ECAASU Values
Updated: 2021

The East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU) strives to advocate for Asian/American communities through a series of innovative and engaging programming that tackle some of the most pressing issues facing Asian/American communities. Since 2008, ECAASU’s National Board has worked to develop priorities that ground our work and programming. Historically, we have centered affirmative action, Asian AmericanStudies and Ethnic Studies, civic engagement, data disaggregation, immigration, and solidarity work.

 

As an organization whose mission is to “inspire, educate, and empower” we hope to lean deeper into political education for those that interact with ECAASU alongside our own advocacy and mobilization work. In articulating a set of organizational values, we wanted to ground our work in affirmative/uplifting statements of what we believe in, instead of creating stances solely AGAINST issues like imperialism or xenophobia as we have in the past. We aim for values to be affirmative/uplifting statements of what we believe in that will help guide programming and goals across teams in ECAASU. And with this in mind, we want to ground this reframing in imagination: What is our starting point for thinking about our own identities/experiences and the world around us, and how do we radically imagine the world we want to live in? 

 

We want to recognize our positionality as a largely student network located in the United States, a nation that is the accumulation of the violence, harm, and exploitation from enslavement, genocide, racism, imperialism, Orientalism, colonization, dispossession, capitalism, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, homophobia, and on and on. By virtue of living in the imperial core, we must not only be able to recognize and acknowledge our complicity in America’s ongoing imperialism, but we must also actively fight against it and dream of a world beyond it.

 

Our values are constantly an ongoing conversation as there is always room and space to re-evaluate our values as we are all learning and growing constantly together. We are not authorities over knowledge/perspective, and we value the expertise/lived experience of others. To this end, internally, we will be revisiting and updating ECAASU’s values at the start of every National Board term, and we also encourage those who hope to engage with ECAASU to reach out to us if you have questions/concerns/thoughts regarding our values.



Accessibility

ECAASU firmly believes that everyone deserves to have access to resources to heal, learn, and grow. Having the tools to name and conceptualize the patterns, systems, and traumas affecting our lives is the first step towards healing and growth. In living up to this value, we must all work towards getting rid of barriers – including physical and digital barriers, language barriers, and academic jargon. Because of this, accessibility to us includes disability justice as well as language justice. We aim to create welcoming and genuinely inclusive spaces where all feel safe to ask questions, share their thoughts, and build community. 

Questions that guide this value:

  • How do we provide information and opportunities to people so they feel like they CAN be in our spaces? 

  • How is “proper” language (access to resources often impacted by class, language, dis/ability) used to gate-keep, particularly within academic institutions?

  • How do we extend invitations and invocations to use space(s) however people and their bodies and minds need to be comfortable? How do we tune into what our bodies and minds need and feel? How do we listen to what we have come into spaces already knowing and wanting? 

Community Engagement

ECAASU believes we can engage in community in a number of ways, including citizenship naturalization, political education, grassroots organizing, mutual aid, electoral politics, direct action, and more. Being engaged with the community is about caring for each other; we each give what we are able with the understanding that each and every one of us contributes in different ways. We believe change will always come from the grassroots and encourage folks to find ways to engage in building systems based in community-models of care, accountability, and transformative justice. We also hold space for engaging more formally with the political system to push back against harmful legislation, policies, and rhetoric that threaten our communities and advocate for policies that empower and provide resources for our communities. 

Questions that guide this value:

  • How are we critical of discourse around citizenship and migration, especially for Indigenous and undocumented communities?

  • What kinds of engagements with electoral politics are useful for reducing harm, and what kinds are actually increasing the imperial and capitalist powers of the United States?

Education

ECAASU aims to be a collective space for learning, unlearning, and discussion surrounding Asian/American issues and beyond. We recognize that education that happens in the classroom is oftentimes validated over other forms of learning. As a “student union” we have historically been students and recent graduates of four year degree-granting institutions; however, we hope to expand “student” to include all those who are attending academic and educational institutions that are founded on and continue to function in enabling white supremacy and elitism. Furthermore, we firmly believe that regardless of where we receive our education, it is our duty to feed that learning into action and to actively practice what we learn. 

Questions that guide this value:

  • What do we mean by a “student” and who are we outreaching to? 
  • How can ECAASU serve as a political activation point for people? 
  • How can we center the value of lived experiences and storytelling as methods of education and learning?

Solidarity

ECAASU seeks to represent Asian and Asian American communities, yet we express a firm commitment to other communities organizing around anti-racism, anti-oppression, and anti-capitalism. We are committed to both inter- and intra-community solidarity, which necessitates a willingness to name and exercise the privileges we hold to fight for collective liberation. Each of our full selves lie at the cross-section of race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, citizenship status, criminal history, and many other identities. In this, we want to name that our distinct experiences, histories, and relationships to power and privilege as “people of color” are not monolithic. Furthermore, we emphasize that Black, Asian/American, Pacific Islander, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are not mutually exclusive, as well as the fact that Asian/American identity means different things to different people. We also recognize that queer and trans Black and Indigenous folks have always been at the forefront of movements for justice and emphasize the need to understand those histories. As an Asian/American organization, we seek to uplift, amplify, and center their voices as well as explicitly denounce anti-Blackness and US settler colonialism as a part of our solidarity work. 

Questions that guide this value:

  • What are some historical and current examples of solidarity?
  • Who have Asian/American spaces historically centered and how are we committed towards actively dismantling these dynamics?
  • How are we defining “our” communities?
  • How do we promote coalition building and an inclusive atmosphere for marginalized communities including the Asian/American community?
  • Are we aligning ourselves with an anti-imperial or decolonial lens (and how)? What are ECAASU’s limitations of engaging in this work?