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Auntie Kristina's Guide to Asian American Activism

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Auntie Kristina's Guide to Asian American Activism

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Theodore Chao (Author)

Jenessa Joffe (Author)

Anna Michelle Wang (Author)

Kristina Wong (Author)

Shehzil Malik (Illustrator)

Forthcoming in 2026

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Auntie Kristina’s Guide to Asian American Activism

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Vibrant and witty, Auntie Kristina’s Guide to Asian American Activism discusses the Asian American community, past and present; explores allyship with other communities of color; finds a place in national and global movements; and turns inward so young…

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Rodríguez, Noreen Naseem, Sohyun An, and Esther June Kim. 2023. Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms. Routledge.

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Rodríguez, Noreen Naseem, Sohyun An, and Esther June Kim. 2023. Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms. Routledge.

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Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms

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Asian American voices and experiences are largely absent from elementary curricula.
Asian Americans are an extraordinarily diverse group of people, yet are often viewed through stereotypical lenses: as Chinese or Japanese only, as recent immigrants who do not speak English, as exotic foreigners, or as a “model minority” who do well in school. This fundamental misperception of who Asian Americans are begins with young learners―often from what they learn, or do not learn, in school

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Gibney, Shannon and Mariama J. Lockington. 2024 April 4. Re-envisioning One-Dimensional Adoptee Narratives in KidLit. The Brown Bookshelf.

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Gibney, Shannon and Mariama J. Lockington. 2024 April 4. Re-envisioning One-Dimensional Adoptee Narratives in KidLit. The Brown Bookshelf.

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Re-envisioning One-Dimensional Adoptee Narratives in KidLit - The Brown Bookshelf

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As more and more adoptees get published or share their stories, the response from readers and gatekeepers in kidlit publishing is often fraught with hurt feelings and a limited understanding of the nuances of the adoptee experience. In this conversation, Shannon Gibney and Mariama J. Lockington—two authors, scholars, and transracial adoptees—dive into how this tension [ Read the full article... ]

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Home - The Asian American Foundation | TAAF

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The Asian American Foundation is a convener, incubator, and funder accelerating opportunity and prosperity for AAPI communities. Join our movement.

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Lee and Low Books. 2024 February 28. WHERE IS THE DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING? THE 2023 DIVERSITY BASELINE SURVEY RESULTS. The Open Book Blog.

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Lee and Low Books. 2024 February 28. WHERE IS THE DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING? THE 2023 DIVERSITY BASELINE SURVEY RESULTS. The Open Book Blog.

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The 2023 Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS) was created by Lee & Low Books with co-authors Laura M. Jiménez, PhD, Boston University College of Education & Human Development Language and Literacy; Betsy Beckert, PhD candidate, Boston University College of Education & Human Development Language and Literacy; Rory Polera, data analyst; and Jake C. Dietiker, undergraduate, Boston University College of Engineering.
INTRODUCTION

The Diversity Baseline Survey was created to answer a question: Does the book industry have a diversity problem? A benchmark to measure the demographics of the publishing workforce was missing from the larger conversation about representation in books. First executed in 2015 and then in 2019, the Diversity Baseline Survey has become an industry standard, providing a way to track whether publishing's inclusive hiring practices are working. See data from the previous studies- 2019 and 2015 -for comparison.

Employers are routinely vociferous about their commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) initiatives without implementing the transparent means to monitor results. We know institutional change takes time to bear fruit, which is why revisiting the survey every few years is so vital.

WHY DOES DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING MATTER?

People from all backgrounds are demanding to see themselves in media. Thanks to the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we know there are more diverse children's and young adult books being published today. We also know the book industry's power as a form of cultural expression and as a tastemaker. Television, film, and theater are influenced by publishing trends and successes. It has been heartening to see diverse casting reflected in the many book-to-screen adaptations-irrevocably altering who is seen and heard.

It's imperative the publishing workforce continues to reflect the many lived experiences in North America. As gatekeepers, we decide what stories get published, which creators get the extra sales or marketing push, and which books get reviewed. Our industry greatly benefits from a diverse workforce to shape the voices and characters that will appeal to a wide audience.

While the 2023 Diversity Baseline Survey results still indicate a majority workforce of straight, nondisabled, White women, there are noticeable percentage changes across various categories. For example, when the DBS was first administered in 2015, 79% of the respondents identified as White. In 2023, 72.5% identified as White. This marked improvement shows that the publishing industry is becoming more inclusive, albeit incrementally so.

THE LAST FOUR YEARS

To say a lot has happened since 2019, when the last DBS results were released, is an understatement. In the US, the political climate feels increasingly polarized as we fight to preserve our democracy. As global citizens, we also bear witness to geopolitical instability and violence from all corners of the planet. These events, among many others, have shaped our worldview:

The COVID-19 pandemic killed over 7 million people and temporarily shut down the world.

