Montgomery County Councilmember Gabe Albornoz’s (Democrat, At-Large) latest e-mail update or “bulletin” to constituents (all 1.1 million of us, being that he’s “At-Large”) had the intriguing header “Focusing on Community Priorities” (see below). CM Albornoz has been in public office since 2018. On his “About” Council government page he claims:
Gabe is truly “at-large,” having lived in Gaithersburg, Silver Spring, Bethesda; and now, Kensington, where he lives with his wife Catherine, also a Montgomery County native, and their four young children.
Is this all it takes to be firmly “At Large” and representing all the people in vast, diverse, MoCo? Living a few places? And is Kensington really all that different from Bethesda?
Finding at least this kind of e-mail header refreshing, since many Montgomery County Councilmembers do not “focus on community priorities”, I clicked to skim through. A screen capture of the initial, welcoming header is below.
What I discovered is actually an interesting, and perhaps inadvertent, showcase of what seems to be occurring within MCPS regarding “pilot courses” hyper-focused on “hyphenated American” studies. In this case, Councilmember Albornoz is spotlighting something called “Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Studies”.
Try and say “Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Studies” five times fast.
I had never ever heard of “APIDA”. The County Council goes on and on each May about AAPI and I had seen “APA” before, but never “APIDA”. It seems to be a term first coined in… you guessed it… higher education. Specifically California “higher ed”. Anyways, I have also discovered that I am part-APIDA, according to this. Haha I’m in the victim clique!
We use the term APIDA, which stands for Asian Pacific Islander Desi American, as a pan-ethnic classification that intentionally includes South Asians (Desi) as part of the community. There is a great diversity of identities and ethnicities encompassed under the APIDA umbrella, including East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander. This term ultimately includes all people of Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander ancestry who trace their origins to the countries, states, jurisdictions and/or the diasporic communities of these geographic regions.
Anyways, here is the quick screen grab of what Councilmember Albornoz wanted to highlight in his newsletter on “focusing on community priorities”:
Setting aside the “Students have taken the lead in the creation of the APIDA course, including helping to write the curriculum” bit — which is mind-blowing for someone who attended MCPS and never had that “opportunity” – check out the canvas print they are all posing around (above).
That appears to be a print of Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese-American (how about just American?) activist and Mao Zedong admirer who passed away in 2014. Kochiyama was tragically interned with other Americans, forcibly and with no redress, under then-President FDR’s “executive order”, during World War II. Japanese-Americans were eventually given reparations for this state-initiated violent removal and internment.
But she was also a ridiculous apologist for brutal state / communist violence herself. This is how Dylan Matthews at Vox.com wrote about her in 2016 (“Yuri Kochiyama, today’s Google Doodle, fought for civil rights — and praised Osama bin Laden”, May 19. 2016):
“Two positions of Kochiyama’s stand out as particularly alarming. First, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Peruvian terrorist group Shining Path, a Maoist organization that has conducted a brutal insurgency killing tens of thousands of people since 1980. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that Shining Path personally killed or disappeared at least 30,000.”
And…
“This did not appear to bother Kochiyama, who joined a delegation to Peru organized by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, which defends the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. She read, in her words, “the kind of reading materials that I could become ‘educated’ on the real situation in Peru; not the slanted reports of corporate America. The more I read, the more I came to completely support the revolution in Peru.” In other words, she read, and believed, Maoist propaganda denying Shining Path’s war crimes.”
It is fine to study and learn about such people in high school — that is what school is for. Kochiyama should be referenced and studied and debated, freely.
But should these kinds of figures be “lionized”, put on a portrait and surrounded by smiles? Why is this “portrait” of a Maoist and Shining Path war crimes apologist up in a school classroom, anyway?
More to come.
