Thank you to all who joined us for Asian Night 2021 last night. We’d like to address concerns about the show brought to our attention by one of our performing groups, BLS Desi. Last minute changes were made unbeknownst to main leadership at A.S.I.A. in the video editing and script for the masters of ceremony, which resulted in a software editing error that cropped out the faces of performers. In addition, we have been made aware that some of the comments made by the masters of ceremony during the show were harmful and inappropriate to the South Asian community. We acknowledge that the A.S.I.A. board has been complicit in not catching these errors before the show premiered. As a primarily East and Southeast Asian executive board, we must recognize and unlearn our own biases within the Asian American community. While we fight against Asian American racism, we must also be dedicated to addressing the prejudices that exist within our community. We greatly appreciate BLS Desi for bringing these issues to our attention, so that we may learn as a community and strive to be better allies towards the South Asian community in the future. We deeply apologize for how we misrepresented the hard work and dedication of this community. In light of our actions, we are holding conversations with both our masters of ceremony and our executive board regarding these comments and our complicity in this incident. Moving forward, we have corrected the editing error in the video, removed the insensitive comments from the emcee clip, and re-uploaded the revised Asian Night video to Youtube.

We encourage you to take a look at BLS Desi’s performance; their dance is truly beautiful, and they are an extremely talented and hardworking group. We are glad to have their partnership and thank them for their willingness to communicate and hold A.S.I.A. accountable for our actions.