Celebrating Black History Month with JEDI Parent Education Initiatives

By Lindsey Kundel, Director of Communications & Marketing

In celebration of both the Lunar New Year and Black History Month in February, TAS and TAS Cultural Connection invited parents and alumni to a webinar presentation titled "Parallels between the history of Taiwan and the Black Lives Matter movement: A Conversation on Empathy, Solidarity, and Action by Building Common Ground."

As part of the School's commitment to the community to build continued understanding and discourse on issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, this presentation featured Middle School history teacher Weston Wang Cooper 王韋盛 ('08) and guest diversity trainer Anthony Kelley, who has been working with Upper School students again this year, generously funded by a PTA grant. Cooper is a TAS alumnus

A similar presentation was given to faculty and staff last year, facilitated again by both Kelley and Wang Cooper.

Weston Wang Cooper was born in Taiwan to an American father and a Taiwanese mother. He grew up speaking Taiwanese, Mandarin, and English. He attended local public school until 9th grade, graduating from TAS in 2008. After graduation, Cooper attended the University of Washington for his undergraduate degree, where he majored in International Studies and Cultural Anthropology, with a focus on race, ethnicity, and identity formation. He worked at Morgan Stanley before returning to school to receive his Master in Teaching degree. Weston began his education career in the Seattle Public Schools before returning to TAS as a Middle School history teacher in 2018.

Anthony Kelley left a chaotic and violent childhood to become a successful college athlete, winning the Rose Bowl while playing football at the University of Washington. Turning toward academia and away from the NFL, he went on to earn a master's degree in Education Leadership and Policy studies. He worked at the University of Washington and later at Washington State University as Director of Student Diversity and Outreach. He now helps individuals and organizations realize their true potential through deep self-awareness and negotiating difficult conversations.

The facilitators began the talk by explaining to parents that the presentation was, in many ways, an attempt to recreate an organic conversation that the two originally had with one another several years ago.

"We first met when I attended an event that he [Kelley] hosted while I was teaching public school in Seattle," said Wang Cooper. "It was just by luck that we ran into each other again when he [Kelley] came to Taiwan a few summers ago."

The pair met during a few Black Lives Matter protests and events held in Taiwan and were later asked to hold a talk with TAS employees.

"What we are trying to do is demonstrate how he [Kelley] and I built common ground with each other, and from that discuss some possibilities that we as individuals can do to work with one another and better understand one another," said Wang Cooper.

Kelley agreed that the presentation is ultimately about modeling for the TAS parent community how anyone can use the model they presented to learn and grow from another person, admitting that finding common ground with people who are different from you can be very difficult. 

"This is not going to be a presentation to convince you of anything," explained Kelley. "Everything that we're sharing here is open-source information, but the notion of how we're modeling potential conversations and how we as individuals were able to find and bring correlations to what the other brought to the table - that is what we're going to be sharing today."

The pair introduced what they call their "working theory" that there is a large impact of modeling behavior that you want to see in your community. Within this theory, there are three main levels of modeling that need to occur for an organization to see the desired behavior: first, there needs to be individual action taken; second, there needs to be strong community support; and, third, there needs to be larger institutional support and a framework established that helps to perpetuate support for that action from the lower two levels.

After discussing their own personal backgrounds and complicated identity webs, the pair began to draw some comparisons between historical events in the United States and Taiwan. 

The question Wang Cooper asked parents to ask themselves was, "Why is it that I care about this event? Why is it that I care about these social movements that don't personally affect my life?" 

For Wang Cooper, he says that his answer to this question is because there are clear commonalities between marginalized groups that cross historical boundaries.

The first of such comparisons was the killing of Eric Garner by New York Police Department officers in 2014 and Lin Jiang Mai's violent encounter with authorities in 1947 in Taipei. Many people regard Garner's death as an important date in the energizing of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, and, similarly, many people view Lin's persecution as one of the incidents that resulted in the 2/28 incident, in which thousands of civilians were killed.

Another comparison which Wang Cooper and Kelley discussed at length is the parallel between riots in Minneapolis in 2020 and a riot in Taipei in 1947. 

"When you look at the gatherings of both crowds, there is unresolved trauma," said Kelley. "When these things happen, this is a result that we've seen historically. People respond without having their harm being acknowledged in any way. This results in a lack of trust in their community."

Kelley and Wang Cooper explained that throughout all of the historical comparisons that they could draw, there is one common end result: depending on where you stand, you will interpret the events differently. But both speakers said that viewing history this way - in which you prioritize your own identity over the similarities between events - can only lead to chaos and society of unrest.

"How do we take responsibility for each other? How do we stand up for each other? How do we see our struggle in the struggle of others?" asked Wang Cooper. These are questions that are not easily answered except through intense individual reflection, which, the speakers said, is required before any community can move up to the second and third level of impacting community behavior.

The School hopes that parents will find the time to watch the entire presentation, available to all community members through the TAS portals.

The presentation was hosted by Reed Aitken, current chair of the TASCC and parent of a current Grade 4 and Grade 8 student. Aitken described the TASCC to parent attendees as a parent group that is working with TAS to create space for parents to engage with one another on issues related to justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. If you would like to learn more and get involved, current parents can find more information within the TAS parent portal.