NAPABA’s Civil Rights Committee presents “Race, Books, and Education: Selective Erasure, Misinformation, and Reclaiming Our Stories,” a three-part webinar series. In Session 1, experts will discuss the importance of teaching ethnic studies and elevating the stories of marginalized communities, including AANHPI history, and current policy efforts to teach this history. Session 2 will discuss book bans, and why their reach has gone as far as banning children’s books about Asian food. Session 3 will describe how professors are responding and adapting to the current attack on DEI and race on college campuses, its impact on the pipeline into academia, and what this means for the ability to teach Critical Race Theory or meaningfully discuss race in college and law school campuses going forward.

This webinar series is co-sponsored by:

AABA Houston
ABA-NV
APABA-DC
APABA-PA
AABANY 
AABA Bay Area
NFALA 

Session 1: Reclaiming our Stories — Knowing Ourselves, Knowing Our History
Japanese American civil rights leader Yuri Kochiyama once said, “Unless we know ourselves and our history, and other people and their history, there is really no way that we can really have positive kinds of interaction where there is real understanding.” With recent state and federal legislation as a backdrop, this session will address the current debate regarding the teaching of ethnic studies and of marginalized communities, including AANHPI history, and current policy efforts to teach this history. We will also discuss the importance of long-term cross-racial organizing in this space, recent successes, and how these successes fit into a broader goal of building the “real understanding” that Yuri Kochiyama demanded. 

Session 1 Panelists

• Marita Etcubañez (Moderator), Asian Americans Advancing Justice - AAJC — Marita is the Vice President of strategic initiatives for Advancing Justice | AAJC. She leads the organization's efforts to build awareness, conduct anti-harassment bystander intervention training, and encourage reporting of anti-Asian hate. Prior to joining Advancing Justice | AAJC, Marita was director of legal services for the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center in Washington, D.C. Her 10 years of experience providing direct legal services to low-income communities includes advocating on behalf of migrant and seasonal farm workers with Texas Rural Legal Aid, as well as working with labor pool workers as part of the Homeless Persons Representation Project in Baltimore.
  
  Marita holds a law degree and bachelor’s degree from The University of Michigan. She is admitted to practice in the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia.
  
  
• Thomas Lee, Fordham Law School — Thomas Lee is the Leitner Family Professor of International Law and Co-Director, Center on Asian Americans and the Law at Fordham Law School; he was Faculty Director of Graduate and International Studies from 2006 to 2019. He has written many articles about international law, U.S. foreign relations law, constitutional law, federal courts, and legal history. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Virginia Law Schools; Special Counsel at the Department of Defense; a Member of the ICSID Panel of Conciliators; and U.S. law adviser to the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Korea. He is Special Counsel at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, and a Member of the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, and of the American Law Institute. Before his academic career, Lee clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the First Circuit and Justice David Souter of the Supreme Court and served as a U.S. naval cryptology officer, afloat on submarines and surface combatants and ashore in Korea, Japan, and with the National Security Agency. He is a graduate of Harvard University (A.B., summa cum laude; A.M. in Regional Studies-East Asia) where he also studied for a Ph.D. in Government (ABD), and an honors graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was Articles Chair of the Law Review. 
  
  
• Grace Pai, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Chicago — Grace Pai is the Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago, where she leads strategy for issue-based campaigns and power-building work. In 2021, she led a successful campaign to require Asian American history to be taught in all Illinois public schools – making Illinois the first state in the country to do so. Prior to joining Advancing Justice | Chicago in 2018, Grace worked on environmental and economic justice issues with The People’s Lobby and Reclaim Chicago. She has spent nearly a decade organizing in Chicago and has trained hundreds of organizers and community leaders across the country. 
  
  Building Asian American political power is one of her passions. In November 2020, Grace took a leave of absence to move to Georgia to help win a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. As the Field Director for Asian American Advocacy Fund PAC, she built and managed a canvass program that knocked on the doors of more than 100,000 AAPI voters in the Atlanta metro area in just 5 ½ weeks, contributing to the historic wins of Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Grace also serves as the founding Executive Director of Asian American Midwest Progressives, a political organization established in 2019 that endorses progressive candidates for elected office.
  
  
• Juhwan Seo, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - AAJC — Juhwan Seo is the Assistant Director of Education Policy at Advancing Justice | AAJC. He advocates for equitable education policy for Asian Americans, with an emphasis on Asian American studies in K-12 curricula nationwide. Previously, Juhwan organized with the New York Immigration Coalition and co-founded the Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition. Juhwan holds an M.A. from Cornell University and a B.A. from Harvard University. His areas of expertise include queer migration, immigrant labor, and bureaucratic policy implementation. Juhwan has taught courses with Cornell's Asian American Studies Program, Department of Sociology, and Prison Education Program.