian voices have been thrust to the forefront of activism and racial justice. From New York to Los Angeles, people have attended protests and signed petitions in an attempt to enact meaningful change. A GoFundme fundraiser created to combat anti-Asian hate has raised more than $4 million, with approximately 41,000 donors from all over the world. Corporations such as YouTube, H&M and Airbnb have shown their support to the Asian community through monetary donations or providing educational resources on recent events.

The media also has started reporting on the violent attacks against Asians, yet the topic is still overlooked and undercovered. As a journalist, Chen found disparities in how different crimes and issues were covered, an issue that prompted her to join the Yappie. “I think [media coverage for AAPI issues] is something that has been a problem, to say the least, for a long, long time,” Chen said. “It’s just that people didn’t really care about [these issues] until now.”

Chen pointed out that while many people assume the Asian community is silent, it only appears that way because Asian activists so often go unheard by the general public. “Part of the problem is definitely lack of media coverage, but I also think people just didn’t care about the stories that did get published about anti-Asian racism,” Chen said. “It is still very frustrating for a lot of Asian Americans who have been living this reality their entire lives, and especially the last year, for all of a sudden to be catapulted into this huge thing.”

In Oakland, activists have been protesting and petitioning for the city’s officials to make a change. Just Cities, an organization based in Oakland, has been working on initiatives that give fair housing and leadership opportunities to minorities. In 2020, Just Cities helped to pass a landmark housing policy that removed discrimination against those who have criminal records. They are also working on preventing the displacement of lower-income people of color from major cities in the Bay Area. Margaretta Lin, the Executive Director for Just Cities and an activist for Asian rights, believes that racially motivated crimes can stem from inequalities in the housing system, which makes her work at Just Cities significant in combating anti-Asian sentiments. “The rise of anti-Asian American hate stems from all these structural gaps, around our education and around our multiracial understanding,” she said. “It stems from a history of racial segregation in schools and housing.”

In the last couple of months, Oakland and other cities in the Bay Area have organized marches and protests to stand in solidarity with the grieving Asian community. In San Mateo, Ashlyn So, a 13-year old middle school student, organized an #StandForAsians rally. In San Jose, Gunn alumnus Adam Juratovac organized another rally in solidarity with Asian Americans amidst the hate. Rallies like these show Asian Americans that they are not alone in their struggles and that they can find allies in their community members and neighbors.

In Palo Alto, residents have been coming out to show support to the AAPI community. In the last few weeks, local community leaders have organized rallies and protests in order to stop the violence against the Asian community. On March 26, city council councilman Greg Tanaka participated in a rally in Foster City. The day after, a kid-friendly protest in Palo Alto called “Littlest March” took place; protestors walked down University Avenue to the City Hall, where a moment of silence was followed by speeches from the general public and writing hopes for a better future on postcards tied to a “wishing tree”.  “We felt like this was necessary,” Huang said. “We were just two mothers who felt like Palo Alto also needed a march in solidarity with Asian Americans, especially as Asian Americans ourselves.”

Stepping Forward

In light of the anti-Asian hate and resulting movements against such prejudices, local communities have made attempts to counter xenophobia and move in solidarity for Asian Americans. On March 19, Principal Wendy Stratton condemned anti-Asian racism through a schoolwide Schoology message, sending solidarity and support to the many Asian American students impacted both personally and mentally by the occurrences.

On March 22, a little less than a year after Tanaka’s first attempt to bring attention to anti-Asian sentiments in Palo Alto, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution to denounce and combat xenophobia and racism towards all racial groups in Palo Alto, but more specifically the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. “I’m hoping that this will unite Asians somewhat in terms of standing up for each other,” Tanaka said. “We can’t keep having a higher standard for Asian hate crimes.”

Arima also attended the March 22 City Council meeting and spoke in favor of the resolution, believing that the handling of ani-Asian hate incidents in Palo Alto should be made more transparent. “If any [instances of anti-Asian hate] happen, it is important for the public to know—for the rest of the world to know—what has actually been happening,” she said. “The record for Asian hate crimes is zero in Palo Alto. So, what is counted as a hate crime, and what is not counted as an anti-Asian hate crime?”

