Black Asian American Solidarity Professional Development Conference

Black Asian American Solidarity Professional Development Conference

Date: October 10, 2024

Time: 9am-4:30pm

Location: Carl A. Fields Center 58 Prospect Ave, Princeton NJ 08544

Please join us for our Black Asian American Solidarity Professional Development Conference!

This hybrid event is an opportunity to learn Black history, Asian American history and the history of solidarity between Black and Asian Americans in the movement for civil rights.

Keynote Address - Dr. Beth Lew-Williams of Princeton University

Amistad Curriculum - Dr. Patrick Lamy, Executive Director of the Amistad Commission

There will be nine options for “make-and-take” small group sessions for teachers and curriculum supervisors on Black history, AAPI history and Cross Cultural Solidarity. Our workshops will be led by the following speakers:

Dr. Sohyun An and Dr. Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, authors of Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms

Dr. Rosetta Treece, superintendent of Hopewell Valley Regional School District

Yoland Skeete-Laessig, author of When Newark had a Chinatown

Dr. Jason Chang of UConn AAASI

Gabriel Tanglao of NEA & Sundjata Sekou, a NJ Educator

Dr. Andy Urban of Rutgers University

Samip Mallick of South Asian American Digital Archive

Dr. Joy Barnes Johnson, a NJ Educator & Denyse Leslie of Paul Robeson House of Princeton

Sima Kumar of The E Pluribus Unum Project Inc and a NJ Educator

Closing Address:

Dr. Ying Lu of The E Pluribus Unum Project Inc and NYU Steinhardt

Dr. Nathalie Edmond of Mindful and Multicultural Counseling and Antiracism Revolution

The conference schedule is

9-10 am keynotes

10:10-11:00 workshop

11:10-12:00 workshop

12-1:30 lunch and resources and lesson plans and poster session

1:30-2:20 workshop

2:30-3:20 workshop

3:30-4 closing

Exhibition

Here are descriptions of the workshops.

Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms

Drs. Sohyun An and Noreen Naseem Rodríguez will provide an overview of their recently published book, highlighting ways that educators in elementary classrooms and beyond can include Asian American experiences and histories in the curriculum and across disciplines.

Seabrook Farms with Professor Andy Urban of Rutgers University

By the end of World War Two, Seabrook Farms was unrivaled as a producer of canned, dehydrated, and frozen vegetables. During periods of peak production, the company employed nearly 7,000 laborers in its fields, plants, offices, and trucking fleets on an annual basis, in positions that ranged from seasonal harvesting and assembly line work to year-round plant and storage maintenance. In the 1930s and 1940s, Seabrook Farms became reliant on thousands of Black migrant farmworkers from the U.S. South who, on an annual basis from late-April to November, were subcontracted for fieldwork, housed in camps lacking indoor plumbing, electricity, heating, sanitary waste disposal, and other basic amenities, and denied access to better paying, unionized jobs in the company’s packing facilities. In 1943, Seabrook Farms started recruiting incarcerated Japanese Americans from camps in the West and Arkansas under the War Relocation Authority’s “resettlement” program to avoid having to elevate Black workers into higher-ranking positions within the company. By the war’s end, more than 2,500 Japanese Americans had relocated to Upper Deerfield Township in Cumberland County, to work for the company.

As Professor Urban will explore in this workshop, the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center has begun the process of recognizing this complicated and difficult history and has taken steps to ensure that Black workers’ history with the company is told. This workshop group will also address how Seabrook Farms can be understood as a site where tensions between Black Americans and Asian Americans existed alongside acts and expressions of solidarity.

How to set up your classroom to prevent microaggressions

Hopewell Valley Regional School District Superintendent Dr. Rosetta Treece will lead a small group session on “How to set up your classroom to prevent microaggressions.”

AAPI Curriculum Resources: Toward a Pluralistic Approach to Teaching and Learning

Sima Kumar is a New Jersey educator, mother, a board member of The E Pluribus Unum Project (TEPUP), who testified at the Assembly and Senate Education Committee meeting in support of the Asian American and Pacific Islander curriculum.Governor Murphy signed the bill into law on January 18, 2022. Kumar will lead a professional development seminar that highlights the resources for integrating AAPI content while including lesson ideas on using historical thinking through an interdisciplinary lens.

