PETITIONS TO
SHANGHAI AMERICAN SCHOOL

To the Shanghai American School administration:

The recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, to name a few, have reignited the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, combating the police brutality and systemic racism that pervade our society. We strongly believe that Shanghai American School — a leading institution in the international school community — should play an integral role in this worldwide conversation. In response to over 150 alumni emails urging communication, Shanghai American School has thus far released a single public statement that was inadequate. We are now following up and calling upon our alma mater to announce their public support of Black Lives Matter and commit to concrete actions leading to long-term change. We understand that as an institution in China, there may be forces that prevent you from taking a strong public stance; however, we still expect the school to do everything within your control to show solidarity.

As Shanghai American School graduates, we are grateful for the educational opportunities the school has provided us and for the tight-knit alumni community that has lasted long beyond graduation. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, we have been actively re-examining our own privilege as global citizens and reflecting on the importance of using our voices, understanding that being silent is to be complicit. As an institution that associates itself with the American identity, we must educate the students on systemic racism. We must teach them how to be active allies, how to be engaged in the conversation against racism, and how to use the skills that they have learned in school to fight for equality and justice. Though current students may not realize the importance of this movement, we must educate them on why they should care—why they must care—because this fight concerns each and every one of us, and this significance has to be made clear by their leaders.

Also during this time, we have been considering our socioeconomic privilege and the monetary ways we can contribute to the Black Lives Matter movement. As a community of families with significant social, cultural, and financial capital, Shanghai American School has an exceptional opportunity to make a profound impact on the fight against anti-Black racism. Donations are an effective and actionable way for institutions to participate in the movement. We strongly call on Shanghai American School to provide its students, parents, and the broader community with information on how to donate to groups such as the NAACP Legal Fund, Color of Change, Emergency Release Fund, and more importantly, to lead by example.

Lastly, upon reflection of our individual experiences at Shanghai American School in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, we recognize the urgency for long-term reform. Shanghai American School prides itself on excellence, diversity, and global mindedness. It also heavily prioritizes the languages, values, and educational norms of Western societies, and in turn, implicitly rejects those of the country in which it resides. One particular student’s testimony regarding the Shanghai American School video, “The Day We Found the Americans,” directly reveals the concerning, systemic prejudice present in the school’s admissions process. We understand that this is likely unintentional. We understand that this may be the result of a deeply ingrained, broken American system from some 400 years ago. And we understand that facing these deep-rooted issues is difficult and will take time. However, the school’s alumni, parents, faculty are committed to seeing this through by being active allies in the fight for equality and justice, and we hope you join us in this commitment as well.

To that end, we recommend the following actions in support of Black Lives Matter:
Reissue a public statement on the Black Lives Matter movement addressing the concerns detailed in this petition.
Provide the Shanghai American School community with informational resources for donations and/or other financial contributions to any or all of the following organizations: NAACP Legal Fund, Color of Change, Emergency Release Fund, The Bail Project.

We also encourage a written plan with actionable next steps, which focus on the long-term goal of actively participating in global conversations and reshaping the school’s approach to embracing diversity and inclusion, covering the following:
Incorporate Black history and lessons on allyship into the school’s curriculum.
Invite a representative group of individuals, including Black and other marginalized groups, to speak on campus and engage with the Shanghai American School student body on race and social justice issues.
Reform the hiring, teacher training and enrollment practices to truly embrace diversity and inclusivity, and to help break down the white-centric culture currently in place.
Commit to actively supporting social movements aligned with the school’s values in an open and transparent manner, namely through donations.

Shanghai American School’s mission statement aims to inspire a lifelong passion for learning, a commitment to act with integrity and compassion, and the courage to live our dreams. We, the Shanghai American School community, are now calling on our school to lead by example, and commit to this mission on a global scale. This means listening in intently to the current movement; committing with compassion to lessen the pain that these issues inflict on the global community; and actively and courageously speaking up to catalyze positive change. Our mission calls on you to act now.

Sincerely,
The Shanghai American School Community

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June 2020
Petition to the Shanghai American School Administration

Dear Mr. Gauthier, Ms. Sargent-Beasley, Dr. Bonin—

We write to you as the concerned alumni, students, faculty, and community allies of Shanghai American School. We write to you in the devastating wake of multiple ongoing global crises: COVID-19 has been punctuated by the related pandemic of anti-Black racism and the growing epidemic of anti-Asian sentiment in the US. These crises have not only touched all our lives—as SAS has always been eager to remind us that we are a community of “global citizens”—but they have also served to amplify many pre-existing, systemic issues in our nations and institutions.