People worldwide rose up to protest state-sanctioned violence and racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd's murder by police.

The US Supreme Court issued judgments ending affirmative action and the federal right to abortion.

Within our industry, important conversations are changing the landscape:

Diversity-Baseline-Survey-3.0-FINAL-REVISION
Please click or hover your cursor over the PDF to reveal navigation options to scroll through the full survey results. The charts include listing of <1% or 0% for the race, gender, and sexual orientation for greater transparency. View the DBS 3.0 results in ISSUU.
METHODOLOGY AND RESPONSE RATE

Beginning in January 2023, the latest Diversity Baseline Survey took over a year to complete. Almost two hundred companies, of all sizes, from across North America, participated, including 11 review journals, 37 university presses, 62 literary agencies, and 81 trade publishers (including the Big 5). We made a special effort to invite educational publishers, specifically textbook companies, to participate in the survey with limited success. See the full list of participants.

A note about the participant list: When we disseminated the survey, we confirmed the delivery of survey links to each participating company, taking note of the number of responses received. In a few cases, we noticed a zero-response rate, which indicates the company failed to send out their surveys. Whatever the reason for the not issuing of survey links, this may be why we did not see a larger number of responses, despite an increase in the number of participating companies.

The 2023 Diversity Baseline Survey was sent to 2,591 reviewer employees, 1,860 university press employees, 597 literary agents, and 18,972 trade publishing employees (both children's and adult divisions of each company). A total of 24,020 surveys were circulated with a response rate of 36.0%. This represents a 10% increase from the number of surveys sent out in 2019, which was 21,753, with 7,893 responses. The current survey had 8,644 responses-a 9.5% increase from 2019.

The DBS was sent directly from each participating company's internal contact person. To ensure the integrity of the data, we worked with a professional survey company, Toluna, to administer and conduct the survey. Toluna provided blocks of unique survey links based on the number of employees for each participating company to ensure a secure survey. Some participating companies requested universal links, which were easier to send but lacked the security of the unique links. Thankfully, we did not notice or detect any data integrity issues. The surveys were completed anonymously, and no participating company, including Lee & Low, had direct access to the raw data results.

The survey results were analyzed and aggregated by a small team at Boston University to ensure the anonymity of individual respondents. They were the only ones with access to the raw data. Data analysis excerpts from Laura M. Jiménez, PhD, Boston University College of Education & Human Development Language and Literacy, are included below and called out in green italics.

INDUSTRY OVERALL ANALYSIS: WHAT THE NUMBERS TELL US

RACE: According to the survey, 72.5% of publishing, review journal, and literary agency staff are White/Caucasian. The rest are comprised of people who self-report as Biracial/Multiracial (8.4%), Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander/South Asian/Southeast Indian (7.8%), Black/African American/Afro Caribbean (5.3%), and Hispanic/Latino/Mexican (4.6%). Native Americans and Arab Americans/Middle Easterners each comprise less than 1% of publishing staff. 0.8% of respondents said their identity was not listed.

The current data around race shows 72.5% of respondents self-identifying as White/Caucasian. There is still an overwhelming White working population in the field, but it is a steady change from 2015 (79% White) and 2019 (76% White). There are many possible reasons for this change: one that we feel strongly we need to point out is that there is a much larger participant pool with each iteration of the survey. And, with each survey there are more and varied publishers participating. The 6.5% change from 2015 in the racial makeup may also signal an effect of hiring practices, as well as other factors not seen in the data. The largest change in racial categories was in the biracial/multiracial category at 8.4%, an increase of over 5% from 2019. Overall, the rest of the publishing industry is almost completely unchanged in terms of racial self-identification. Please note that these categories are subjective and overlapping, so there is a total of more than 100%. There continues to be an alarming lack of representation within the publishing workforce of American Indian/Alaskan Native/First Nations/Native American (0.1%), as well as Middle Eastern (0.5%). In addition, 0.8% did not identify a race, which is more than either American Indian/Alaskan Native/First Nations/Native Americans or Middle Eastern people. Black/African representation is holding steady at 5.3%, which is consistent with 2019 (5%) and 2015 (4%). The increase is so nominal that it is not statistically significant. The other group that is holding steady is Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander at 7.8%. This, like Black/African representation, has seen a very slight increase over the years from the 7% seen across both 2015 and 2019 surveys. Again, these very slight increases are not enough to be considered statistically significant within this dataset, but the trend is worth noting. It appears there is an actual decrease (-1.4%) in the people who self-identify as Hispanic/Latino/Mexican at 4.6%. This decrease from both 2015 (6%) and 2019 (6%) is worth attending to across the field. This is enough of a loss to be considered significant.