Building Continental Bridges: Black & Asian American Solidarity with Gabriel Tanglao of NJEA and Sundjata Sekou

The "Building Continental Bridges” workshop is intended to foster solidarity, show connections, collaborations, and showcase how white supremacy has pitted Black and Asian communities against each other. This session will focus on specific examples of Black and Filipinx solidarity from the past, present, and future. Additional resources available here.

The Life and Legacy of Paul Robeson

Denyse Leslie and Dr. Joy Barnes-Johnson of the Paul Robeson House of Princeton will lead small group sessions to develop interdisciplinary lessons about the life and legacy of Paul Robeson.Black and South Asian American Solidarity

Samip Mallick will present about historical solidarities between South Asians and Black Americans in the fight for racial justice and share South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)’s resources.

When Newark had a Chinatown

A vibrant Chinese community existed in Newark between the 1870s and 1940s. But when Yoland Skeete-Laessig, herself an immigrant of Chinese descent, wanted to learn about its history she could find almost no information other than old news stories focusing on crime, gambling and other negative topics.Determined to recover this forgotten history, she began a multi-year project by getting to know the few remaining Chinese residents and seeking out former residents and their descendants. She spent hours tracking down archival documents and even organizing archeological work that included excavations in her own back yard. Gradually Skeete-Laessig was able to bring back to life the fascinating and deeply moving stories of a community that thrived through hard work, strong community organizations, and mutual support in the face of discriminatory laws. Her research was shaped into a book, that traces the community from its roots in China and shows how the Chinese affected and were affected by events and trends in American history. Above all it gives voice to many remarkable individuals who shaped Newark’s Chinatown.

Bios

Dr. Sohyun An is a Professor of Social Studies Education at Kennesaw State University. Her research and teaching center on curriculum, pedagogy, and movement of K-12 Asian American studies and social studies education. Her recent works include co-written with Drs. Noreen Naseem Rodríguez and Esther June Kim; “Our folks Were Badass!” Learning and Dreaming in Basement (Rethinking Schools, 2023); Who’s Behind the Camera? Anticolonial Visualization of “Westward Expansion” (Social Studies and the Young Learner, 2024); Re/presentation of Asian Americans in 50 states US history standards (The Social Studies, 2022). As a co-founder of Asian American Voices for Education, she works alongside Asian American youth, educators, and community organizers to advance Asian American studies and ethnic studies in Georgia’s K-12 schools. Before becoming a teacher educator and researcher, Sohyun was a middle and high school teacher in South Korea.

Dr. Joy Barnes-Johnson addresses science teacher preparation, policy, curriculum design, adult/community growth and equity in her work and research.  She has taught in China, Jamaica, and throughout the United States. She enjoys working as a dissertation coach and volunteer with various education outreach programs including The CHOOSE project, the Lost Souls public memorial project, the Trenton Branch of the NAACP (ACTSO), and The Paul Robeson House of Princeton where she is program committee chair. She is currently writing a book framing the role of Black educators and their allies working to pass on a heritage of joy. Archival research and contemporary storytelling will be woven together with the rationality of African proverbs in celebration of the leadership of teachers. Her favorite things to do in her spare time include reading, frolicking with family, and imagining new ways to see chemistry in everyday life.

Dr. Jason Oliver Chang is the Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of University of Connecticut. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of History and is a Core Faculty member of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, as well as Faculty Affiliate of El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies and American Studies. After finishing his PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 2010, Jason Oliver Chang lectured in Asian American and Latin American history at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a Masters of Public Policy and Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Combining Asian American Studies and Latin American Studies, Dr. Chang has worked with colleagues in these related fields to push for a hemispheric conception of Asian America that attends to both the transnational features of Asian diasporas in the Americas and the importance of local, regional, and national frames of analysis. His first book, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940 has just been published by University of Illinois Press, 2017. This work analyzes the regional histories of Chinese migration and integration in Mexican society to show how the racial image of the Chinese shifted over the course of the 1910 revolution and subsequent reconstruction. The shifts in this racial form demonstrate how Mexican anti-Chinese politics, or antichinismo, influenced the formation of mestizo national identity; the exercise of sovereign authority by the postrevolutionary state; and the cultural politics of how Indians became racialized subject/citizens of the Mexican state.

