MCC Training Helps Community Be Better Allies to Asian Americans

As a college serving a diverse community, Middlesex Community College provides training opportunities for faculty, staff and students to learn how to best protect and serve all students. In direct response to the discrimination against the Asian community across the country and globally due to the pandemic, the college developed a Cultural Competency Training to teach the MCC community how to be allies both at the college and out.

Virak Uy, MCC’s Director of Asian American Student Advancement Programs, created the training with Dr. Phitsamay Uy, UMass Lowell College of Education Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator for the PhD Program, for the MCC community to be active allies, especially when witnessing an anti-Asian racist situation out in the community.

“Like all of us in those types of situations, many of us are in shock in the heat of the moment,” Uy said. “What do you do? What do you say? Dr. Uy has done a great job of developing a curriculum of content. The goal is to hopefully raise awareness and provide strategies and resources for our staff and faculty so they can help impact our students.”

Being a good ally means supporting the victim, finding out what they need, offering support, and reacting to the situation in the best way possible. In the training, Dr. Uy describes the five D’s to provide different strategies people can choose in case they are confronted with a discriminatory attack. They are direct, delay, document, delegate and distract.

In the training, Dr. Uy includes historical context around discrimination against Asian Americans over the past decades, asks participants to share their own experiences, and helps participants act out scenarios that may arise for relevant practice.

“We need to make sure these experiences are being heard,” she said. “We want people to continuously learn about different cultures and how to work and interact and communicate with them. It’s going to be a lifelong process.”

The training is part two of a Cultural Competency Training that has been established for the past couple of years. The response – which has already had 100 participants since it started in March – has been overwhelmingly positive.

“One thing that we’ve heard from the trainings is that all of the participants have said that it’s made them much more aware,” said Patricia Demaras, MCC’s Assistant Dean of Multicultural and Veterans Affairs. “It’s something they really didn’t know was going on until this issue was brought to their attention.”

Phu Duong – who works in MCC’s Law Center – said the training was therapeutic for him. He had the opportunity to share his own experience from this past spring when a group of men verbally harassed him and a friend at a store. Being an Asian man, the group blamed him for bringing the virus to the U.S., which made Duong aware of how dangerous it is for people to refer to COVID-19 in derogatory and racist terms.

“I did not even know how to even protect myself from such hurtful language and ridiculous situations,” he said. “[At the training], I learned more about how to become an ally, how to help someone – a student, faculty or staff member – in a time when the pandemic seems to add more fuel to the wildly burning systemic, racial discrimination fires in our country.”

Ann Buskey, MCC’s Director of TRIO Student Success Program, found value in being made aware of what is happening and then learning how to react to it. Calling the session “heart breaking” when hearing stories, Buskey also learned how to stand up to the discrimination.

“I was personally affected by the discussion and the sharing of the direct and indirect discrimination that is happening in our nation,” she said. “I feel better equipped to stand up, speak up and intervene when I observe discrimination.”

Having worked in higher education for over 20 years, Christine Derosa, MCC Communications Department Faculty Member, strives to put in the work to understand where students are coming from and what they have to endure. She considers the training to have been “thought-provoking and interactive,” but also positive, despite the subject matter.

“The facilitators were engaging, personable, understanding and open to what participants had to share,” she said. “They provided such insightful information on not only the history of Asian American cultures, but active steps we can all take to be an ally for the Asian American population within our own communities.”

Dr. Uy was impressed by the willingness of participants to engage in the training rather than be fearful of a challenging topic.

“People came in and everyone was so interested and invested in it,” she said. “When we have such a heavy topic, some people will become despondent. Whereas I feel like people at MCC were invigorated and said now I’m going to do this work that is so important.”

In 2016, Middlesex was awarded a multi-year Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANPISI) grant to support Asian and Asian American students. Part of the grant includes funding for these Cultural Competency Trainings. The grant allowed MCC to react quickly in the spring to create a training and support students and staff.

The AANAPISI grant also previously allowed the college to open the Asian American Connections Center on the college’s Lowell campus. Although the center is offering resources and support online because of the pandemic, students still have a space to connect with each other, staff and resources.

The center has helped students transition to online learning, host study groups, meet on Zoom, and have events, including a Welcome Back Party to kick off the Fall semester.

Having a place of support to turn to – along with knowledgeable staff and faculty across the institution – is necessary to lend to the success and safety of students. Students can bring any concerns to MCC, and the college will help get them the support and resources they need on and off campus.

Being able to respond to students’ needs by offering the training is what Uy calls a “natural process” – one that is relevant and critical to what is currently affecting students, either directly or indirectly.

As to why the training is so important, Uy said it starts with serving students’ needs and maintaining the connection he has built working in the center. Once you have that positive relationship, there is now a need to anticipate issues that arise and respond to them.

“In all of these discrimination incidents, there’s a sense of heightened anxiety that’s been high already with the pandemic,” he said. “But now students have to worry about physical safety of themselves, friends and family.”

Although geared specifically to support Asian Americans, the training is run in solidarity and allyship with the Black Lives Matter Movement, as well as other kinds of racial injustice going on in the world, according to Uy. Many strategies apply to being allies to all people.

Uy said, “This cultural competency and ally training is just one of the ways we are trying to provide awareness and support, then embedding it as part of our equity agenda.”

Visit www.middlesex.mass.edu or call 1-800-818-3434 for more information on MCC.

Discover your path at Middlesex Community College. As one of the largest, most comprehensive community colleges in Massachusetts, we educate, engage and empower a diverse community of learners. MCC offers more than 80 degree and certificate programs – plus hundreds of noncredit courses – on our campuses in Bedford and Lowell, and online. Middlesex Community College: Student success starts here!