By Ishita Jayadev ’26 and Amy Jayasuriya ’26
On March 11, around 50 people gathered at The Motley for “Building power not paranoia,” a teach-in and discussion held by a collective of 5C Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) students, including speakers Kenny Le PZ ʼ25 and Lauren Mar ʼ25. The teach-in focused on the history of Asian American organizing at the 5Cs, how to organize others and create an escalation campaign, and the next steps people can take to build power at and around the 5Cs in the face of repression.
Le and Mar situated the teach-in by quoting Grace Lee Boggs, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” to emphasize how organizers must consider patterns of repression established in the past as well as current repressive moments.
“We’re not detached from the history that came before us and that’s part of us,” Mar said. “So we have to kind of accept what violence is in our communities, why, and what’s at stake in these moments.”
They grounded the current moment with the acknowledgment that The Claremont Colleges continue to invest in the Zionist entity’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, recent breaking of the Jan. 19 ceasefire.
Le and Mar discussed heightened repression in the U.S. as seen through the Trump administration’s attempted deportations of people protesting for Palestine solidarity, including Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil.
“This level of violence is not a new thing, it’s an escalation of violence that has already existed,” Le said. “So we [can] think about [how] these attacks lay the groundwork for our communities to be vulnerable in a way that is different, right? But it also follows along the legacy of capital’s ability to accumulate and racial capitalism’s creative destruction of our lives in new inventive ways.”
Le and Mar pointed out the hypocrisies of the Trump administration’s recent “DEI cuts,” given that DEI is a concession to anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizing.
“[DEI] relies on inclusion to the structure of white supremacy… and is used to assimilate people of color into racial capitalism, to increasingly exploit and tokenize people of color into institutions as a way of touting those institutions as progressive,” Mar said. “DEI is not actionable. Wins in diversity are not material and are often taken away … Visible diversity is seen often as enough, whereas coalition building and solidarity have tangible foundations to resist oppression.”
Le and Mar then shifted towards examining the state of organizing at the 5Cs, such as Pitzer President Strom Thacker’s veto of the college council’s decision to permanently shut down the University of Haifa study abroad program, as well as Scripps administration’s decision to shut down The Motley over their hanging of a Palestinian flag.
Le pointed out that these events together can remind people that “organizing did happen, and there was repression. One thing that the colleges tried to do for us is to forget that these incidents are happening [which we can’t do].”
History of Asian American Organizing at the 5Cs
Le and Mar laid out a timeline of Asian American organizing at the 5Cs, framing the history as important for informing how students can organize and respond to new iterations of institutional repression.
They highlighted the beginnings of APIDA organizing at Claremont in the late 60s and 70s when the Asian Student Association at Scripps was created as a political APIDA student organization.
In 1989, students created a proposal for a 5C Asian American Resource Center, something that still doesn’t exist. Instead, this proposal was mostly absorbed into the creation of the Asian American Resource Center (AARC) at Pomona in 1991.
While the AARC continues to function as a hub of APIDA student organizing, the dismissal of a 5C resource center forced organizing to be centralized at Pomona and any attempts to build a 5C resource center have been, in Le’s words, “subjugated.”
The fight re-emerged in 2003 and the request was again denied. Instead, the Asian American Advisory Board, or AdBoard, was created as a 5C resource even though it’s still mainly situated in Pomona.
Additionally, Le and Mar discussed the 1993 “Liberation through Education” building takeover of Alexander Hall where students fought for more ethnic studies programs and more diversity among faculty and staff.
The same year at Scripps, students created a mentorship program that is now known as the Asian American Sponsorship Program (AASP). They also created Asian American Women as Resources for Each Other, or AWARE, which is now the Asian American Student Union (AASU) and operates as an APIDA political group at Scripps.
Mar pointed out AWARE/AASU as an example of DEI not creating long-term wins, because the programs used to have a part-time coordinator and work-study jobs for APIDA students, both of which were eventually removed by administrators.
Ellen Wang ’25, who was previously employed at The Scripps Voice, also said that AASU used to function as a resource center, similar to the AARC, which is no longer the case. Wang pointed out, “the things that we consider wins aren’t always wins in the end, because the institution doesn’t say yes unless they’re getting something out of it.”
Elaborating on AASU, Wang said, “There was a huge fight in 2001 after the AASU part-time coordinator position was co-opted by ResLife to become more of a campus life position.”
Out of this fight, students led the campaign and teach-in called “Whose Voice, Whose Vision” at The Motley in October of the same year. They protested the lack of support for students of color and the lack of student representation for executing Scripps’ Irvine Foundation $800,000 diversity grant to be used over 5 years.