Dr. Chang’s second project expands his interests in hemispheric Asian American history in several ways, with a short-term research agenda that focuses on Asian participation in Pacific and Caribbean seafaring culture. Drawing from business and government records he has begun work on a manuscript entitled Deep Waters: The Maritime World of Greater Asian America, envisioned as a multi-ethnic survey of Asian and Pacific Islander participation in the economy, culture, and labor of the trans-Pacific passage, linking Asia and the Americas. He is particularly interested in the historical development of oceanic occupations for Asian and Pacific Islanders as an abject source of maritime labor tracing its origins in the sixteenth-century Spanish galleon trade, to the British commercial fleets, then to the U.S. Navy and merchant mariners. The long-term research agenda attends to an environmental history of the Pacific, and particularly in the ways that the pelagic environment of the ocean acted as an agent of history in successive imperial regimes, Pacific fishery politics and ocean voyages. His aim is to build an understanding of the particular architecture features of maritime life as an environmentally structured socially signified multi-ethnic/multi-racial contact zone. To this end he traces the influence of the Pacific through the dynamics of its currents and the technological evolution of oceanic domination from the seafaring occupational forces to gunboats to aerial bombing. And, he examines the Pacific Trash Vortex as a material archive of trans-Pacific histories of toxicity, exploitation, dispossession, and imperialism.

Professor Chang teaches courses that bring together the fields of Area Studies, with emphasis on the Pacific and western hemisphere, and Comparative Ethnic Studies that stresses the dependent and contingent nature of race and its intersection with class, gender, and sexuality. His classes address topics such as global capitalism, transnationalism, diaspora, identity and community formation, indigeneity, inter-racial contact zones, governmentality, and the environment, as well as, the legal, cultural, and political economic foundations of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism in the Americas.

Nathalie Edmond, PsyD, RYT-500 is a licensed clinical psychologist, experienced yoga teacher, JEDI practitioner, owner of a group practice and former behavioral health administrator.  She worked at the counseling center at Princeton University and has recently become the director of counseling at Villanova University.  She teaches graduate classes on multiculturalism and feminism.  She takes a trauma informed and integrated perspective to her consultations and trainings blending mindfulness, didactic, multimedia clips and conversation. Her general approach to trainings related to diversity, equity, inclusion and justice is grounded in the idea that we have to build comfort within ourselves as racial beings to be able to talk with others about being racial beings or make meaningful changes in our communities.  That would translate to recognizing our positionality in relationship to privilege and power along many different identities from a place of compassion and accountability.

Sima Kumar is a New Jersey educator, mother, a board member of The E Pluribus Unum Project (TEPUP), who testified at the Assembly and Senate Education Committee meeting in support of the Asian American and Pacific Islander curriculum. Governor Murphy signed the bill into law on January 18, 2022. She published an article in NJEA Review called “Asian American in America’s Literary Heritage,” which explored the origins of the invisibility of Asian and Asian American literature and history in the K-12 curricula.  In the article, she provided a pedagogical approach for creating more inclusive curricula to meet the needs of the increasingly multiracial and multiethnic demography of students in today’s classrooms.  She heads the professional development branch of The E Pluribus Unum Project (TEPUP), a nonprofit organization that serves as a hub to connect and mobilize communities across New Jersey for the purpose of transforming education to reflect our pluralistic society.  Sima moderated an interdisciplinary exploration of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in the United States with poet Alison Roh Park and documentary filmmaker Angel Velasco Shaw, a collaborative event with Princeton Public Library. She was a guest speaker at the Center for Future Educators program at TCNJ.  She received a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is currently pursuing an Ed.D. at Rutgers University.  

Dr. Patrick Lamy is the Executive Director of the Amistad Commission. Dr. Lamy grew up in Fordham, Bronx, New York, and has resided in Essex County, NJ since 1981. Dr. Lamy received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Caldwell College followed by a Master of Arts in Education and Human Services from Montclair State University and a Doctorate in Higher Education Administration from Seton Hall University.

Over the past nineteen years at Bloomfield College, Dr. Lamy has held the following positions: Resident Director, Residence Life Coordinator, EOF Counselor/Tutorial Program Coordinator, Director of Residence Life, Assistant Dean, Associate Dean, Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Officer and most recently, Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students. What Dr. Lamy enjoys most about his employment at the College are his interactions with students, and the opportunities to collaborate with all sectors of the College Community to provide Bloomfield College students with an enriching and challenging educational experience.

