Dwight L. Greene Symposium: AAPI Identity and Politics
With U.S. politics often defined by mistrust, information silos, and sharpened partisanship, the organizers of Wesleyan’s 33rd Annual Dwight L. Greene Symposium asked what stories—and whose stories—shape Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) identities today.
Titled “Shifting Narratives: Asian American and Pacific Islander Politics and Identity in an Age of Polarization,” the program brought together John Yang ’80, anchor of PBS NewsHour Weekend and correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, and Daniel Martinez HoSang ’93, professor of American studies and political science at Yale University. The conversation was moderated by Saeyun Lee ’93 and hosted for the Asian American and Pacific Islander Alumni Celebration.
Yang opened with a journalist’s eye for nuance: Depending on which media outlet you watch or read, he said, “you get very different pictures of what’s going on.” That fragmented media ecosystem, he noted, can magnify viewer anxiety and encourage zero-sum thinking about AAPI communities—especially on hot-button issues like education policy and U.S.-China relations. Even so, Yang underscored tangible progress in cultural representation: “I can remember growing up not seeing anyone who looked like me on television… today, it’s different,” he said, pointing to several examples of AAPI characters and persons in mainstream media, such as Saturday Night Live's Bowen Yang.
Martinez HoSang situated those media shifts within a broader civic crisis. Since the early 1990s, he argued, the terrain for multiracial democracy has been reshaped by economic precarity, disinformation, and a waning trust in institutions. The result is a powerful “sense of cynicism” that cuts across immigrant small business owners, working class families, and college-educated professionals alike. “People are asking basic questions—Is school working for my kids? Can I afford to stay in my community?—and they don’t see institutions answering,” he said. That vacuum, Martinez HoSang warned, is where polarizing narratives thrive.
Both speakers cautioned against flattening the immense diversity within the AAPI community. Aggregated labels can obscure crucial differences of class, immigration pathways, language, religion, and regional history. Yang noted how political operatives sometimes pit subgroups against one another, while Martinez HoSang traced how movements gain or lose power depending on whether they make room for that internal complexity. “Communities aren’t fixed; they’re processes," Martinez HoSang said. “People need spaces to ask hard questions without being sorted immediately into camps.”
Audience members were deeply interested in how education can shape future perspectives: How should schools teach Asian American histories in a way that registers to students that this subject is not separate from, but rather a substantial part of U.S. history? Martinez HoSang pointed to recent curricular efforts that go beyond “contributions” lists to help students build historical consciousness, understanding exclusion laws, wartime incarceration, labor struggles, and solidarities with other communities. That approach, he suggested, equips young people to recognize the stakes of the present rather than treating identity as a set of static facts.
The factor of social media inevitably loomed large. Yang described how platforms can supercharge rumor and outrage while still giving many users a rare sense of community. Martinez HoSang agreed, calling them “micro-publics” that can either dissolve institutions or knit new ones, depending on whether we meet people where their questions live. The task for educators, journalists, and organizers, they argued, is not to wish those spaces away but to create better ones—places where nuance travels as far and as fast as slogans do.
In closing, Lee returned to the symposium’s charge—to “shift narratives” by listening across differences and expanding the public we imagine when we say “we.” That mission—rooted in the legacy left by Dwight L. Greene ’70 as a professor, mentor, and friend—remains the symposium’s throughline: reflecting on where we’ve been, naming where we are, and most importantly, asking where we are headed. Though the political mood often feels dire, neither speaker was yet ready to embrace fatalism.
Yang emphasized that even amid the noise, “there’s still a broad center that doesn’t want to harm anyone”—a civic instinct worth organizing around. HoSang framed optimism as something to work towards. Rebuilding trust requires everyday practices of connection—welcoming people into conversation, refusing purity tests, and designing institutions that are accountable to real needs.
The Dwight L. Greene Symposium honors Dwight L. Greene ’70 as a memorial and tribute to his life and work as a professor of law, mentor, and friend. The Alumni of Color Network and the Black Alumni Council sponsored this event.
