In this episode of Buff Innovator Insights, meet Dr. Jennifer Ho, professor in the department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts. Dr. Ho tells us about how growing up in an Asian-American family, along with more recent societal and personal transformations, has influenced her scholarship and emboldened her efforts to end racism.
Terri Fiez
Hello, I'm your host Terri Fiez, vice chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Welcome to Buff Innovator Insights, a podcast for science fans, creative thinkers and lifelong learners. This podcast gives you a behind the curtain look at some of the most innovative and groundbreaking ideas in the world. Even better, it's an up-close and personal introduction to the people behind the innovations. From how they got their start to how they are making tomorrow better for all of us. Today I'm excited to introduce you to Jennifer Ho, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder. She received her BA in English from UC Santa Barbara, a PhD in English from Boston University and held a faculty appointment at UNC Chapel Hill from 2004 to 2019. She is the author of three books, co editor of a collection of essays on race and narratology and a series of teaching essays on Asian-American literature and currently serves as president of the Association of Asian-American Studies.
In addition to her scholarship and teaching Jennifer is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, including leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate. In this episode, we'll learn how Jennifer's formative years growing up in an Asian-American family in California set the stage for her lifelong interests and scholarship. How her interests evolved through college graduate school and as a professor, spanning topics such as Asian American literary and cultural studies, intersectionality and critical race studies and how her diagnosis with cancer and recent social upheaval have influenced her approach to community engagement and embolden her efforts to effect change through her scholarship and teaching. Let's meet Dr. Jennifer Ho.
Hi, Jennifer. Thank you for joining me this morning. I'm so excited to talk to you, so let's just get started. Where did you grow up and what was it like?
Jennifer Ho
I grew up in the San Francisco bay area in a town called Hayward and it was kind of in many ways, your typical California suburban existence, except I happen to be the child of immigrant parents and so there's kind of an overlay of what that means when you're the kid of immigrant parents, especially when they're Chinese.
Terri Fiez
So what about that experience that was unique? Try and describe that to us.
Jennifer Ho
Sure. So part of it was pretty much every Sunday, we went to Oakland Chinatown and had dinner or dim sum with my grandparents and it also meant that there was Cantonese and Mandarin spoken in my home, although I want to be really clear, I myself never learned Mandarin or Cantonese. So there's all sorts of things I think, especially in the 1970s, when you're a kid who's Asian American and you're growing up with The Brady Bunch and seeing all sorts of images of what white suburban life looks like, which means that you don't fit in and I think that it's fair to say that I experienced a fair amount of racism overt and covert during the 1970s as most Asian American kids did. Nonetheless, because I had a large extended family that happened to be in the bay area on my father's side, I actually did have a lot of support, in terms of my family, but also in terms of my friend group.
I've always had a multiracial group of friends and a lot of that I think has colored my experiences about race and racism in the US. So I'm not trying to paint my childhood as idyllic in any way, shape or form, but I think in some respects it was unique because it was not a white, suburban childhood. Even though there were those elements to it, it was more complicated than that with respect to race and ethnicity.
Terri Fiez
So let's, let's move on to more of your school years and how that played out for you. What are your favorite subjects in school and what were some of your outside activities?
Jennifer Ho
I was an English nerd all the way. I loved books. The local library was really a Haven for me and we would go once a week and I would check out the maximum number of books and then I would return those books, having read and devoured all of them in one week and I would check out another set of books. So reading really was a passion of mine and really specifically narrative and even more specifically when I met novels. I thought I wanted to be a novelist when I grew up just like Louisa May Alcott.
Terri Fiez
So what shaped your decision to go to college and then how did you decide where to go?
Jennifer Ho
You know, there's this thing called the model minority myth in which Asian parents are pushing their kids to succeed and especially wanting them to go into the STEM fields and my parents were not like that at all. They were not the ones driving me to go to college. They didn't stop me obviously and they were encouraging, but I was the one who really looked up all of the colleges on my own with the help of guidance counselors at my local high school and I picked pretty much all California schools. I was also, I think probably arrogant. I only applied to four schools, which I think in contemporary times seems absurdly low. I managed to get into UC Santa Barbara and the rest is history. I'm actually, it turns really grateful. I got into UC Santa Barbara for both personal and academic reasons.
Terri Fiez
So when you got to college, what about college changed your thinking?