We reviewed other surveys, along with the US Census, to refine our list of ethnicities for DBS. We received feedback from the previous surveys that some of the race categories were too broad or that subcategories should be separated out, e.g., Pacific Islanders within the Asian category. But we wanted to be able to compare data and avoid any chance of compromising any individual's personal identifiable information (PII), so we kept the racial breakdowns close to what we offered in the previous survey with a few adjustments.

GENDER: The language around gender identity and sexual orientation is constantly evolving, as is our own personal understanding of where we see ourselves on these spectrums over time. The 2023 survey stats reveal upward trends in how people identify in regard to gender and orientation.

Cis women are still the dominant demographic at 71.3%. This number dips among executive and board member positions to 62.9% identifying as cis women. This reflects the reality that men still ascend to positions of power in significant numbers, even in women-dominated industries.

The 2019 survey reported that overall, 74% of people who work in publishing self-report as cis women. The current survey has 71% of the respondents self-reporting as cis women. Given the sample size difference, this 3% change in cis women does not meet the bar for statistically significant change.

91.9% of publishing staff identify as cis men or women, meaning they identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. The small number of genderfluid, nonbinary, genderqueer people in publishing points to the need for publishers to take extra care with stories about this community, especially if they are written from outside the lived reality of these identities. Accuracy is of the utmost importance when considering how gender identity and sexual orientation have become lightning rods for politicized bias.

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: According to the survey, about 68.7% of publishing staff identify as straight or heterosexual.

This category saw the most change over the course of the study. In the initial survey in 2015, 88% of the respondents self-reported as straight. This survey saw a statistically significant negative change in the number of respondents that self-reported straight. The change can be largely attributed to the number that identified as bi and/or pansexual (14%). Not surprisingly, most of these are White women, but that again is most likely attributed to the fact that the field is overwhelmingly White women. Gay representation held steady at 4%, and lesbian representation increased 1 point to 3%, with asexual increasing to 3.8% from the 2019 results.

As LGBTQ+ civil rights have become more at risk from targeted attacks, the inclusion of this segment of the workforce is more critical than ever. According to the Human Rights Campaign, employees are almost five times more likely to want to work at a company if it publicly supports and demonstrates a commitment to expanding and protecting LGBTQ+ rights. Check out HRC's LGBTQ+ Corporate Citizen Framework for more insight.

DISABILITY: Disability advocate Ace Ratcliff helped with the construction of this question. While it does lack nuance-because it is a yes or no question-its simplicity may have led to more people self-identifying as having a disability.

The greatest change is seen in disability status. In 2019 11% identified as having some kind of disability. In 2023 16.2% identify as being disabled. It should be of note that the COVID pandemic occurred between the collection of these two data sets.

Literary Agents identified the most as disabled, increasing from 9% to 22.4%. There were statistically significant increases across other departments: Marketing & Publicity rose from 10% to 20%; Editorial from 12% to 18.9%; Reviewers from 19% to 26.2%; and Interns from 22% to 27.6%. The uptick in folks identifying as disabled may be related to the greater availability of remote and hybrid work.

AGE: This is a new question added to the 2023 DBS. According to the US Census, the country's population is growing older. The majority age in the publishing industry is 25-34 years old (30.9%), illustrating publishing's workforce is relatively young since the median age in many states is over 40. From there, the ages are as follows, in descending order: 35-44 years old (24.5%); 45-54 years old (20.2%); 55-64 years old (14.7%); 18-24 years old (4.9%), and 65+ years old (4.8%). The unique life experiences that come with a certain age sometimes shifts our thinking and behavior. Young people are often seen as leading the charge when it comes to social change. As those under 40 move up through the ranks, it'll be interesting to see the impact on the other identity demographics.

PRIMARY WORK LOCATION & REGION: These questions about work location and region were also new for the 2023 DBS. We felt this was important to ask since employee work location has the potential to change the composition of the publishing workforce, allowing it to be more demographically diverse. Overall, the data showed most folks are working in a hybrid environment (48.0%) or entirely remote (45.2%).

Publishing has historically been New York City centric. The pandemic may have shifted this. Most of the industry still works from the US Northeast (58.7%). The US Midwest (15.1%) and US West (9.3%) round out the top regions.

Remote work could also alter future employee makeup from a socioeconomic perspective. More employees than ever before work remotely from locations across the country and Canada. If employees continue to work remotely, a larger cross section of prospective candidates will be able to afford to work in publishing despite its modest salaries without having to relocate to an expensive city like New York.

