What Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Means Today
Not long ago, April and May were the busiest months of my year by a wide margin. April because many academic calendars close for the summer before Asian Pacific American Heritage Month arrives in May, so campuses celebrate a month early. I'd speak at law firms, universities, nonprofit headquarters, and corporate offices on civic philosophy, free expression, and art.
There have been fewer invitations lately. Some of that is direct, some of it quieter institutional pressure. A lot of organizations have become cautious about hosting programming that might be read through a political lens, even when nothing about it is political.
At its best, an APAHM event involves the whole room, not just the people in it who share my background. The good ones operate on a shared understanding that Asian American history is American history. We've shaped this country through some of the most consequential Supreme Court cases in its history, through invention, through building infrastructure the rest of the country still relies on. The best events don't just celebrate that past. They connect it to the present, name both the progress and the struggles still in motion, and ask what it would take to strengthen the ties between the people in the room. I know I'm being asked to do real work rather than decorative work when the invitation isn't "we need an Asian American speaker" but something closer to "we think your experience says something true to everyone here."
At its worst, heritage month programming collapses into what writer Tim Wise called the three F's of multicultural awareness: food, fabric, and festival. A hollow celebration that never connects to anyone, treating more than fifty distinct ethnic groups speaking over a hundred languages as one undifferentiated category. I know I'm in that version when the ask is simply "book an Asian speaker, performer, or caterer," no further thought required, because we're all functionally the same booking anyway. It's the campus dining hall approximating orange chicken or frying frozen dumplings instead of partnering with someone from the community. Underneath the food and decorations is usually a complete unfamiliarity with what's happening right now, the kind that lets someone describe a spike in violent attacks against Asian Americans as a string of unrelated incidents rather than a pattern.
The complicated relationship a lot of people have with heritage months shares a structure I first noticed almost a decade ago, in a different context.
In 2016, I spoke at Portland Community College's "Whiteness History Month," a program built to examine the social construction of white supremacist culture rather than, as plenty of furious commentators assumed, a celebration of white people's accomplishments. The backlash arrived almost instantly, including far-right activists who filmed my talk and afterward campaigned to have me fired from my job. What struck me wasn't the anger. It was the timing of the anger relative to the content. The school had run anti-racism programming, multicultural centers, and diversity staff for years without incident. The fury arrived the moment the word "month" got attached to a name, before a single session description had been published. People were furious about content they hadn't seen, reacting to a label.
A version of that dynamic explains a lot of what's happened to heritage month programming since. The objection rarely turns out to be about the substance of any particular event. It's about the existence of the frame itself, the bare fact that an institution decided a month was worth naming. Once that frame becomes politically costly to defend, institutions quietly stop defending it, regardless of whether the programming was ever the hollow version or the substantive one.
That's the part I find difficult about this moment. The shuttering of efforts like the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the quiet disappearance of events that used to fill my April and May calendars, none of it distinguishes between the heritage month done as food, fabric, and festival and the heritage month done as sustained civic conversation. Both are getting treated the same way, which means the version worth defending is disappearing alongside the version that probably deserved scrutiny all along.
I don't think the answer is reflexively defending every heritage month event regardless of quality, any more than dismissing the concept because some versions are shallow. The more honest question, for any institution still deciding whether to do this work, is the one I'd ask about any program: are you doing this because you've actually considered what this community has contributed and what it's still navigating, or because May exists on the calendar and someone needs to be booked?
The substantive version usually has a few specific features. Real partnership with the community being honored, continuing past May rather than starting and ending with it. Choices that show up in curriculum or programming throughout the year, not a single assembly or lunch-and-learn. A sustained relationship with a speaker or organization rather than a one-time appearance. Treating the people closest to the issue as the ones who help shape how an institution examines its own culture, rather than as an afternoon's entertainment. Some of the strongest programs I've been part of are ones I return to annually, where each visit builds on the last instead of starting from zero.
The difference shows up immediately in the room. In whether the audience wanted to be there or was fulfilling an attendance requirement. In whether the questions afterward engaged with anything I'd said or just thanked me for coming. Heritage months are exactly as substantial as the people running them are willing to make them, and right now fewer people are willing to find out.
I speak on civic philosophy, identity, and free expression at universities, civic organizations, law firms, and corporations. If you're designing heritage month programming that holds attention beyond attendance, simontam.org/speaking is the place to start.