Jennifer Ho
So I figured I would go to law school and rhetoric was something that I had heard would be useful, right. Especially if you wanted to be a trial lawyer. So I majored in communication with a specialization in rhetoric. They phased out the rhetoric program at UC Santa Barbara my second year. So I had to declare a new major and that's when I decided to major in English, because again, a lot of people said that a lot of lawyers had English degrees.
Terri Fiez
So tell us about majoring in English. What did you learn in that experience through those four years?
Jennifer Ho
I learned to escape in other worlds, maybe that's the pleasurable part of what it meant to be an English major. I learned to think really critically, to really analyze language and think about how narratives are constructed in terms of a plot, in terms of character, in terms of how a narrator is relating everything and whether to trust that narrator. Is that narrator reliable? And I would say all of that meant I was developing key critical thinking skills along with very key critical writing skills and I also ended up taking English classes that explored a variety of different national, ethnic, racial perspectives. Which again, I would argue, definitely expanded my worldview.
Terri Fiez
Very interesting. So then when you finished your degree, you eventually went to get a PhD. So tell us about your PhD experience and really how it helped to shape your future in terms of what you do today.
Jennifer Ho
Yeah. I really feel like my whole career at academia is a story about how I did not intend to end up in the places I've ended up. So in 1995, I matriculated at Boston University and there's a required cohort class in literary theory and I show up on the first day of this class and I look exactly what I'm like, which is a young woman who is straight out of Southern California. So my hair is long and in a ponytail held together by a white scrunchie. I'm wearing a white t-shirt and khaki shorts and white kicks with no socks and I walk into the seminar room and everyone else is dressed in black and denim and wearing leather shoes and I realize I have made a huge sartorial mistake. That's number one.
The second mistake I make is telling the truth when have to go around the room and introduce ourselves. So I'm the second person to go and you're supposed to say your name, what you plan to study while you're there and I tell everyone that my plan is to leave with a master's degree and move back to California so I can teach Asian-American literature at a community college. I quickly realized this is not the answer to give in a literary theory seminar because everyone else is talking about how they're there to study the biopower ethics of Michel Fuko.
That they're interested in questions of epistemology, that they're there to investigate the archive of Shakespeare's history plays and I'm just flummoxed and I should add at this point that I was the only non-white person in my cohort and within the entire graduate program actually, there were only three of us who weren't white, who were all Asian-American women, but my entire graduate school experience was pretty much about being with other white graduate students and I mentioned this because I believe that may have contributed to the sense that I didn't belong. It certainly exacerbated it by the fact that I wanted to study Asian American literature and nobody was doing that kind of work.
Terri Fiez
So what did you learn in your PhD in terms of the subject matter and where it took you from there?
Jennifer Ho
I think in terms of the subject matter, I mean, I certainly learned a lot and I definitely developed a passion for Asian-American literature and culture. The stories of who Asian-Americans are, especially in terms of coming of age novels and identity formation, which is what I ended up writing my dissertation on. What I also learned was what it means to be a scholar who is trying to navigate things pretty much on her own. So that meant having to professionalize early by going to conferences and making networks among other graduate students and faculty in the Boston area and I think those lessons served me well. They were challenging very much so, but I think that they did enable me to become a scholar and professionalize at a much earlier age and then I started applying for post-docs which in the humanities, especially at this time. The early aughts, was not as common, but I was fortunate to get a postdoctoral dissertation fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill for two years. That is very similar to the CU Boulder's chancellor's postdoc.
Terri Fiez
So then you continued there at UNC. What brought you to Boulder?
Jennifer Ho
So I was at UNC for about 17 years and at the time, right before I left UNC, I was a full professor in the English and comparative literature department. I also held the appointment of being the associate director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities and I knew that I wanted some kind of leadership position, but I thought that given what I'm passionate about and I'm very passionate about the humanities, in addition to social justice, that directing a humanity center probably made the most sense, given my skillset and my interests. I was told by a friend that University of Colorado Boulder was also looking for a director position and so I applied to be the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU Boulder and doing the campus visit and talking to people and meeting people and really being in Boulder solidified that this was going to be a really good place for me to thrive as a leader.
Terri Fiez
That's a great story and we're so glad you came, let's shift now and talk a little bit more about your scholarship. So what are some of your focus areas of your scholarship?