Margaretta Lin believes that education is key to putting an end to the model minority myth. “Today, we’re not taught about each other’s histories in this country, and so when we’re not taught the truth and the reality of our experiences here in this country, it’s really easy for stereotypes about racial groups to become dominant,” she said.

Similarly, Chen believes that ultimately, the cure to racism and ignorance is education. “I think a lot of it comes down to education, but it [needs to] start from the very beginning of schooling, and I believe that that’s true for all racial groups, whether you’re talking about Native Americans, Black communities or Asian Americans,” she said. “[Education] needs to start from the beginning, so that you don’t just learn this whitewashed version of history.”

In many regards, the rushing highway traffic represents affluence and comfortable middle-class life: the fleet of sedans and SUVs making their way up and down Highway 101 boast passengers working in the world’s most affluent tech companies and high-end San Francisco businesses. Indeed, Palo Alto, the common destination of such travelers, is itself a hotbed of wealth—in 2018, city residents’ median household income was more than double the national median.

Yet less noticeably, Highway 101 remains the de facto divide between affluent Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, a city with an estimated poverty rate of 12.6% and a place known as the per-capita murder leader of the U.S. in 1992. Although East Palo Alto has made encouraging progress in safety and decreasing the city’s poverty level, such vast disparity is far from a coincidence. In fact, this artificial divide is caused by an extensive history of racial segregation that has long infiltrated the community.

A multitude of discriminatory housing practices, such as restrictive deeds and redlining, have contributed to vast educational and socioeconomic inequalities—and the implications of such practices, far from being relics of a bygone era, threaten to rear their heads once more in the current debate over who should have access to Foothills Park.

A history of housing segregation

Despite spurring quintessential Silicon Valley innovation and laying claim to a seemingly progressive community, the Bay Area was not—and still is not—immune to the gentrification and racial segregation that plagued cities all over the country.

During the economic boom following World War II, minority families began flooding into the Bay Area to look for a place to settle. However, they were met with widespread resistance: in Palo Alto, certain properties in multiple neighborhoods subdivided from 1925 to 1950 had deed restrictions specifying that “no person not wholly of the white caucasian race shall use or occupy such property unless such person or persons are employed as servants of the occupants,” according to the website Palo Alto History.org.

Social studies teacher Laurel Howard, a Palo Alto resident since childhood, recalls that bylaws embedded in the deeds of nearby houses were surprisingly commonplace. “My parents own a house in Palo Alto,” she said. “When they bought the house, [it was] actually written into their deed that they can’t sell the house to a person of color.”

A similar practice of barring property sales to people of color was in place near Stanford University’s campus. During World War II, the Peninsula Housing Association of Palo Alto purchased a large amount of land to build 400 houses in response to the housing shortages at the time. In their bylaws and deeds, the association incorporated a quota system promising that the proportion of Black homeowners on their land would not exceed the proportion of Black individuals in all of California. Later, they sold their land to a private developer with a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) agreement detailing that no properties could be sold to any Black individuals.

As a result, people of color were prohibited from settling in most Palo Alto neighborhoods. Left with no other options, minority families turned to a nearby area, the soon-to-be called East Palo Alto, where housing prices were lower and housing restrictions were less frequent.

Although these types of racial restrictions were outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, de facto restrictions nevertheless persisted through bylaws and deeds. The effects have cascaded to from the modern-day divide: houses were often passed through generations, creating the segregated community seen today.

Discrimination and FHA redlining

Of course, these practices of racial segregation weren’t just limited to Palo Alto. In 1934, the FHA was established on a nationwide scale. Originally, the agency was created to improve housing standards and increase employment in the midst of the Great Depression; in order to do so, the FHA worked with real estate companies to provide loans to potential homeowners.

Real estate companies, however, wanted a guarantee that potential homeowners would actually pay back their loans; thus, the federal government marked out neighborhoods to provide “risk ratings” that would judge which neighborhoods would pay back loans on time, resulting in a process marred by racism. “The neighborhoods that tended to be the most safe investments [for real estate companies] tended to be neighborhoods with that very strict, stereotypical cookie-cutter white family, because those were socially seen as more respectable and safer,” Howard said. Neighborhoods seen as “high risk” were outlined in red lines, leading to the term of “redlining.” Neighborhoods of color were outlined in red more often than not, leaving such areas deeply segregated for years to come.