The push for an Asian American studies department finally made headway in 1998 when the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies (IDAAS) was created, after barely passing as only Pomona, Pitzer, and Scripps supported its creation.
In 2000, the Pitzer Center for Asian Pacific American Students (CAPAS) was approved. At Scripps, the Irvine Foundation Diversity grant was used to support the new Multicultural Resource Center — eventually replaced by Scripps Communities of Resources and Empowerment (SCORE).
Mar pointed out how name changes like SCORE which used to stand for “Students of Color Organizing Revolutions Everywhere” as well as the name of the CARE Center at Claremont Mckenna College (CMC) which stands for Civility Access Resources and Expression, show the institutional cooptation of student organizing spaces.
The creation of CARE emerged from an op-ed in The Student Life, a 5C newspaper, that a first-gen, low-income CMC student of color, Lizette Espinoza, wrote in October 2015, saying that she didn’t feel welcome on CMC’s campus because of the racial climate and the lack of resources for students of color.
“And then the Dean of Students Mary Spelman emailed Espinoza, saying that she would try to support students who didn’t fit the CMC mold, meaning students of color, and first-gen, low-income students,” Mar explained. “This created a huge uproar among students, so in November there was a huge wave of protests demanding Dean Spelman resign, and two students even went on a hunger strike.”
Dean Spelman resigned that semester and in August 2016, the CARE Center was created — a space meant for students of color at CMC.
In contrast, Mar pointed out how currently SCORE was a “fundamentally a dead space” since the directors’ resignation last year and the absence of the regular student interns.
“Ellen [Wang] and I can speak to this, but we were in a bunch of meetings when they were talking about the SCORE director job description, and they didn’t even want to [include] the word marginalized, let alone, students of color,” Mar said. “So it’s like, well, what’s the point of the space then?”
Mar emphasized that many student initiatives rooted in political organizing become subsumed by administration.
What is Organizing: Relationship Building
After Le and Mar touched on the history of organizing and repression at the 5Cs, they discussed organizing more generally.
“Activism has a connotation that anything you do is an act of resistance, which is partly true,” Le said. “But if all you’re doing is individual acts of resistance, then you’re not actually building any real power.”
They expanded on this by explaining how activists primarily engage in individual actions, such as boycotts and walkouts for short periods of time, while organizers build power by focusing on how to meet long-term goals and visions as a collective.
“Power isn’t concentrated in just a position,” Le said. “You don’t have power just because you are the son of a president [or] the director of a center. You have power if you’re able to achieve a goal.”
Drawing on Boggs’ pamphlet “Organization Means Commitment” and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s definition of organizing, Le emphasized that organizing can not be done without a strong commitment to people or an organization.
“An organizer is somebody who asks questions, an organizer is somebody who can get people together, because there is power where there are people,” they concluded. “Organizing isn’t necessarily just about the amount of pressure we can exert, it’s about the people who can bring into the struggle.”
While emphasizing the importance of community building within organizing to keep campaigns from dissolving into infighting, Le acknowledged the difficulty of building relationships and starting campaigns with people you are unfamiliar with.
Organizing tactics such as one-on-ones, which are informal conversations meant to engage individual’s concerns and encourage them to join campaigns, function as an easy and fundamental way to begin building organizing relationships.
“The most successful events happen when real people talk to real people and when real people invite real people,” Le said. “Even if you are a very vulnerable person, everyone can talk to people that they don’t know anyone can bring people into the movement.”
They emphasized how even “uneasy” alliances were necessary for movement building since “other oppressed people, even the most intolerable, the least radical, the meanest, they’re still not the enemy. No one comes out of the womb radicalized. It’s our responsibility as leaders to help each other grow.”
How to Create a Campaign Protected from Repression
After creating alliances, the next step in building power for long-term organizing is to create an escalation campaign — a movement with specific goals achieved through strategic escalatory tactics.
Tactics, Le described, are any single action or activity to get you closer to a goal, including teach-ins, delegations, and rallies. Without a strategy, Le emphasized, there is no direction that tactics will lead to.
Le talked about how escalation, which is the practice of slowly organizing higher-risk actions and gradually placing more pressure on institutions, helps people feel safer joining movements.
“Risk isn’t unchangeable; risk is something that bends; risk is something that we can decrease when we have each other,” Le said.
After tactics like rallies and delegations, Le identified the most escalated tactic as impacting a school’s finances through actions like a tuition strike.
However, Le said that conducting a campaign was rarely this simple because of repression and pushback from the institution. They identified repression as a reaction to movement building to put a stop to campaigns as well as keeping non-organizers (or the passive majority) from joining the movement and keeping them compliant.