Jennifer Ho
So my scholarship has really... Has always been focused, I should say, on identity. I've been always really fascinated about how we identify as we do, particularly around issues of race and gender and what I really decided was the main intellectual intervention that I have, right? The main intellectual problem I'm grappling with, is how to end racism and I want to really say, I understand how naive that sounds and I understand that a single person is not going to end racism, but I also think that there's nothing wrong with dreaming big. That the people who are trying to cure cancer for example, there are baby steps that have to be taken along the way, but I don't think there's anything wrong with saying what the end goal is, is an end to cancer.
An end to suffering and very similarly, that's what I think it means when I say I want an end to racism and I hope that some small part of what I'm doing in my scholarship and my teaching and my service is helping to contribute to the end to racism and so I've made this decision and I should actually probably pause and disclose this. I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in 2010 and when you're diagnosed with cancer, it really forces a re-examination of your life and one of the things I decided was that moving forward, I wanted to write scholarship that my family could read and my family is literate and they read an English.
So I don't want to make it sound like they can't read my scholarship, but we all know that academic writing has a certain amount of jargon and is geared towards an academic audience and what I mean is I want to write for a smart public audience. I want to be a public intellectual who is engaging with these ideas and who wants to find a smart audience, but talk in a way that I am understandable and I can have conversations and dialogues with people and so I've really been moving into this realm. I've written pieces for the conversation on Kamala Harris and her mixed race identity, which was the subject of my second book and most recently, because of the tragic shootings in Atlanta, CNN reached out to me and I wrote an opinion piece about what it means to be an Asian woman in America.
Terri Fiez
Can you talk about during COVID what your work has focused on?
Jennifer Ho
Yeah, so COVID has really sharpened parts of my anti-racism work in particular, because of the rise in anti-Asian racism and violence that has happened with the onset of COVID-19, I've really shifted into high gear. I created a PowerPoint slide deck that I'm really fortunate that the university of Colorado, Boulder Arts and Sciences Magazine turned into a website and because they turned it into a website and it's sociable, a lot of people have accessed that website and I was able to revise it after George Floyd's death over the summer to also include slides to make clear what the links are between anti-Asian racism and anti-Black racism and I think this is particularly important because there's so much rhetoric about historical tensions between black and Asian communities and so one of the things I've been doing in this public facing work around anti-Asian racism is to also make clear that there are many more moments of coalition building between black Americans and Asian Americans.
Many more things that they share in common than the tensions that are driven by, I would argue mainstream media, would suggest and that one of the roots of anti-Asian anti-black racism is white supremacy. This is the kind of engagement I'm really hoping to do it. It does come with costs, I want to share, because every time I do write public facing work, I get backlash. On social media, but also it trickles in and into my email and sometimes I get hateful text messages and I think that's unfortunately the cost of doing business in the area of social media when you are a woman of color who is trying to talk about issues of racism, sexism and intersectional oppression.
Terri Fiez
So how do you deal with that? How do you manage seeing these messages and how do you block that out and not let that color what you're doing?
Jennifer Ho
That's a great question. I will say, I've been doing this for a while. So I've developed 10 years of strategies and I have I put on an auto-response. So when I get hate mail, there's an auto response that essentially less people know that I'm saving anything that I think is threatening. I read everything. That's not always advised, but I think it's important that I read things to make sure that I know whether there's a credible threat. I have not yet received a death threat. I hope I never receive a death threat. I have received rape threats.
It's not nice. It's not pretty, but I think it's important for me to see the hate, because in the way that I'm constituted, it helps give me resolve and the hate doesn't overwhelm the love and so the other thing is that I'm extraordinarily fortunate in having a very strong support network and those people really lift me up and provide messages of support and really concrete help. And so what I would say to anyone who's interested in doing this work is you can't do it alone. You have to have a network of people who will support you in this, but the good news is that there are networks of people out there.
Terri Fiez
Right? That's very inspirational, thank you for sharing that. You lead the Center for Humanities and the Arts. Can you tell us more about what it is and what is the mission of the Center for Humanities and the Arts?