DEPARTMENTAL OBSERVATIONS

The 2023 survey results provide filter responses by department:

Executive (includes Board Members)

Editorial (includes E-book Development and Journals Department)

Sales (includes Fulfillment/Distribution and Book Fairs/Book Clubs)

Marketing and Publicity (includes Book Reviewers* and Design)

Literacy Specialists

The Business of Publishing (includes Administrative/Customer Service; Human Resources; Information Technology/Website/Metadata; Literary Agents*; Operations/Accounting/Finance; Production/Manufacturing; and Subrights and Permissions/Legal/Contracts/Licensing)

Interns

Breaking it down this way gives us a clearer picture of how inclusive or homogenous departments are in relation to one other.

Two new groupings-Literacy Specialists and Business of Publishing-were added to better reflect the variety of work being done.

* These roles in past surveys were their own category with their own pie graphs, respectively. In this survey, our academic analysts grouped Book Reviewers under the Marketing and Publicity umbrella and Literary Agents under the Business of Publishing. There are close-up charts that pull out the demographics for these influential gatekeepers, so the data can be easily compared to previous results.

A few interesting department-level observations worth noting:

MORE DIVERSITY IS STILL NEEDED AT THE TOP: The Executive level continues to see slight changes in demographics, with people identifying as White decreasing.

When we look at race across the different sectors, we see some encouraging trends. The overwhelming whiteness in the Executive levels is trending downward, with the most current data showing 76.7% people self-reporting White. This is only a marginal decrease of 1.3% from 2019, but it is a 10% decrease from the 2015 data.

Comparing data from 2019 to 2023, cis women increased from 60% to 62.9%; the number of people identifying as straight dropped from 82% to 79.6%; and the percentage of people with a disability increased from 10% to 12.4%. Diversity and inclusion only become core values of a business when leadership intentionally chooses to support and invest in a diverse workforce.

EDITORS AND LITERARY AGENTS SHOWED STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN SOME DEMOGRAPHICS: The people in Editorial who self-identified as White lessened. {Editorial shows a downward trend with 71.6% White participants (from 82% in 2015 and 85% in 2019).} This change in just four years is notable. We hope this more diverse pool of editors eases the psychological and emotional burden often placed on the shoulders of the few Black, Indigenous, People of Color around the acquisitions table.

Literary agents were not part of the 2015 dataset. In 2019, literary agents were predominantly White (80%), straight (76%), cis women (84%), who were nondisabled (91%). In 2023, agents are still predominantly White (73.7%), with the largest increase of bi- or multiracial (12.3%) representation. The greatest change from 2019 is reflected in sexual orientation. 62.4% identify as straight (-13.6%), while 23.9% identify as bisexual/pansexual, which is an increase of 10.9%. Along with that increase, there was an increase to the number of people who identify as asexual/demisexual to 4.8% (+2.8%), and a slight increase in those who identify as lesbian at 2.4% (+1.4%).

INTERNS CONTINUE TO BE MORE DIVERSE THAN THE INDUSTRY AS A WHOLE: The Intern dataset offers a glimpse of what the future workforce may one day look like. Of the interns surveyed in 2023, 63.8% identify as BIPOC-up from 49% in 2019; 55.2% are part of the LGBTQ+ community; and 27.6% have a disability.

It appears that the efforts to bring more BIPOC interns into the field has shown enormous promise. Although this is only the second time the category has been included (2015 did not include interns) the growth should be highlighted. In 2019, 51% of the interns were White, 18% Biracial/Multiracial, 14% Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander/South Asian/Southeast Indian, 8% Black/African American/Afro Caribbean, 5% Latinx/Latino/Mexican, 1% Middle Eastern, and 0% American Indian/Alaskan Native/First Nations/Native American; 3% declined to self-identify. In the current survey the numbers have significantly shifted. 36.2% of the interns self-identified as White, 29.3% as Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander/South Asian/Southeast Indian, 15.5% as Biracial/Multiracial, 13.8% as Black/African American/Afro Caribbean, and 5.2% Hispanic/Latino/Mexican. The changes are the most significant for Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders/South Asian/Southeast Indian with a 15.3% increase and Black/African American/Afro Caribbean respondents with a 5.8% increase. The changes are just as significant across other areas. Although the representation of cis men has remained steady across the years at around 10%, there was a shift in the percent of cis women to 69% (-9%) and an increase in the genderqueer and nonbinary categories. In 2019, genderfluid, nonbinary, and genderqueer were grouped together as a single option for the gender-identity question, making up 9% of interns at the time. But in 2023 we refined the survey to better represent people. There are 8.6% who identify as genderqueer/genderfluid, as well as an additional 8.6% identifying as nonbinary. A total of 3.5% chose not to disclose. The interns are also serving a much wider array of sexual orientations in 2023, with only 37.9% identifying as straight (-13.1% from 2019). There is also a large change in bisexual/pansexual identity to 25.9% (-4.1%) in the current data. Asexual/demisexual are almost the same at 10.3% (+0.3%), whereas lesbians increased to 12.1% (+7.1%), and those who identify as gay also increased, to 6.9% (+4.9%). Although we did not provide an "other" category, there were 6.9% who elected not to disclose their sexual orientation. The challenge for the industry will be to both support the wide array of interns who have come into the field and to find a way to retain and promote these individuals in the industry that so desperately needs them.