“They [counterinsurgents] want to make sure that [the insurgents or organizers] are illegitimate, and they use things, like surveillance, policing, and repression [to do so]; these tactics have been perfected over time to advance the project of colonialism,” they said, emphasizing how the same repression is seen globally, whether that is policing to repress divestment protesters or the genocide in Palestine.
Le acknowledged the conflict, burnout, and capitulation repression causes. Going forward, the solution they identified was building power, not paranoia through different types of organizing and community building.
“We have to remember that even though it seems visible, high-risk direct action is not the only way we can build power,” Le said. “Repression is not an excuse for complicity or preemptive compliance. We must always try to expand our political community, we must work together to build infrastructure, and we have to learn how to be in movement together, about remaining committed to our principles. Avoiding repression doesn’t mean action, it means finding new ways to organize and give each other understanding.”
Where to Go from Here
Le and Mar introduced Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)’s “Don’t Comply with Project 2025:
A Ten Point Pledge for Colleges and Universities” as actionable steps colleges can agree to combat the Trump administration’s executive orders that attack Palestine solidarity protesters as well as non-U.S. citizens.
Despite these generalized steps, they acknowledged that the fight is different at every institution and recommended the Marxist concept of concrete analysis for organizers to think about the specific context they are situated.
“The job of an organizer is to turn the question of what ought to happen into reality, to create the possibility for change; this requires concrete analysis,” Le said.
Le explained that concrete analysis includes thinking about the economic and political conditions of the institution so that “when we’re able to think about economic conditions concretely, and [realize] why people do things they do, [we can] strategize how to stop those things, completely.”
The next step of concrete analysis includes conducting a power analysis, or thinking about who holds power at the college. Le explained that this includes not only those in higher-up administrative positions but also “staff and people power.”
“Different people have power in different ways and our work is to find those people, connect them to our cause to facilitate three class struggle,” Le said.
Other questions Le said were important to ask during concrete analysis include: “What is the state of action mobilizations at each college, why? What segments of the colleges are the most reactive, how do they happen to be more active? What types of students are inactive or active about organizing?”
Thinking about the last question, Le emphasized being considerate of other students’ viewpoints or current lack of action, “Maybe it’s the fact that we live in a system that doesn’t want us to be radical, right? These are very different inquiries. Maybe we’re just tired. There are a lot of reasons for why we engage in the things that we engage in. But again, our job as organizers is bringing them in because we need people to build power.”
Le identified one failure of divestment protests and Palestine solidarity actions as not organizing workers more intentionally. They invited Samson Zhang PO ’25, to speak about labor organizing they’ve done through the Claremont Student Worker Alliance.
Zhang identified the labor movement as a place where practical analyses of power are constructed, unlike places like the classroom.
“Even in ethnic studies departments, even in a lot of these classes that we’re taking that are supposedly social justice classes we’re taught to critique, we’re taught to analyze things in terms of how fucked up things are, but very rarely we question who we are fighting against and how we are going to win anything from them and all the different layers of that,” Zhang said.
They also pointed out how workplaces are “significant sites of racism and colonialism, of the ways that these power relations are continually reproduced and one of the main sites that we engage with every day [as everyone enters the workforce].”
Zhang talked about how this plays out on campus and how students are purposefully divided from workers.
“On campus even, we are pushed away from the workers who are here and the local community that is here, and that’s a racial and colonial setup, right?” Zhang said. “And labor organizing and CSWA have really meaningful opportunities to expose these contradictions in the white supremacist project. And it exposes the contradictions on these campuses and allows us to actually see ourselves in solidarity with the workers who are feeding us every day, cleaning these dorms, making these schools run in all the other ways, and committing to fighting our common enemy.”
Zhang also identified how labor could be a common cause to organize for other issues, as Pitzer and Pomona labor contracts currently have provisions in them about how they can’t let ICE into their workplaces. They also gave the example of divestment organizing at Occidental College through labor unions, since most students at the college were student workers.
However, they did acknowledge limitations to this type of organizing.
“I really don’t believe that all the things I’ve learned about labor have prepared me to think seriously about how to win divestment, think seriously about how to win an arms embargo, think seriously about how to win the liberation of Palestine,” Zhang said. “And that’s a problem in labor more broadly, is that they’ve identified corporations as the common enemy, but not the state. Labor in the U.S. right now works within the state, relies on laws and litigation and courts to come out in their favor.”
Zhang ended by saying, “These classes [at the 5Cs] aren’t going to liberate you or any of us. We need to think seriously about how we’re building community, power, community care, and what it takes to win a different world.”
