Artwork by Ella Sun
“This is not navel gazing. Studying your own racial or ethnic group is not a delimiting exercise… It’s a way of looking at the world through a lens.”
Hear Our Voices Magazine celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Franklin Odo, an advocate and pioneer of Asian American studies who ensured the representation of Asian culture in public institutions like museums and universities.
In April 2022, we interviewed Dr. Odo for our speaker event series, where we spoke about the model minority myth, his time as director of the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Program, and his advocacy for Asian American Studies in California. He called in from Massachusetts, where he was teaching at Amherst College.
As an aspiring Asian American scholar, I first asked Dr. Odo about his start in anti-racist advocacy. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Odo was an activist for minority representation in school curricula, an aim that would continue throughout his career.
What kind of education doesn’t prepare you for the serious and traumatic events that are taking place around the globe and at home? At that time, there were a bunch of movements within the United States, including Students for a Democratic Society – mostly white kids who were looking at free speech and looking at income inequality, and oppression of the white working class. [Ethnic] studies on the other hand, was an upstart radical movement that was resented by my colleagues.
Odo’s contributions to this movement for racial visibility are expansive: he founded the ethnic studies program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, taught courses on race and public history at Amherst, and served as president of the Association for Asian American Studies from 1989-1991. He told us that one of the most significant developments he saw in ethnic studies was the development of the term “Asian American” as a standalone descriptor.
Before then, we were ‘Oriental,’ or part of a national ethnic group – Indian American, or Japanese American, or Chinese American. So naming ourselves was a very important part of the whole [movement].
“Asian American,” on its own, demonstrated a sense of unity between Asians who had been, until then, defined by White America. It was an identity that Asians had chosen for themselves.
Odo taught a class at Amherst called “Model Minorities: Jewish and Asian Americans.” He explained that the concept of the model minority, which is typically associated with Asian Americans, originated as a stereotype of Jewish Americans.
This whole system of looking at character, athletics, extracurricular activities, and so on, [began] only in the 1920s, when Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the Ivies, determined collectively that there were too many Jews scoring high in the admissions tests. They were like 20% of the student body, but that was too many… for White Anglo Saxon Protestants.
The emphasis placed on those non-academic factors, then, gained influence in the admissions process as a means of reducing the number of Jews in private universities. Similarly, even the most accessible systems – public history museums – were widely exclusive and nondiverse.
Museums used to be the most trusted institutions in the country. This may or may not be true anymore. But it’s important to realize, because when people go into museums and see exhibits, they often believe it is the truth. And in fact, there are real people, often White, who have a particular perspective and point of view, who are selecting [the exhibits], who are writing the labels, who are telling you which parts of American history are important. And it’s not easy to say, ‘Excuse me, where am I in this exhibit?’
In 1997, Odo joined the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Program as its founding director. He was the first Asian American curator at the museum, uplifting the stories of AAPI history, culture, and arts through influential exhibitions such as “Exit Saigon, Enter Little Saigon,” which shared the effects of the Vietnam War on Vietnamese American communities. He defined the museum’s mission to “enrich the American Story with the voices of Asian Pacific Americans.”
Odo’s family recalls his humility when it came to his work and career. “He was one of the most unpretentious people I ever knew,” says Max Milian, Odo’s grandson. “I might never have known of his immense accomplishments and impact had I not bothered to find out for myself. But he was, and will always be, my grandpa first.”
In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to a fund in Dr. Odo’s honor, which will help carry on his legacy of social justice, scholarship, and mentorship at the University of Hawai’i.