The View from Here: Community & Connection

by Tucker Foehl, Head of School
As we make the final preparations for our return to campus next week, there is a buzz of activity that reminds me more of August than March. Today, our staffulty has been training and working hard to put the final touches on our classrooms, even as we mark the one-year anniversary of our shelter-in-place. Both the all-hands-on deck preparations and this solemn milestone inspire reflection on our interconnected, determined, and caring community. This deep sense of community is one of the many qualities that drew me to SA, and it has sustained so many of us through this difficult year. There are so many challenges we have endured this year, and one critical and alarming obstacle has been largely ignored and underreported throughout the pandemic. 
 

The increased violence and hate-speech against Asian Americans that has pervaded so much of our national discourse surrounding the pandemic has reached a crescendo locally with the brutal assault of a 91-year-old man in Oakland’s Chinatown and the murder of a Thai man in San Francisco. Nationally, Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate, a reporting center launched in response to anti-Asian racism, has received over 3,000 first-hand reports of attacks and abuse against Asian-Americans in 47 states and the District of Columbia throughout the pandemic. Sinophobia, or anti-Chinese sentiment, has become more commonplace in our national discourse and driven much of this violence, although the anti-Asian sentiment is widespread and, according to organizations working to combat this, Asian Americans of all backgrounds have experienced increases of attacks and abuse against them this year. 
 
Many of our students have grown increasingly alarmed about these hate crimes. Some of our DEI Student Advisory group leaders—Abi Forgue ‘21, Charlie Lewis ‘23, Mae McCarthy ‘23,  Fatima Rojas Nuñez '22, and Amelia Packard ‘22—wrote an open letter to me responding to the secondary pandemic of anti-Asian violence and racism in the United States. In their letter to me, they demonstrated a commitment to combating this in our society and asked me to create awareness around this pressing issue:
 
“There has been a sharp increase in hate crimes against Asian American people close to home in the Bay Area. This is horrible, yet we have seen little media coverage of these incidents. This is a direct result of the harmful model minority narrative that is tied to Asian American people: the widely held belief that they are not people of color and thus a hate crime could not possibly be committed against them… It’s important that SA brings more light to this topic, because the media coverage on it has been hard to find. By providing information to students about violence towards Asian Americans, we will be doing our part to actively combat the model minority narrative that erases the violence and racism that Asian Americans face.” 
 
The student leaders also included additional resources and local organizations working toward addressing this increased violence and the anti-Asian rhetoric that is having such a destructive impact on our society. If you are interested, please utilize these resources if you want to become more aware of what is happening and the way people are responding in our region and beyond.
 
As the DEI Student Advisory leaders wrote to me, “we must actively seek to bring awareness to the recent violence, and also encourage our community to do the research and seek opportunities” as we all work toward impactful change. 
 
The letter from our DEI Student Advisory leaders is just one example of the critical voices in our community who are responding to these injustices. Some recent pieces from Sophia Siegner ‘24 and Dot Kowal, our Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Director of College Counseling, are powerful reflections on this national crisis and both include personal reflections on what it means to be Asian American at this particular moment. These voices, and so many others in our community, provide vital testimony that highlight individual experiences of exclusion and what it means to truly belong. 

This week, we also asked all students to fill out our first-ever DEI dashboard survey to help us document and track our students’ sense of belonging at SA. We hope that this will help us support everyone in our community as we work toward creating a more equitable campus and inclusive school community. As some of us know from our own experience, and recent scientific studies have further confirmed, students thrive when they feel a sense of belonging at school. We need to strive toward perfecting that on our campus, and we need to do everything we can to instill an authentic sense of inclusion and belonging in the fabric of our communities beyond SA. This work is especially vital as we return to on-campus community life in the coming weeks and months.