These crises have amplified the shared experiences of racism that SAS alumni faced during our time at school, and compel us to speak out against SAS’s systemic effacement of non-white/non-western voices on interpersonal, curricular, and institutional levels.

For any readers of this letter who think that an educational institute can be politically neutral, let us remind you that all teaching produces and reproduces canons, axioms governing the systematic treatment of subjects. Teaching never occurs in a vacuum: curricula dictate which voices are worth including and which are not, and admissions/hiring practices always reinforce particular hierarchies of power.

Given that administrators recently stated on Facebook that “Shanghai American School is committed to a period of self-exploration” and are actively inviting students and alumni to engage in dialogue, we invite you to consider the following questions and concerns:

1. Is the SAS curriculum complicit in the production and reproduction of colonial structures of power?

We feel strongly that we have not had meaningful or sufficient conversations about race or colonialism in any of our SAS schooling.

Tabling the evaluation of IB and AP programs for now, let us examine the high school courses that the administration does possess direct control over. In the past ten years, the social studies curriculum at SAS appears to have remained largely unchanged. Consider two paradigmatic courses.

US History: In the official 2020-2021 High School course catalog, “U.S. History” is a course that will focus primarily on “the mid 19th century to the present.” What is lost by the minimization of pre-civil war history? How is it possible that while all students take either US History or AP US History, so many of us have never had any meaningful conversations about race, the legacy of slavery, and the ongoing oppression of African Americans in America?

Asian History: Is there a reason why students who attend a school in China receive only one year of ninth grade “Asian History” as a gesture towards the “Shanghai” half of a Shanghai American School? Do teaching materials gloss over the de facto colonization of Shanghai as “spheres of influence”? Do students learn about the missionary roots and the International Settlement’s expulsion of Chinese inhabitants that paved the way for SAS’ founding?

2. Do students who attend SAS see themselves represented in their curricula as legitimate producers of knowledge, art, and change? What benchmarks are in place to ensure that all English courses which purportedly teach “a wide range of literature that is connected to a variety of different cultures” actually do so? Does the SAS curriculum disrupt or discuss the privileged relationship that white bodies have established in relation to what counts as knowledge?

We feel strongly that we rarely if ever read texts by nonwhite authors and, similarly, rarely if ever had conversations about canonicity and movements to decolonize canons.

3. Does the SAS curriculum explicitly educate students on how to be effective allies to Black, indigenous, and/or people of color? Does the curriculum educate students on why allyship is necessary in the first place, and are conversations about allyship framed in both American and local Chinese contexts? Does SAS train its educators to contextualize conversations about privilege with conversations about the ways that privilege benefits from global systems of inequality?

We feel strongly that SAS does not.

4. Is SAS transparent about its hiring practices and the representation of staff of color? Is SAS transparent about its admissions practices? Is there equal pay for equal work? Do promotional materials highlight white students? Is SAS transparent about ramifications for faculty and students who engage in discriminatory behavior?

We urge SAS to start actively collecting community testimonies regarding these questions.

In many ways, the points above mark a lack of real responsiveness on the part of the administration to the concerns of a radically nontrivial number of alumni and students. In your Facebook statement, you claim: “In the past week, over 150 letters have been sent to [SAS] by alumni.” Citing this number and asking what alumni can “teach us about the world they have entered” without addressing any particular concerns is empty virtue signaling without making an effort toward real change.

We call on SAS administrators to make a concrete statement addressing these questions and to convene an open digital town hall this summer to enter into a conversation with us on the issues outlined above.

We are disappointed that our concerns have been met with more questions and vacuous statements. We would like to channel our collective frustrations into productive and collaborative reform. We acknowledge the difficulty and stress that current events have placed upon all members of the community, administrators included. But we are also coming to you as similarly affected individuals who are carving out time from our own lives to offer our own emotional and mental labor in service of building a stronger and more responsible educational community.

We are asking SAS to respond ethically, critically, and concretely in this turbulent time, and to set a precedent for its peer institutions. SAS prides itself on producing a community of alumni who can apparently, in the language of your perplexing promotional materials, go “from here to anywhere.” Do you really want an education that aims to send kids “anywhere”? Give us instead the curricular offerings, the benchmarks, the leadership, and the hope to go somewhere good. Otherwise, we simply cannot in good faith serve as ambassadors for this school.