Internships play a key role in expanding one's idea of the kind of work possible within an industry. It's important to remember that Interns temporarily shift the demographics of a company for a set period of time-anywhere from 3 months to a year. An internship does not necessarily easily transition into a full-time entry level role either. While there is no guarantee of permanent placement, the potential exists as companies do routinely hire from the internship pools.

WHAT'S NEXT?

While some of the biggest differences were noted from the 2015 survey results to this latest iteration, the dataset for the first DBS was much smaller than the 2023 version. There's a shift in attitude about the survey. Companies are more eager to take part in it today than in 2015, when folks needed to be convinced about why it's important to participate.

Efforts to increase diversity in the publishing workforce will always involve serious work and commitment. The net gain of a more inclusive workforce benefits us all. It lessens the tendency for staff to gravitate toward siloed interactions and increases the likelihood that we will get to know people outside our comfort zone. For the book industry, more diverse representation behind the scenes leads to better books. While the word authenticity has been thrown around over the last few years, the underlying goal should always be to publish books that are genuine and true, and that represent the lived experiences of a wide range of people.

If the publishing industry is sincere about achieving an inclusive workforce, then the people tasked with implementing DEI initiatives should be from a mix of intersecting identities and backgrounds, including those from the majority demographics.

As you digest these latest DBS statistics, please take the time to ponder these questions:

Is your company culture welcoming of diverse staff?

Do diverse staff members feel comfortable voicing their opinions? If not, what systems can be put in place that will let them share their thoughts without the feeling of risk or repercussions?

Have recent conversations on bias and privilege changed your perspective on the systemic problems that exist in society today?

How can your team, department, or company center the voices of those historically marginalized by the publishing industry to create meaningful institutional change?

Has your empathy grown or receded toward diverse causes in the last four years? If you have found yourself pulling back, what could be done to bring you back into the fold?

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "The line of progress is never straight." Four years from now, what will the next baseline survey show us? The work continues.
Contact dbs@leeandlow.com for press inquiries or permission to reprint.

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WHERE IS THE DIVERSITY IN PUBLISHING? THE 2023 DIVERSITY BASELINE SURVEY RESULTS

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The Diversity Baseline Survey was created to answer a question: Does the book industry have a diversity problem? A benchmark to measure the demographics of the publishing workforce was missing from...

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Pacific Islanders in Publishing | A Worldwide Database of Pacific Islanders in Publishing

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Pacific Islanders in Publishing is a database of Pacific Islander NHPI creators and professionals in publishing, and includes the latest PI book releases worldwide.

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Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History. College of Education. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History. College of Education. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History | College of Education

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Welcome to the professional development series for the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act, sponsored by the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and approved by ISBE.

What's in this professional development series?

This professional development series has three modules, each broken into three sections and includes an introduction. Though participants can pick and choose which modules and sections to complete, we highly recommend beginning with Module I.

Module 1

Introduction to Asian American Issues

Module 1 provides an introduction to the Asian American population and the social construction of race in the United States. It also provides an overview of Asian American issues and history/herstory.

Module 2

Asian American History: Race & the American Imagination

Module 2 discusses the history of Asian immigration to the United States and the ways US legislation, court cases, and policies restricted immigration, citizenship, and equal access to schooling.

Module 3

Contemporary Issues Facing Asian Americans

Module 3 explores complexities of Asian American experiences after WWII, the Civil Rights Movement(s), Asian American identity, anti-Asian violence, and representation in K-12 curricula.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is the TEAACH Act?

Passed in April 2021, the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act amended the Illinois School Code, ensuring that every public elementary and high school student in Illinois learns about the contributions of Asian Americans to the economic, cultural, social, and political development of the United States.

Beginning with the 2022-23 school year, every public elementary school and high school shall include in its curriculum a unit of instruction studying the events of Asian American history, including the history of Asian Americans in Illinois and the Midwest, as well as the contributions of Asian Americans toward advancing civil rights from the 19th century onward.

How many professional development hours can I get?

This professional development series has three modules. Completion of all three modules can earn teachers up to 36 professional development credits in the state of Illinois. However, to accommodate teachers' busy lives, the modules are customizable, and you may complete any of the modules (1, 2, or 3) to receive individualized professional development hours. Though participants can pick and choose which modules and sections to complete, we highly recommend beginning with Module 1. Please contact us at teaach@education.illinois.edu for more information.

