Asian!

A friend of mine sent me a link to a music video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=546zAa57AJE) made by a group of Calvin College students. It’s pretty amazing considering it includes about a hundred participants and was filmed in one continuous take.

My homeroom students just finished filming their own mock commercial for a school-wide competition, so yesterday I showed them the Calvin video.

Calvin College grew out the Dutch, Christian Reform tradition and historically has not been a hotbed of diversity. Now please know that Calvin College has made great strides in diversifying its studentbody and teaching staff in the last few decades. None-the-less, the majority of Calvin is still Dutch. The Van Somethings constitute about 30% of the student directory. Calvin remains in large part a bastion of middle-American whiteness. And this comes through in the video.

But about one minute into the four-minute video, an Asian student appears on screen. Without prompting, half of my homeroom pointed and gleefully shouted out in unison “Asian!” They seemed pretty excited to see a representative of themselves embedded in the middle of this very American experience.

In general, my students have a pretty acute sense of identity. While they might not refer to themselves as American, they strongly identity with America even though most of them have never lived there. After all, they do attend an American school; most of them speak better English than Cantonese; the majority of the music and movies they consume is from The States.

My students really liked the video. When it was done, one of my homeroom students said, “I want to go there.” It’s quite possible that the Calvin student they saw in the video is an ICS alumni. ICS has sent several students to Calvin over the years.

After showing this video, if any of my students ends up going to Calvin, I am fully expecting a commission.

-Jack