Dr. Lamy is very active in the broader Essex County Community where he serves as a mentor to several young men and women in high school and college. He is a recognized member of Who’s Who Among American Colleges and Universities Professionals; American College Personnel Association; American Counseling Association; and the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the Leadership Exchange Journal from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators; the previous member of several conference planning committees for the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the New Jersey Association for Affirmative Action in Higher Education.

Denyse Leslie Denyse began her career in general management consulting at Towers Perrin, focusing on strategic planning with publishing and education clients. She kicked the tires and recommended changes that left clients well-positioned for growth. She's led internal consulting efforts at a Fortune 10 bank and Educational Testing Service, where she successfully developed the strategy that resulted in ETS's profitable return to K12 testing. Denyse has also served as DiversityInc's Senior Vice President, Consulting and helped clients implement metrics-based strategies that achieved diversity gains.

Denyse has pursued opportunities to get important stories told. She serves as Board Vice President and Managing Director of the Paul Robeson House of Princeton. This non-profit is renovating the birthplace of Paul Robeson, located at 110 Witherspoon Street, and developing educational programs worthy of Robeson's legacy of activism and social justice. Making Robeson a Household Name is the mantra. She also serves on the Board of CASA of Burlington and Mercer County, which advocates for the safety and education of children in foster care. 

Denyse facilitates the Black Voices Book Group, now resident and partnered with the Princeton Public Library. She enjoys the opportunity to monthly read, discuss, and engage with great books that narrate the history and culture, and hopes and aspirations of African Americans and the Diaspora. 

Denyse grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She is a member of the charter class of Yale University's School of Organization and Management, where she graduated with an MBA. Denyse graduated from Middlebury College cum laude with Highest Honors for thesis work. She has a son, Christopher Jonathan Leslie, and a granddaughter, Auriana Michelle Leslie. Her 96-year-old mother, Melanie Evelyn, a retired NYC Public Schools K-2 educator, lives nearby in Bucks County, PA.

Beth Lew-Williams is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), won the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Ellis W. Halley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, her next book project, John Doe Chinaman, will consider the policing of Chinese migrants in the American West.

Samip Mallick is the co-founder and executive director of SAADA, which he has guided from its inception in 2008 to its place today as a national leader in community-based storytelling. Mallick's background includes degrees in computer science and library and information sciences and work related to international migration and South Asia for the Social Science Research Council and University of Chicago. Mallick currently serves on the Library of Congress Connecting Communities Digital Initiative advisory board. He also previously served as an archival consultant for the Ford Foundation's Reclaiming the Border Narrative initiative and on the Pennsylvania Governor's Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs.

Dr. Noreen Naseem Rodríguez is an assistant professor of elementary education and educational justice in the College of Education and core faculty in the Asian Pacific American Studies program at Michigan State University. Her award-winning research engages critical race frameworks to explore the pedagogical practices of teachers of color and the teaching of "difficult histories" through children's literature and primary sources, and has been supported by the Spencer Foundation. She has authored over 40 scholarly and practitioner articles and book chapters and is co-author of (Norton, 2021) with Katy Swalwell and ”(Routledge, 2023) with Sohyun An and Esther Kim. Before becoming a teacher educator, she was a bilingual elementary teacher in Austin, Texas for nine years.

Sundjata (Sund-Jata) Sekou (Say-Coo) is a third grade Black male educator at Mount Vernon Avenue Elementary School in Irvington, New Jersey. He wants you to know that he loves his students, the urban community where he teaches, the struggles, triumphs, the parents, the “ups and downs.” He also loves the students who are born in this country, the immigrants, the Haitian Creole speakers, the Spanish speakers, Jamaican Patwa speakers, Asian and Pacific Islanders, students with IEPs, students who are very difficult in his classroom, and anyone else that he missed. The reason he loves them is because “they are him and he is them.”

Yoland Skeete-Laessig is a Newark, NJ based artist of Caribbean descent.  She is co-founder of the Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center in Newark, one of Newark’s leading artist run alternative spaces which she ran from 1993 to 2015. Under her leadership the organization received awards and recognition from New York Foundation For The Arts and New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as the City Of Newark, for outstanding cultural contributions and arts programming. 