How do I claim my PD hours?
AFTER you have completed all the sections you wish, please visit this link to claim your hours. You may also complete the form if you wish to provide feedback to the team at the University of Illinois.

How is this different from other professional development opportunities?

Our approach is completely asynchronous, and it is customizable! If you want to go through all three modules, you can receive 12 hours of professional development credit in the state of Illinois. However, you can choose modules (and sections within them) to meet your liking for a customizable amount of professional development points.

More about our approach:

This professional development (PD) series will take a critical, historical, and structural approach. For example, we do not simply add Asian American facts to curriculum or focus on food or cultural traditions of Asian Americans.

The PD series will focus on how race and inequity have shaped Asian American experiences and led to racialization of them as model minorities and foreigners versus as fully complex and diverse individuals.

It will take a cross-racial approach, showing how Asian American histories are intertwined with other communities of color.

It will focus on voices of Asian Americans as historic and present-day actors in the US narrative.

Who made this professional development series?
Faculty, staff, and doctoral students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's College of Education and iSchool. For more information, meet the teamhere.

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Welcome to the professional development series for the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act, sponsored by the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and approved by ISBE.

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Dear Asian Americans is a podcast for and by Asian Americans, focusing on authentic storytelling rooted in origin, identity, and legacy. Host Jerry Won b...

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Asian America: The Ken Fong Podcast

Ep 370: Dale Minami

Attorney Dale Minami is most known for leading the legal team that overturned the conviction of Fred Korematsu. Forty years earlier, Korematsu had defiantly disobyed

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Ep 369: The Two Kens – Let’s Replace Tucker!

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Ep 367: June Millington

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This is a special episode for several reasons: My friend Patrick Hare is on the ballot in LA County to be a Superior Court Judge;

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These awards were given to the Podcast starting from left to right: "2019 KCET Local Heroes" top ten finalists, Asian Podcasters Network 2020 Silver Medal "Best Episode", Amsterdam-based Xenolearn organization's "Twenty-Five Podcasts That Talk About Culture, Diversity, and Race, 2020", Asian American Podcasters Association's "2020 Advancement & Achievement Golden Crane", Asian Hustle Network's Top 50 Unsung Heroes Award 2021.

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Choy, Catherine Ceniza. (2022). Asian American Histories of the United States.

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Choy, Catherine Ceniza. (2022). Asian American Histories of the United States.

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An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.

Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the 21st century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early 21st century.

"An impressive new work about how major moments in Asian American history continue to influence the modern world . . . . An empathetic and detailed recounting of Asian American histories rarely found in textbooks."
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"Today's rise in anti-Asian hate demands a new sort of Asian American history. Choy meets this urgent need with a powerful and effective nonlinear account of how we came to the present moment."
-Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

"With unflinching insight and grace, Professor Choy offers an evocative meditation on the histories of Asian Americans, histories that powerfully connect our past with our present. A stunning, timely work that deepens our understanding of race in the United States."
-Vicki L. Ruiz, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Irvine

"Systematically and unapologetically, this country has attempted to erase Asian Americans from the American story. Catherine Ceniza Choy has an urgent reminder: the America of today would not exist without Asian Americans. She reminds us, too, that anti-Asian hate is hardly a new phenomenon-in fact, it has been central in the creation of this country for well over a century. Still, Choy channels hope but underscores that there is no moving forward without reckoning with the sins of our past. I promise you, this is unlike any history you'll ever read-a book only Catherine Ceniza Choy could have written."
-Anthony Christian Ocampo, author of The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race

"Accessibly written for a wide readership, Asian American Histories of the United States is a comprehensive, informative, and insightful work. Featuring multiple origins and trajectories of Asian American history, it offers important, new perspectives on Asian American rich and textured lives."
-Yén Lê Espiritu, Distinguished Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

"Exquisitely geared to meet the urgent demands of our time, Catherine Ceniza Choy's highly readable Asian American Histories of the United States addresses it all: viruses and discrimination, healthcare and food culture, its vast workforce and their manifold contributions, proving time and again just how crucial Asian Americans are to the history of the United States."
-Franklin S. Odo, John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer of American Studies, Amherst College

"Catherine Ceniza Choy is one of the most gifted public intellectuals that the Asian American community has produced. As Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan did during the Great Depression, Choy bears witness to recent years of great anti-Asian hatred. Asian American Histories of the United States inspires us to link personal biographies with global histories, and tragic pasts with hope-filled futures."
-Theodore S. Gonzalves, twenty-first president of the Association for Asian American Studies