In nearby San Francisco, for example, 87% of previously redlined neighborhoods are still classified today as low-income, according to the Urban Displacement Project. Other nearby cities subjected to redlining policies in the past include San Jose, Oakland and Berkeley.

Some neighborhoods in Palo Alto, however, were less segregated than others. “The Greenmeadow neighborhood was more integrated,” Howard said. “However, just because they would sell the house [to people of color], doesn’t mean that [they] had equal access to it.”

Setbacks faced by minority families, such as the lack of access to loans, still played an influential role in housing settlement; even if families were allowed to live in a neighborhood, they often could not afford to do so.

Redlining was ultimately made illegal with the Federal Fair Housing Act in 1968, a ban that was later reinforced by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, which required banks to report their public loan data. Yet the damage was done: only 1.6% of Palo Alto residents are Black, according to the 2019 U.S. Census estimate.

East Palo Alto gentrification

Through both discriminatory deeds and illegal redlining practices, the divide between East Palo Alto and Palo Alto widened in the years following World War II. During the 1960s and 1970s, Palo Alto began to thrive. The technology industry was booming and Stanford University became a premier institution, attracting professors, students and innovators alike. However, housing prices remained steep, and the discriminatory practices kept many from settling in Palo Alto. “East Palo Alto, right next door, became the space where people who are coming to this region, either to work as domestic servants or even people who are coming to be graduate students at Stanford, [lived],” Howard said.

Yet East Palo Alto was not incorporated as a city until 1983, denying it the money and resources that would have helped it advance. Former Stanford Dean of Freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims argued the decision it left East Palo Alto free to be preyed on by developers. “[Developers thought,] ‘There’s no land left on the Peninsula, so we better start buying up East Palo Alto,’” Lythcott-Haims said. “And then East Palo Alto got gentrified.”

Gentrification is the practice of reforming an area or neighborhood to conform to the current taste of society; in other words, developers change the character of the neighborhood in response to an influx of affluent residents or businesses and make it more appealing to those with power and money.

As tech powerhouses began settling in the Bay Area, especially along the southwest border of East Palo Alto, the community began to change accordingly. “[Facebook] employees [were] like, ‘Oh, we’re in East Palo Alto. This is a sketchy area,” social studies teacher Haley Perkins said, illustrating a common viewpoint held by nearby tech corporations.

As such, companies longed to make the community “safer” for their new employees to live in; for instance, Facebook–whose headquarters lie on the Menlo Park and East Palo Alto border–currently funds a branch of the Menlo Park Police Department specifically for policing the area surrounding their headquarters.

The consequence of gentrification was a rise in already expensive housing prices. Some East Palo Alto residents, especially those who settled in the city after being denied housing elsewhere, were displaced. One University of California at Berkeley study found that East Palo Alto “lost thousands of low-income black households” from 2010 to 2015, with no similar effects reported in predominantly white neighborhoods in the same time period.

Yet gentrification does not inherently have to create a negative impact, according to Perkins. “I think that, philosophically, when people are removed from their homes because they can no longer afford to live there or because of other governmental policies, that’s a moral wrong,” she said. “Gentrification isn’t necessarily a bad thing if what it’s doing is investing in communities for [those] that exist there, and making the community better for existing [individuals living there]. But what gentrification tends to do is invest in communities so that other communities can thrive in that community.”

Lythcott-Haims echoed Perkins. “We ought to be able to bring opportunity and look after the needs of those who are already there,” she said. “Otherwise it’s just another form of colonization.”

Impact on the education system

The effects of Palo Alto’s extensive history of racial segregation has compounded to form clear disparities in the quality of education offered by East Palo Alto’s Ravenwood School District and the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD). In 1986, the Tinsleys, an East Palo Alto family, filed a class action lawsuit against eight local school districts. “East Palo Alto schools were so incredibly underfunded that a lot of people sued, saying that their children were not getting adequate education,” Howard said.

The lawsuit also cited the discriminatory practices that prevented the Tinsleys from settling in more affluent areas in the first place. PAUSD pled no contest. In response, the district created the Voluntary Transfer Program (VTP), also known as the Tinsley Program, which allows 60 East Palo Alto students to take a bus into the city and attend Palo Alto schools.

