HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-03-25-2020-QingLiu.ltrFirst I would like thanking committee members for the selfless service to the town.
And we would love to work with town offices to help keep building already the best
town in Boston area.
I am here representing many local Chinese residents to help further communicate
one issue regarding the recent 20/20 survey that contains the Asian only sub
categorization. We fully believe in 20/20 survey's good intention. But we want to
express the concern that we do not think creating sub categorization only in Asian in
the recent 20/20 survey form as in question #49, and then based on this to seek
agreement to specific Asian sub group to justify the sub categorization is the right
approach. Once you put anything like this out there, there will always be some
people supporting it and others against it. How do you determine this is justified? By
the vote of the majority number of ethnicity groups? By the vote of majority of Asian
population? By simply there is support? As in many cases, many issues if hurting
certain people, we won't even pass regardless if the majority people support it or
not.
Many local Chinese residents are concerned that why creating sub categorization
only in Asian category. By using same approach, we can probably easily create sub
categorization for other race categories. Yet I do not believe the committee have
tried such approach on other races. We are also concerned that by only sub
categorizing Asian will divide Asian community and single out certain ethnicity
groups (like Chinese). Chinese historically has been heavily discriminated against in
this country and we worry that this can potentially causing discrimination.
Especially if in future, there will be more different kind of policy forms that contain
Asian only sub categorization.
I thus urge committee to review the whole approach for creating Asian only sub
categorization and the way to justify such sub categorization only in Asian, but not
in any other race categories.
Since we do not believe the approach and justification is mature enough, and can
create potential discriminations against certain ethnicity groups. We request
following changes made to the current survey (we are tying to make it as simple as
possible).
1. Change online survey to only list Asian, remove the sub -categorization.
2. For the data have been collected, consolidate to only use Asian instead of sub
categorization.
Thanks a lot for committee's consideration.
Resident Qing Liu
3/25/2017