Thread by @reappropriate

There's been a lot of chatter on Asian American Twitter, and one thing I just want to add the conversation is that I'm noticing a broad dismissal of folks who primarily engage in scholarship as their form of contribution.

I want to contest that point of view.

I'm on record in multiple outlets being strongly in favor of Asian American ethnic studies. One major reason is because I believe that sustainable social change requires rethinking our ideas, and reimagining the future. Revolution is about theory as well as practice.

The challenge to think more broadly about who we are and what our positionality is - and to constantly reshape those ideas based on new information - informs my every day. I believe that building theory about sustainable change better directs our action.

To paraphrase Grace Lee Boggs, revolution is not just picketing and other forms of protest action; although those things are clearly also essential. Revolution also comes from evolution of thought in addition to practice.

Yuri, on the other hand, also said (paraphrased) that unless we know ourselves an our history, as well as other people and their history, there cannot be positive interaction with real understanding.

I've always read that as a quote about interracial solidarity, but it is also a quote about emphasizing the role of knowledge and theory in building better social movements.

All of this is to say that the scholar-activists in our midst - the ones whose contributions are primarily through building theory and research about our communities and movements - play an important role. They are helping us build our roadmaps for the future we seek to create.

Of course, there's a lot of criticism around how well our ethnic studies fields can challenge existing institutions when they are so deeply ingrained within the neoliberal academic establishment. That's an absolutely fair point.

But to me, that's a call for Asian American studies and other scholars to maintain self-awareness about the environment in which they produce scholarship, and to consider how those establishments influence the work, not a good reason to reject the role of scholarship outright.

Considered, thoughtful, and accessible scholarship focused on the community - our histories and contemporary stories - has, in my opinion, an important role in the larger goal of creating social change for the better; and I wish we weren't so quick to discount it.

We cannot know where to go if we do not know where we've been.