SB 5574 Washington State Legislature- Providing instruction on Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander history in public schools.

TW: Editorializing

Clearly the history of Asian Americans in the US and Washington State should be taught in schools. The issue with this is that clearly there are some Asian groups who have made huge contributions and there are others which have not, some of this is due to population size. There are some who have been in this country for many many generations and some Asian minorities whose presence in the US is relatively recent.

The bill states that this “includes,but is not limited to, the history of 9 Americans of East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander descent.” During committee the bill was expanded and also now includes Black, Hispanic and Native American requirements. The sponsors apologized that “not everyone” could be included. The issue I have is if you are going to exclude some groups then some of these groups mentioned above clearly have not made huge contributions to this region or country as a whole. The “AAPI” block requires including everybody who goes under that umbrella. As if the history of Chinese and Japanese people in America and this region is not far more worthwhile to include then Native Hawaiians, Pakistanis, or Filipinos. In no way am I suggesting these three groups should be completely omitted from curriculum in Washington State. But if there’s going to be demands that specific groups be included because of their contributions while others are omitted some groups falling under the AAIA umbrella should be in the latter category. It should not be either everybody in that category is mandatory to teach or nobody is.