"With anti-Asian bigotry accelerating in the United States, often violently, this important and beautifully written book is exactly the knowledge base and guide needed to educate the public. Then we must take action to address and resist the hate and resentment being experienced in Asian American communities."
-Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

"Catherine Ceniza Choy makes a convincing argument that we must understand the past if we are to adequately address the anti-Asian violence of the present. Written with love and respect for our communities, this book illuminates histories as diverse as Asian America itself."
-Grace M. Cho, author of National Book Award finalist Tastes Like War: A Memoir

"With admirable clarity and deep empathy, Catherine Ceniza Choy deftly captures the complex heterogeneity of the lives, cultures, and histories encompassed by the category of 'Asian American.' But even as Choy is acutely aware of the differences between and within Asian American communities in terms of national origin, language, religion, class, and immigration histories, so too is she attuned to their commonalities: the discriminatory citizenship and immigration laws that solidify their status as 'forever foreigners,' the histories of militarism and empire in Asia that constitute and indelibly mark their existence in the US, but also their shared histories of radical organizing and activism against discrimination, violence, and imperial rule. With lucid prose that never loses sight of the everyday lives of ordinary people, Choy counters the forced forgetting, erasure, and invisibility of Asian American histories, cultures, and labor. In so doing she makes indisputably clear their centrality to the very formation of the United States. If you think you 'know' American history, this book will be a revelation."
-Gayatri Gopinath, author of Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

"By documenting multiple origin stories, by recounting various histories, by examining a heterogeneous history of violence, erasure, and resistance, Catherine Ceniza Choy closes the door on narrow and uniform understandings of Asian Americans. This book is a monument to the complexity of history and the fullness of historical prose."
-Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

"Catherine Ceniza Choy is a brilliant, perceptive historian who knows how to tell stories. By connecting people, movements, memories, and dreams with the harsh realities of structural racism across oceans, continents, and time, she gives us a completely new history of the United States-reminding us that nothing is ever black and white."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"111 New Books to Read for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month," Goodreads, included in AAPI Month roundup

"Asian Americans Building America: An Interview with Catherine Choy," Asia Society, interview

"Lynchings: An untold piece of Asian American history," Axios, author and book quoted in piece

"18 of the Best Asian American Books to Read This Year," BookRiot, book listed in roundup

"Why Nathan Chen's history-making gold medal is so significant," NBC News, author quoted and book mentioned in Olympics piece

"Most Anticipated Reads for the Rest of Us 2022," Ms. Magazine, book included in 2022 forthcoming book roundup

"Interview with an Indie Press: Beacon Press," Literary Hub, book mentioned in Q&A with the press

"How Will the History Books Remember 2021?" Politico, contributed to piece

Download the readers' guide.

Reflect on the title of Catherine Choy's book Asian American Histories of the United States. How does the title compare to other books in the ReVisioning History series, such as An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays or A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross? What is captured in placing a spotlight on the plural "histories" of minoritized people?

In the preface, Choy discusses "positive stereotypes" of one-dimensional Asian American success and how "this misunderstanding . . . contributes to the dehumanization of Asian Americans" (viii). Considering no stereotype is truly "positive," name some examples of stereotypes that pose as progressive or constructive for Asian Americans and people of color. How does this book work to combat the myth of the perfect marginalized group?

Choy writes an achronological history, depicting important events in the past without specific order. What were your first impressions of the introduction highlighting Asian American history from the most recent to oldest events? How did this achronological structure shift your understanding of this history, and why do you think Choy chose to write the book in this manner?

Choy presents to readers how Asian Americans experience the unique challenge of "being both celebrated and villainized at the same time," as explained by Dr. Fu on page 2. In both the text as well as in life, where do you see this sentiment reflected?

Chapter 1 discusses the massive influx of Filipino healthcare workers in the US medical field-noting that "31.5 percent of registered nurses who died from COVID-19 were Filipino American, although the group makes up only 4 percent of this labor force." (14). Were you previously aware of this statistic? What does this tell you about the US workplace and the communities that are valued or neglected?

Page 66 focuses on internal dissent between Asian communities within America during the early rise of Asian American social justice movements. Filipinos "felt marginalized by terms like 'yellow power'" (66). From the workplace to your favorite Netflix show, where else do you see the erasure of dark-skinned Asian Americans? Where does this discrimination stem from? How can we better practice intercommunal allyship and care?

On page 67, Abe Ignacio shares how learning his history in school and fostering healthy discussions about his cultural roots helped him rebuild his esteem surrounding his heritage. Taking into account Ignacio's successes, struggles, realizations, and experiences, can you speak to the importance of teaching a multicultural history in the classroom? Can you think of other instances in your life when learning about your own history helped establish confidence?

