By: Lori Perkins
Last week, in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we shared Part One of an interview with Jennie Janssen, Assistant Curator of Blue Wonders at the National Aquarium, and co-founder and president of the nonprofit Minorities in Aquarium and Zoo Science (MIAZS). In that interview, Lori and Jennie discussed her current role, career journey, advice on job opportunties, and how she feels about designated recognition months for racial, ethnic, and social groups. This week we share Part Two, where Jennie discusses ethnicity barriers and sterotypes, why she helped found MIAZS, and advice for other racial or ethnic minorities in this field.
You’ve had a very fortuitous and fortunate pathway to where you are. Did you encounter any barriers based on your ethnicity?
I feel like my particular racial makeup was more of a privilege than a barrier for me, in some ways. I never saw it as a barrier. If anything, I think that there were higher expectations, or expectations that I had talents that perhaps I didn’t. So, there’s some of my own reverse compensation – like, don’t assume I can do that math in my head!
You had the challenge of higher expectations, in contrast to the more negative stereotypes around many other ethnicities. She must be really smart, she’s Asian; she must be really disciplined, she’s Asian. And that’s a different kind of barrier, because it’s about the pressures you might put on yourself.
Correct. And the pressures about whether my own self-worth is matching. It’s not just that other people think I should be smarter. There’s part of me that’s like, should I be? And I’m not, but should I be, and therefore, what’s wrong with me? Also, the fact that genetically I’m a part of this completely different national culture, but politically I’m not.
I competed in gymnastics when I was a kid, and I remember watching the Olympics and saying to my dad, if I ever got into the Olympics, would I be on the U.S. team, or would I be on the Chinese team? He was adamant that I’d be on the U.S. team, but I was thinking, well, okay, I can’t tell – I don’t know.
That was one of the biggest pivotal points for me. There are all of these different social and ideological constructs. How do you know what box to check, how do you navigate at all when you’re immersed in them? You don’t notice them even as constructs unless you take a step outside of yourself and look at them. They’re just normal, you’re in it – there’s only the view you have, and you realize, oh, everyone doesn’t see it through my eyes. I’m glad we’re seeing that sort of awakening in our profession.
That leads me to your role in the founding of MIAZS (Minorities in Aquarium and Zoo Science). Tell me how that came about.
I think the George Floyd murder was a last straw among so many last straws. I give full credit to my co-founder, Meghan Holst. We were all seeing and experiencing and mourning and angry at that time. Meghan reached out to me in early 2021 and said, hey, I’ve got this crazy idea I’d love to run by you. We set up a call and talked for a long time about the demographics we saw at RAW (the Regional Aquatics Workshop) and how those demographics are baked into the way we do things. We asked ourselves, what are the things that we could do? What are the things we’ve been waiting to see done? What are the things that can easily be done? And a lot of the ideas we came up with weren’t hard things. There’s a lot of very simple, basic stuff that could be done. And that conversation ended up being us founding MIAZS.
We grabbed it and ran with it. This was during the pandemic lockdown, and in-person conferences and meetings had been canceled, so we scheduled a We Wish We Were at RAW Zoom. It was sort of a ploy, because once people joined the call, we told them we’d launched a nonprofit, and while people were on the call, they started calling other people and saying, hey, you need to get on this call, and other people started joining too.
Which tells you how much of an appetite there was!
Yeah. We expected it’d be a two-hour Zoom and it ended up being four hours! We all knew we wanted to do something, but many didn’t know what to do. People had recognized the problem like we did, but nobody had really been talking about it. As an aquarist. a lot of us are problem solvers – that’s what we do. We realized we have the power to act. We consider our official launch to be Earth Day 2021, which was that Zoom call. We were incorporated by July and received our 501(c)3 the following March.
That’s incredible progress over such a short period of time. But again, it’s like serendipity seems to follow you. As you said, the George Floyd murder was so galvanizing for so many people, and it made people start to say, I need to do more than just be outraged.
It was inspiring to us to see how MISS (Minorities in Shark Sciences) had been founded, and we felt that if they could do that, we needed MIAZS for the aquarium and zoo industry too. It felt like the open door. In my life, I’ve felt like I need permission to do things, or it’s not my place – I’m waiting for the people who have the power to lead. But we made our own brand of power. We just conjured our own power.
You certainly did, and it’s inspirational for other groups. What’s next for MIAZS?
We recently held our strategic planning meeting. The next thing that MIAZS is working on is providing ally skills workshops. We’ve been doing those at some conferences including RAW, AALSO, and AAZK over the past years. They’re so instructive. And also, not rocket science, since those conversations are coming from people within the industry and saying, this is us, this isn’t someone coming from an external business operation to talk to an animal operation. We know this world. We’re starting to offer ally skills workshops, and we’re building out the model to come to a facility or come to a conference. This is emotionally taxing work, so we do it in teams where there’s support and backup for the workshop leaders.
What advice do you have for other racial or ethnic minorities that are entering our field or are moving through our field?
Right now, the most critical thing is, please know you’re not alone! If you’re reading this, know that there are more of us out there. MIAZS is here to help you connect. There are other organizations out there, too. You aren’t alone, come find us. We’re hoping we’ll stumble upon you as well. There’s a network that can help ensure that you have the connections you need to succeed. And the social support is incredibly valuable, too.
Contact MIAZS at https://www.miazs.org/ to learn more.
Canopy continues to promote diversity in mission-based cultural organizations via our diversity strategy services promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