According to Assistant Principal Pier Angeli La Place, the reason behind the program’s founding is largely—and unfortunately–unknown to the community. “It’s more viewed like it’s just this benevolent, kind thing that Palo Alto is doing to allow these kids from East Palo Alto to come over,” she said. “Whereas, in fact, the history of it is that it was a very racially motivated decision to create this boundary that would prevent those students from being a part of [PAUSD]. And as a result, that is why we have that program.”

According to La Place, historically underrepresented students are still not receiving the attention they deserve and are often overlooked in favor of the majority of PAUSD students. “85% of our students are doing fantastic,” she said. “[People then think,] ‘That’s good enough; we’re clearly a successful district because we have a high performing record for most of our kids.’ And so it becomes easier to sweep aside the 15 to 20% [of students] who, on every statistic you could possibly name, are not successful academically.”

Special Education teacher Courtney Carlomagno adds that the socioeconomic status of students’ families often determines the voice they have in decision-making. “The parents who have more capital and live nearer to the school are going to be the ones who are making the demands on the educational system,” she said. “They’re going to be the ones speaking at the school board, and so they’re going to gain a lot more access and rights that’s in line with what they want for their students, from their white homes.”

Similarly, there seems to be a lack of community acknowledgement toward these socioeconomic disparities, according to Perkins, making any efforts to resolve them more difficult. “This kind of divide between East Palo Alto and Palo Alto is so known to the community but so unspoken,” Perkins said.

Even as diverse groups of students are brought together in educational environment around the Bay Area, the social and cultural divide deepens, according to Carlomagno. “A lot of our Black and Brown students don’t see themselves in the school community or see themselves in the teachers they have, or they just don’t feel like they’re represented,” she said. “I’ve had students tell me that the only way it’s going to change is if we find a way to increase our enrollment of Latino and African-American students, or to increase the staff we have that are people of color, specifically [those who identify as] Latino and African-American.”

Howard cited the distance between the two communities as yet another factor dividing students. “If you are living in East Palo Alto, you have to take this really long bus ride,” she said. “You’re not close to any of your school peers, because you’re coming from this other region.”

Perkins believes focusing on creating resources is key to lessening the education gap between students from low-income families, including those from East Palo Alto, and students from affluent Palo Alto homes. “One of the big solutions would be to pay attention to and where they’re going to,” she said. “Are the resources being allotted to the students who need them the most? Or are the resources being allotted to the students who already have the most?”

A nature preserve for a select few

Educational inequalities aren’t the only modern-day remnants of Palo Alto’s history with racial segregation. Even today, a debate is raging over who exactly should access Palo Alto’s Foothills Park. Foothills Park, a large nature preserve owned by the city of Palo Alto, has limited park access to Palo Alto residents ever since it was purchased in 1965. A recent lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other plaintiffs has threatened this policy.

According to Palo Alto City Council candidate Greer Stone, the plaintiffs’ rationale is that the current policy violates non-residents’ rights to freedom of speech, travel, protest and assembly. “If you’re a non- resident, you can’t go into the park to protest the park being closed [or say] that it should be a public space and the public should have the right to be able to enter the vehicle to enter the park,” he said.

While there is no direct evidence that the decision to close off the park was made with racist intent, the ACLU also cites Palo Alto’s history of racial segregation in their lawsuit.

Indeed, the stated intent behind the residents-only policy, according to Palo Alto, is associated with the park’s purchase. In 1965, when the city was making plans to buy the land, Palo Alto reached out to neighboring cities to see if they were interested in splitting the cost. No one cared to chip in. Since then, Foothills Park has been open to Palo Alto residents only—in other words, only to those who pay taxes to keep the park open.

In that vein, some Palo Alto residents argue that opening the park up to non-residents would sharply increase maintenance costs due to the required presence of a full-time ranger and the potential increase of garbage collection needed.

Yet this past summer, the City Council approved a pilot program to open the park to select non-residents willing to purchase a permit. Lythcott-Haims hopes that Palo Alto will ultimately open up the park. “I’m ashamed to live in a city that restricts access to this open space that was never originally belonging to Palo Alto,” she said.

Despite numerous efforts to bridge the gap between the two cities, especially in light of recent nationwide equality movements, much work remains. “It’s clear that we do have the vestiges of the systemic inequities within this community from these various housing policies in the 1950s and 1960s,” Stone said.