In short: failing to convene and attend to student/alumni voices through concrete reforms would be to fail all members of the community by refusing to uphold the school’s self-proclaimed “commitment to act with integrity and compassion” and to “[include] students in the creation of community.” Do not simply commit to “a period of self-exploration.” We invite you to actively listen, work with us, and commit to a period of “ethical and moral growth.”

With respect and in solidarity—

Alumni & Students

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SAS Community for Black Lives Petition

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement continues to expose and critique the oppression and violence that Black people face worldwide. In response, SAS released a statement that peddled a false narrative of enlightened racial harmony, concealing the harm that has been done and continues to be done to Black students and other students of color. Even as the statement acknowledges that we, as a school, “still have much to learn and to do in order to ensure that we are honoring the opportunity and responsibility at hand,” it fails to recognize our complicity in the systemic racism endemic to SAS.

SAS cannot ‘reaffirm’ its commitment to racial justice when its actions have continually proven otherwise. As part of the international school community situated in a position of race and class privilege, schools such as SAS have been afforded the comfort of staying silent about the institutional oppression of Black people while upholding a system that continuously subjugates and profits off of Black people. International schools, including SAS, exploit the privilege of their white faculty and students to advertise their selectivity and sell seats in a school that is only accessible to a wealthy elite. The use of the N-word by non-Black students and by teachers in their classrooms; the white faces that are paraded as evidence of SAS’ desirability; the Eurocentric curricula that conceal histories of oppression — these are but a few of the symptoms of a diseased institution. We are unable to alter the history of colonialism upon which international schools were built. However, we can recognize our own complicity within globalized white supremacy, and commit to implementing anti-racist educational reform.

SAS’s purported mission is to instill in students “a commitment to act with integrity and compassion.” It further states that as global citizens, we “take action based on informed decisions filtered through empathy, integrity, sustainability, and social justice… we take action with sincerity and honesty.” In order to model and live out "integrity and compassion," we must materially support Black lives and endeavor to be anti-racist. This begins by recognizing and confronting our own complicity in anti-Black racism. The longer SAS’ inaction continues, the emptier our promise to uphold our mission will be. Therefore, we urge SAS to carry out the following actions:

Commit to challenging structures of anti-Blackness by incorporating discussions of globalized white supremacy into SAS’s academic curricula, including but not limited to:
Increasing the representation of Black authors taught in English courses,
Introducing more Black perspectives and narratives and encouraging discussions about anti-Blackness in relevant social studies and humanities courses;
Dedicating a portion of the syllabus to learning about and discussing structures of colonialism and globalized white supremacy in all relevant social studies and humanities courses
Inviting more Black speakers, such as authors, activists, politicians, educators, and professionals, to talk to students;

Affirmatively create an anti-racist environment within the SAS community, and ensure the safety and belonging of Black students and students of color through:
Offering recurring anti-bias workshops and seminars on racial equity and privilege outside of course curricula, through off-campus programs (e.g. The Eleven, The Ten, and the Nine), and/or dedicated full-day events,
Mandating and providing recurring diversity and anti-bias training for all faculty members, with general and college counselors undergoing cultural competency training,
Instituting a channel for students, faculty and staff to anonymously report incidents of racial bias;

Establish clear consequences to racist aggressions (e.g. microaggressions, racist jokes, use of racial and ethnic slurs) by:
Strengthening and elaborating upon disciplinary consequences for offenses within school guidelines,
Encouraging faculty and students (through training and workshops) to be vocal against racist behavior and report transgressions;

Commit to prioritizing racial diversity in faculty hiring and student admission processes by:
Setting up programs to seek out, recruit, and hire prospective Black faculty, and other faculty of color;
Establishing a bursary to provide students of color and lower-income students more accessibility to attend SAS;

Release a public response committing to implementing the demands listed above by July 1st.

As a collective of mostly non-Black students, faculty, staff, parents and alumni of Shanghai American School (SAS), we recognize our responsibility as allies to demand change, a burden that should not fall on the shoulders of Black people.

We further recognize that SAS has played a formative role in our upbringing and education, and will continue to play such a role for all future generations that enter its doors. Although some of us are alumni, it is because we still feel connected to the SAS community, a place we once called home, that we ask for better from the institution. It is in this spirit of care for SAS that we, the undersigned, commit to challenging our own complicity in anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and in turn, commit to holding SAS accountable in doing the same. Faced with a moral crisis, we must expect nothing less.

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