Ava Knapp

Palo Alto Unified School District board trustee Rowena Chiu expresses her opinions at a board meeting on Jan. 23. According to Chiu, an Ethnic Studies course is a valuable class but must be implemented with careful consideration. “Context is everything,” Chiu said. “Whilst it is an incredibly fascinating field, it’s really hard to teach. When it comes to the area of curriculum approval, we need to take that seriously and proceed with caution about how Ethnic Studies is implemented.”

Editors’ Note: After review, The Paly Voice has updated the story to clarify the timeline between Rowena Chiu’s concerns about safety and Danae Reynolds’ differentiation between “unsafe” and “uncomfortable.”

In an exclusive interview Sunday evening with The Paly Voice, Palo Alto Unified School District board trustee Rowena Chiu reflected on the contentious Ethnic Studies board meeting on Jan. 23, her recent social media activity, and the community backlash to that activity.

Last week, Chiu was condemned by 13 former board trustees, the Palo Alto Management Association, and the Palo Alto Educators Association in response to her reposting a post on X that, according to the PAEA statement, “villainized a PAUSD staff member.”

After facing negative feedback from audience members at the Jan. 23 special board meeting about the implementation of an Ethnic Studies course, Chiu said in the meeting that she felt unsafe. Fifty minutes later, PAUSD administrator Danae Reynolds characterized the difference between feeling unsafe and uncomfortable by sharing her personal experience as a Black woman. Reynolds’ comments during the meeting — interpreted as a response to Chiu’s concerns — were referred to in the X post by Asians Against Wokeness, which stated that Chiu had faced “bullying” by other board members for voicing her feelings.

Chiu told the Voice that she agreed with social media’s interpretation of the board meeting.

“The actual post from Asians Against Wokeness represented a position that was in line with my own interpretation of Ms. Reynolds’s comments, which were that they were directed at Asian people and the validity of Asian people to feel unsafe,” Chiu said. “I only agree with their interpretation of what happened in our board meeting. That doesn’t mean I broadly endorse Asians Against Wokeness, nor do I condone any form of racism or hate speech that took place underneath that repost.”

Although Chiu has since removed the repost, she did not remove her original comment on the social media post, which said: “I am a Harvey Weinstein Survivor. In 1998, Weinstein told me, as he attempted to rape me, that he ‘liked Chinese girls, because they’re discreet’. In 2025, as an elected official, I spoke up about Asian oppression, and I was suppressed yet again.”

Reflecting on her online statement, Chiu said that Reynolds’ comments had reinforced the long-standing oppression of an ethnic group.

“The link that I drew was the suppression of Asian voices in general,” Chiu said. “I was addressing the validity of my personal safety. If I say in a public board meeting as a public official that I don’t feel safe, I would love to think that that would be taken more seriously. Instead, my interpretation of Ms. Reynolds’ comments was that, ‘As a person of my affinity group, I didn’t have the right to say, to claim the word ‘unsafe’ and I only had the right to feel uncomfortable.’”

According to Chiu, she feels PAEA was too harsh with its response to her repost.

“I’m extremely upset about the statement that PAEA released,” Chiu said. “It was couched in extremely strong language. I feel that I’m being censored in a very harsh way for placing a district employee under risk, and I would like to say it was never my intention to place another woman of color under risk.”

Chiu said PAEA urged her to take down the repost, which she complied with in order to protect another woman of color.

“PAEA pointed out that it was risky to have the name and face of a district employee amplified in that way, and I agreed with that, so I took it down immediately,” Chiu said. “As somebody who is also a woman of color, I have also very much been at risk: I’ve been racially abused and racially attacked, I’ve been spat at in the street and I’ve had death threats. I understand what it is to be a woman of color who feels at risk. I would never wish that on another human being, and that would be the reason why I took it down.”

Reflecting on the board meeting, Chiu said it was a challenge to strike a collaborative environment.

“I felt that the room was pretty hostile when we entered,” Chiu said. “It felt like the audience had already made up their minds before we began to speak, so it was really difficult to establish an atmosphere of genuine intellectual inquiry and open dialogue. At various points during that long meeting I tried to say ‘I’m also a human being, I also make mistakes, I’m very new to being a board member, and I would really like to be able to ask the teachers some open-ended questions.’”

According to Chiu, she struggled with finding diverse perspectives in a mostly biased group of audience members.

“Free speech is a tenet of US democracy and must be protected; obviously anyone should feel free to be in the room and anyone should feel free to hold up signs in support of things they believe in,” Chiu said. “But one of the things that I really struggled with in this particular meeting is that the room felt very one-sided. It was really hard to identify people who had diverse views. In fact, it felt entirely that the room was united around one view, and if that view is against what you are trying to say, then I think it’s really hard to proceed.”

In spite of Chiu’s position regarding the implementation of an Ethnic Studies course next year, she recognizes the importance of such a course.

“In the context of Ethnic Studies, it’s important that we confront race and we confront who we are, and we have those hard conversations about racism,” Chiu said. “The only way that we can eradicate bigotry and hate speech is to shine a light on it, condemn it and say that this is abhorrent.”

According to Chiu, she encourages the community to consider both sides of the story for a well-informed perspective.

“I got sent screenshots of hateful things being said about Ms. Reynolds, which I abhor and I entirely condemn, but there are also hateful things being said both about me and about Asian people,” Chiu said. “It is really important that we present a balanced view that there is race hate on many different ethnic groups and that all of that is deeply, deeply problematic.”