Every program house and individual student living center serves to further segregate our campus. beginning freshman year we should all be forced to live amongst each other. however, self segregation occurs through university aided/sponsored program houses and student centers. this has to stop in order to achieve the cultural melting pot that cornell claims to have to its prospective students.

I find it hard to stop my laughter upon hearing you comparing Cornell to Disney World's Epcot. To be honest there are borders at Cornell but few if any are propagated by the minorities at Cornell. It is people with your type of mentality who talk about breaking down borders, yet refuse to go to any programs sponsored by minority groups. Those who resent and attack diversity policies and resources for some students whose needs require a little more than what is offered and yet they preach a doctrine commanding minorities to assimilate and get by. I find that insulting and short sighted.

What is needed is for more people who aren't minorities to approach communities outside of their own. That would truly help bridge the divide. How can you build a bridge from only one side? Everyone needs to contribute and asking minorities to succumb and indoctrinate themselves into some dogma that states that we are all equal and we all need the same resources is flawed.

We all have similarities but we are still different. Asking to simply whitewash the campus is not going to improve the climate at Cornell or anyone’s lot for that matter.

Lastly, I doubt satellite pictures would reveal any color considering the low rates of admittance of people of color at Cornell.

Thanks for your comments. Please tell me how my arguments are "wrong and flawed" and perpetuate racism, and I'd be very glad to discuss this with you through email or in person. The article was limited to 800 words; I only wish I could have gone into more detail.

If you believe that this center will beneficially meet someone's needs, please give me specific examples, even hypothetical ones. Before I finally decided to write this article, I tried for several months to think of some, without any success. Please describe a case in which the Center's unique services are necessary to aiding a student, Asian or not.

A last thought: If I have to take an Asian American Studies class to be taught what my needs are, these needs can't be very universal among my race, can they? Or perhaps I'm just the odd one out in a crowd of four billion.

First of all, it's flawed to say Asians have nothing in common and that calling Asian/Asian American students on campus a community is racist. Even a group of people who have absolutely nothing in common, but are *perceived* as a unified group, have a group identity just by virtue of that outside perception.

Secondly, Asians and Asian Americans do have several things in common. Not necessarily anything more than, say, my Romanian Christian friend and I, a German-Hungarian-Irish mutt and Russian Jew, have in common--but that's a lot. On a religious level, the predominance of faith in our lives lends us more commonalities than the differences in specific faith. And everybody from Europe has some culture and history in common. The same is true of Asians: individuals may not share a language, specific ethnicity, or cultural heritage, but their languages and cultural heritages are connected. Anabel Taylor is basically a faith-based community center on a largely secular campus; if Caucasians were a minority on a campus dominated by a culture from another part of the world, we should have a community center. Just so should Asian and Asian American students have access to a physical space where their ethnic, linguistic, geographical, and cultural identities are among the dominant ones. Not all Asian/Asian American students need to want or need this space for it to be a valid necessity for the community as a whole.

Liu also mischaracterizes the A3C's goals. He challenges the goal of helping students, which he argues can be achieved through other services. First of all, this is not entirely true. As a member of the queer community, I know that general services sometimes don't help in a way specialized services can--there are issues, boundaries, techniques that do and don't work, that are more common, if not exclusive, to members of a particular group, and service providers can easily overlook our needs if they're not specifically attuned to them. Again, this is not to say that all queer students, all Asian students, or all students of any other group have all the same needs. It is to say it's effective, and not racist, to use existing cultural and ethnic boundaries as a tool for identifying and meeting needs among particular populations.

Much more importantly, Liu ignores the A3C's other goals, after he mentions them in the mission statement: providing a space for community-building, cultural celebration, and consciousness-raising. These are services nobody else on campus can or does supply. Again I will draw on the queer community as an analogy. One might argue that as a group of individuals, we have nothing in common other than the fact that we don't fit into a heterosexual, gender-binary model of society, and therefore that communal programming, celebrating, and awareness must all be about sexuality. But it's not, per se. The way heteronormativity and sexism marginalize us and the ways we fight back give us a common experience, and out of that, the basis of a common culture, even though the community encompasses members of the widest possible range of all kinds of diversities and our lives are all different. Having a community center gives us a space that is not only "safe" from identity-based antagonism, it is celebratory. It's wearing to live as a representative, which everyone who belongs to a minority group must. A community center is not a ghetto, but a home base, where minority students have a turn to broadcast and bask in their individual and shared heritages.

This article raises some valid points that deserve to be addressed, and it's disappointing that the majority of responses have completely mischaracterized Liu's arguments and skimmed over the fundamental issues behind them.

I think most would agree that Cornell's aim in creating the A3C center is a laudable one, and that racism and the limited availability of support and resources to students are issues that the majority of us would like to see solved.

In light of this, the fundamental point the author makes is that the A3C center is simply not the right solution to these problems. His contention, therefore, is not that the Asian racial identity doesn't exist. It is that this particular racial identity does not create any unique, racially-specific problems that would justify building a center to address these needs, and thus, it is not a worthwhile use of the Cornell budget.

Firstly, the author argues convincingly that the A3C center, by its very nature, cannot lessen racial stigma, nor can it provide any unique solutions to existing problems that Cornell has already begun to address through other, non-racially-oriented centers such as Gannett. Despite Annie Bass's valid argument on the potential benefits of any University-sponsored effort to unify and celebrate people of a similar culture, I can't see how various social events organized by Cornell's diverse cultural and special interest-related student associations fail to achieve this same goal.

Secondly, the author lucidly expresses his concern that, in fact, the A3C center may actually exacerbate racial discrimination and even create new problems which may ultimately outweigh any benefits the center might have. It is not the intentions of the A3C center that the author disagrees with. He is more concerned with the center's design and very nature which would, ironically, make it impossible for it to provide unique support not found elsewhere on campus through events and sponsored programs, and instead possibly even produce further unnecessary harms.

I believe that Liu's piece is thought-provoking and well-argued. Superficial replies such as the one above which berate Liu for not being 'Asian' enough completely miss the point of the article, and indicate a disheartening lack of open-mindedness and reflection which I can only hope are not the views of the Cornell administration or community as a whole.