Jennifer Ho
Yes. I love talking about the Center for Humanities and the Arts or CHA as we use the abbreviation. So our mission is really to support humanities and arts scholars, students. Any staff who have a passion and an interest for arts and humanities, as well as to be a conduit for the entire campus and to reach out to Boulder and beyond in lifting up and promoting what the value is of arts and humanities. So we have a tagline. Arts and humanities give meaning to life and I truly believe that. I know I have a kind of evangelical zeal when I talk about the arts and humanities, but we cannot live in a world without art. We cannot live in a world in which we don't have humanities disciplines that can help us process and give meaning to life and I want to be really clear also in saying I'm not privileging arts and humanities over other disciplines. What I actually believe in the arts and the humanities are stronger when they are working collaboratively with other fields.
Terri Fiez
Well, as an engineer, I can wholeheartedly say I think that's an outstanding idea and I think you'll have a lot of interest in that. So I really applaud your approach. So can you describe some of the work that's currently supported or in the past was supported through CHA?
Jennifer Ho
I would say probably the crown jewel in our program, the program that's most competitive is the faculty fellowship programs. So at the CHA once you're a faculty fellow, you also join other fellows and you meet once a month and you share work.
Terri Fiez
Can you describe a project that you found particularly interesting that was supported or something that one of the faculty did just to give our audience a feel for what kinds of things that our faculty are looking at?
Jennifer Ho
Sure. Most recently, just the other day, we had a meeting and professor Stephanie Sue, who is an assistant professor in the art department. She's an art historian and she's writing a book monograph on East Asian oil painters of the 20th century in China and Japan, engaging with modernity and what's to my mind really interesting about what she's doing is going against conventional wisdom about the ways that China and Japan were often seem to be and honestly, historically were enemies, right? That there was a lot of antipathy, animosity in terms of the nation states of Japan and China in the 20th century, but among artists, there was a lot of collaboration and there was a lot of cross pollination and scholarship that was passing back and forth.
So for her to be able to sort of counter the wisdom that people kind of have had about the divided nation states of Japan and China demonstrate the way that art was able to cross borders in this time period and connect it crossed continentally, transatlantically or trans- Specifically with Europe, I think is a really astounding feat. So that's just one example of how I think the fact that we were able to give Stephanie time off, where she can really think big and the kind of feedback that she got from the fellows, I think was really helpful to her.
Terri Fiez
That's very interesting. Well, one of the things I wanted to touch on is what are some of your favorite courses that you teach?
Jennifer Ho
I guess I have two. It's a little bit hard, it's like choosing one of your children, but I think the two classes that really nurture me, right? Nurture part of me and kind of connect directly to this intellectual mission of trying to end racism is critical race theory, which I teach at the graduate level and I'm currently teaching and then the other class, which I'll be teaching in the spring that's one of my favorites is Asian American women's writing and I guess maybe for selfish, personal reasons, I really love teaching that class because there are all sorts of Asian American identified people who make their way into that class and it's deeply personal wellbeing at the same time, deeply intellectual and that combination, I think, brings out the best in students and produces the strongest writing.
Terri Fiez
I would love to take your courses. It sounds so fun and inspiring. So our final question, as you think about the next decade or two, what are you optimistic about and what is your hope for ending racism?
Jennifer Ho
I am cautiously optimistic that the majority of the human population wants an end to suffering. They certainly don't want to suffer themselves and I think they are trying to look outside themselves and also think about ways of alleviating suffering of others. I say cautiously optimistic, because the human species doesn't really have a great track record on empathy, but I also think about what has transpired in the last decade and I think things are possible in ways that I had never imagined and so I want to be optimistically hopeful that we can try and see, continue the reduction of suffering in the world and if we can have a reduction in suffering, I think that means that we can work to end racism, because certainly racism is something that harms so many people. Both the people who are experiencing racism, as well as people who are saying and doing racist things. So I'm going to be cautiously optimistic about both.
Terri Fiez
That's great. Well, thank you, Jennifer. This has been very inspirational, really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on all this and about your background. Thank you for being with us today.
Jennifer Ho
Thank you for having me.
Terri Fiez
I've been talking with Dr. Jennifer Ho a professor in the department of ethnic studies and the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts. You can learn more about Dr. Ho and the center at colorado.edu/cha. For more Buff Innovator Insights episodes and to join our email list, visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host and vice chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder, Terri Fiez. Innovation is for everyone. We can all make the world a more interesting and better place; sometimes it just takes a spark. See you next time.
