Protesters outside the State House on Thursday morning. [Providence Journal photo / Jacqueline Tempera]

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A new state law that requires school districts to provide detailed data about the ethnic backgrounds of their Asian American students drew protests Thursday.

Fifty Asian Americans gathered at the State House to ask lawmakers a question: Why just Asians?

“If it’s all students, it really should be all,” said Zhijin Wu, a professor at Brown University, who stopped by on her lunch break. “If we are really trying to figure out who needs help, let’s not just pretend that only the Asian population is diverse.”

The All Students Count Act was introduced by Rep. Grace Diaz, a Providence Democrat, with the support of The Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education, a nonprofit that promotes success among Southeast Asian students. It’s modeled after similar legislation proposed on the federal level, as well as in California, Washington and Minnesota.

The bill, which Governor Gina Raimondo signed into law on Wednesday, requires the “department of elementary and secondary education to use separate collection categories and tabulations for
specified Asian ethnic groups in every demographic report on ancestry or ethnic origins of Residents.”

When the bill passed the House, Diaz hailed it as a win for Asian American students struggling with their identity. The data would help districts concentrate resources on specific communities in need. She could not be reached for comment Thursday.

But Jianhao Chen, the protest’s organizer and a Chinese American, compared the bill to “Nazi Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Law that singled out Jews in the pretense of data collection, only to be conveniently used as a basis for genocide in the following decade.”

“This data will easily be manipulated to advance race-based policies,” he wrote in a letter to the governor.

Confusion was the overarching emotion at Thursday’s protest. Rhode Island’s most recent census data shows just 3.6 percent of the population is Asian, said Liying Peng. Some schools only have one or two Asian students, she said, making the need for such nuanced data puzzling.

“You’re spending extra tax dollars to collect this data ... for what?” she asked. “There are more groups that have more problems. Why us?”

Yiguang Qiu led the gathered group in chants — “United we stand, divided we fall” and “education not discrimination.”

He urged the group to reach out to relatives, friends and coworkers to raise awareness about this law before it passes in other states, adding: “No other racial group is subject to such intrusive or divisive measures of inquiry.”

(By Jacqueline Tempera | providencejournal.com   Jul 20, 2017 )