Ms. Skeete-Laessig immigrated to the US as a child, attended the School Of Visual Arts for undergraduate studies in film, video and photography, continued and completed her graduate studies at Tufts University/MIT Graduate program in Anthropological Filmmaking under Jean Rouche, and received an MFA at Hunter College. She is certified in the business of Arts Administration from Seton Hall University and has been adjunct professor at Rockland Community College, Raritan Valley Community College, New Jersey City University and Rutgers University, Newark until 2009.

Ms. Skeete-Laessig has been a documentarian, and artist for as long as she can remember. Although making her living in photography and film, her personal work is a ritual of how life is experienced utilizing any and every medium to accomplish her goals. Ms. Skeete has exhibited her video and photography and multimedia installations in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, Museum of Contemporary Arts and Crafts in New York City, Biblioteque Nacional de Paris and The Musee D’Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, Husby Konsthalle, Stockholm, Sweden, and Estesio Gallery, Beddingstrande, Sweden.

Ms. Skeete-Laessig’s photographs and video work are in the print collection of the Museum of Modern Art, African American Museum of Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas, Carolyn Alexander of Alexander Bonin Gallery in Chelsea, and American Express Corporation.  She has been a recipient of the Glide Memorial Grant, The Graff Travel Grant, The New Jersey Council on the Humanities Grant and the Melon Grant distributed through New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Humanities program. She has been an Artist in Residence at Art In General, The Arts Council of the Essex Area, and has received educational grants and awards for her work with youth and media. She continues to exhibit her work locally, nationally and internationally.  In 2012 she participated in the exhibition “A BILHA PROJECTO DE ARTE. CELEBRA O DIA DE PORTUGAL DE CAMÕES E DAS COMUNIDADES PORTUGUESAS NEWARK” which toured the US and is permanently housed in the Bilha Museum in Portugal. 

Also an author, in 2016 Ms. Skeete-Laessig’s “When Newark Had a Chinatown: My Personal Journey” was published. The book is a product of the artist’s own research into a time when the city of Newark, NJ had a thriving Chinese community.

Gabriel A. Tanglao has been an educator at heart, activist in spirit, and organizer in practice. Having experienced life as a Filipino-American in the modern diaspora, Gabriel consciously represents his pre-colonial Kapampangan roots. Honoring his family and ancestors, Gabriel has served public educators across New Jersey building a movement for justice-centered unions and liberatory education. Gabriel will begin his new role serving over two million educator-unionists across the country with the NEA Center for Racial and Social Justice.

Dr. Rosetta Treece has been an educator for 20 years. During her time in public school education, she has served as a high school English Teacher, Vice Principal, Principal, and Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. Dr. Treece is the Superintendent of Schools for Hopewell Valley Regional School District. Dr. Treece graduated Magna Cum Laude from the College of New Jersey earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Secondary Education. She holds a master’s degree in Educational Administration and earned her Doctorate Degree in Educational Leadership from Rowan University. Her doctoral thesis was on how to promote emotional intelligence in adolescents. Dr. Treece is an Advanced Nurtured Heart Trainer and a Peer Leader. She is an Attitudes in Reverse (A.I.R.) therapy dog handler and a mental health champion. She is committed to preparing teachers, support staff, and school leaders to create learning environments that are culturally responsive and that cultivate resiliency in young adults.

Andy Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His research, scholarship, teaching, and public humanities work focus on labor, migration, and public memory. Andy’s current book project explores the history of Seabrook Farms, an agribusiness in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, migrant farmworkers from the US South, European Displaced Persons, and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s and 1950s. Seabrook Farms is also the subject of an online exhibition hosted by the New Jersey Digital Highway, which Andy curated with Rutgers’ students, and he is currently working with the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center to bring the company’s history to new audiences. Andy’s first book, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2018), examines how federal immigration policies, commercial agents, and reformers shaped labor markets for domestic service in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States. Since 2021, Andy has directed the New Brunswick / North Brunswick High Schools Public Memory Project, a collaboration between community stakeholders, scholars, students, and artists, focused on the creation of public programming, art, and dialogue exploring histories of school integration and segregation. This project coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the withdrawal of approximately 700 white students from New Brunswick High School in 1974, and their matriculation at the newly finished, nearly all-white high school in North Brunswick. 

Event Venue

Fields Center, 58 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, United States