Recently, many residents of the Ithaca community have expressed concerns about ICSD administrators’ lack of accountability for failing schools. I’m sharing my experience.
We have been members of the ICSD community for 13 years. I have three children, and they all experienced frequent racial harassment at school. They’re called racial slurs, made fun of about what they eat, asked to teach them obscenities in the language they speak at home, given slanted eyes, and the list goes on.
Recently, I witnessed with my own eyes the harassment my youngest son suffered. The incident occurred in a public place and in front of a large number of people, including many students and families from various schools. I can’t even imagine what it’s like inside a school building with only a limited number of people. He was at a home track meet. As he was heading to the field for a run, a group of students from his school called his name. One of them yelled “ching chong” at him and they started laughing. My son completely ignored me and left. I confronted the group and reported the incident, and my son said, “No one cares about Asian slurs. It’s not that deep. It’s a waste of time.” Sadly, neither did I. I understand what he meant because I have experienced being treated unfairly as an Asian person.
I expected more since ICSD has been committed to promoting an anti-racist culture, but I did not receive a proper response from any of the ICSD authorities.
After reporting, I was disappointed in the interaction with ICSD administration regarding the incident at the track and field event. I didn’t feel like they had a policy to do that, especially against racism against Asians. I heard that the perpetrator was immediately disciplined, but as for the victim in the incident, no one had any interaction with my son until I raised my concerns, which was eight days after the incident. How does ICSD educate perpetrators if the voice of the victim is not included in the conversation? Isn’t that why racial harassment never stops? We asked several questions to try to convince them that we would treat the cases equally, but they did not give us any answers and instead invited us to meet with them. I declined the meeting and asked for one. When I answered this before meeting him, he said, “May you rest in peace.”
While exchanging emails with ICSD administrators, I shared the message with my son and discussed it with him. He kept saying, “No one cares. It’s a waste of time.” My other kids agreed that no one cares about racist slurs about Asians. did. Is this the anti-racist culture that ICSD has been promoting? It seems that it is already common for students of Asian descent to be subjected to racial slurs at school.
I don’t know if it worked, but the manager I was dealing with met with my son, told him about the incident, and offered to support him. This was three weeks after the incident. It’s definitely better than doing nothing, but I still feel uneasy.
It’s very easy to say “we are an anti-racist community,” but what are they actually doing to promote that culture? Are they actually “anti-racist”? , or how did they assess the effectiveness of what they had done to promote that culture?
The same goes for literally everything ICSD claims. ICSD can say so many beautiful things, but do we know what is really going on?Some things look very beautiful from one side, but from the other side If you try to look at it, it might not be that pretty.
