Faced with hate, wise words are the weapon of choice

Learning such skills is now popular among young Asian Americans.

"In February we went to Harvard to take part in a global debate competition and noticed that about onethird of the children were of Asian descent," Helen Wang says.

Asian Americans make up a significant portion of the USA Debate Team's members, the national debate team that represents the US in international competitions. In the class of 2022, six of the 10 team members were Asian Americans; in 2021 six of the 12 team members were Asian Americans.

Every year there are likely to be at least four or five students in the USA Debate Team who are Asian American, including East Asians, South Asians and Southeast Asians, says Brian Zhou, a member of USA Debate for two years, and who captained the team as it finished runner-up in the Germany EurOpen Invitational in 2018.

"It does seem that there are in general more minority students in debate, and I think Asian Americans have been a very large demographic makeup," says Zhou, who is also the founder of Project Dialogue, a debate education group known for its many Asian American-oriented debate camps, but which is open to everyone.

Asian students tend to be viewed as more passive or quiet, or not as engaged politically and socially, Zhou says. They tend to be viewed more through the lens of the model minority trope, which seems to say that the typical Asian student is good at studying and doing math, regarded as a "perfect minority" that does not challenge societal constructs or oppressive systems. Instead, they "just keep their head down and work", Zhou says.

"I think that is untrue, and I think the stereotype is changing."

Zhou says, "Debate is perhaps a less traditional area of extracurricular activities and is right outside the typical model minority sticker types of math and science."

At the same time, Zhou says, he has seen students who arrive at debate camps have trouble speaking up for themselves and lack self-confidence.

"What we can do as students helping other students with Project Dialogue is to give them a space to learn otherwise, to think otherwise, and try their best to develop a community where we are all working toward a social cause, with our voices out and our fist up."

Margarita Artoglou, a debate instructor, says debate education has the potential to challenge and break stereotypes often associated with Asian children.

Artoglou, who works at Early Scholars, a school in Queens, New York, near which many Asian Americans live, says she has seen many Asian students come in "very shy, very unsure of themselves".

"They don't really want to speak, or they tell me 'I don't have anything to say'."