Suzanna Balino Fernandez, who is Mexican and Filipino, recounts on page 123 how she felt she was rejected from her own cultures for not being "enough" of one or the other. Reflect on the individual who experiences this rejection and how they are affected in the long run. How can the harm of this rhetoric be retraced? What are some effective ways to reframe the narrative surrounding mixed race identity?

Choy states on page 166 that historical perspective greatly contributes to the erasure of Asian American histories, "specifically the power that comes from who gets to tell the story." Do you see any existing parallels to other events in the past that have been forgotten, erased, skewed, or altered by historical perspective?

In the context of the Atlanta murders in 2021, we see womanhood and Asian American identity overlap. What challenges arise at the intersection of these identities? How do depictions such as "dragon ladies" and "lotus blossoms" invoke real-life consequences for Asian American women?

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Asian American Histories of the United States

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An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US.

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Jennifer Chan is Not Alone by Tae Keller. Educator's Guide written by Sarah Park Dahlen

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Jennifer Chan is Not Alone by Tae Keller. Educator's Guide written by Sarah Park Dahlen

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The May Book Project. The Very Asian Foundation.

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The May Book Project. The Very Asian Foundation.

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"In celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, The Very Asian Foundation, in partnership with We Need Diverse Books, launches The May Book Project to help schools and libraries build and maintain robust Asian American youth literature collections.

We are raising national awareness of the need to create inclusive libraries, give readers access to up-to-date Asian American youth literature, and provide funding for donating books to libraries."

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The May Book Project - Very Asian Foundation

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Harnessing the transformative wisdom of anti-racist ancestors, social justice movements, and academic fields, Maum Consulting helps our clients unlearn, heal, and reconnect in order to build a just, joyful, and regenerative world.

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Maum [mah-eum] is an Asian American Studies-based educational social enterprise offering storytelling curation, curriculum assistance, online courses, and professional development, all through a JEDHI (justice-equity-diversity-healing-inclusion) lens.

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Asian American Narratives in U.S. History and Contemporary SocietyGuest Editors: Noreen Naseem Rodríguez and Sohyun An. (January/February 2022). Social Studies and the Young Learner.

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Asian American Narratives in U.S. History and Contemporary SocietyGuest Editors: Noreen Naseem Rodríguez and Sohyun An. (January/February 2022). Social Studies and the Young Learner.

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OPEN ACCESS

This article draws on my reflections from a year-long study in a first-grade classroom in a Midwestern public elementary school during which the author read and discussed a total of fourteen Asian American picture books with the class. In this article, she discusses the children's interactions with Asian American stories and provides suggestions for using children's literature to teach about Asian American history and culture.

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Social Studies and the Young Learner January/February 2022

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OPEN ACCESS This article draws on my reflections from a year-long study in a first-grade classroom in a Midwestern public elementary school during which the author read and discussed a total of fourteen Asian American picture books with the class.

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Maizy Chen's Last Chance by Lisa Yee. Educator's Guide written by Sarah Park Dahlen

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Maizy Chen's Last Chance by Lisa Yee. Educator's Guide written by Sarah Park Dahlen

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"They're Not Too Young to Talk About Race!"

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"They're Not Too Young to Talk About Race!"

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Breslin, Amy K.; Dahlen, Sarah Park; Kwisnek, Kristen; & Leathersich, Becky. (2021). APALA rubric to evaluate Asian American and Pacific Islander youth literature.

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Breslin, Amy K.; Dahlen, Sarah Park; Kwisnek, Kristen; & Leathersich, Becky. (2021). APALA rubric to evaluate Asian American and Pacific Islander youth literature.

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APALA Rubric to Evaluate Asian American and Pacific Islander Youth Literature

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Rubric to Evaluate Asian American and Pacific Islander American Youth Literature Created for APALA by Amy Breslin, Sarah Park Dahlen, Kristen Kwisnek, and Becky Leathersich (2021)

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“Linda Sue Park: Children Love Books with ‘Fierce Adoration.’: The Newbery at 100.”

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“Linda Sue Park: Children Love Books with ‘Fierce Adoration.’: The Newbery at 100.”

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(2022 January 19). Dahlen, Sarah Park. “Linda Sue Park: Children Love Books with ‘Fierce Adoration.’: The Newbery at 100.” School Library Journal.

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Linda Sue Park: Children Love Books with Fierce Adoration | The Newbery at 100

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Linda Sue Park on the Newbery’s gifts, learning what it means to be Korean American, and that fan who read her book 62 times.

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Museum of Chinese in America's "Anti-Asian Violence and Racism: A Selection of Resources for Teachers"

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Museum of Chinese in America's "Anti-Asian Violence and Racism: A Selection of Resources for Teachers"

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Anti-Asian Violence and Racism: A Selection of Resources for Teachers

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In Crossings, a group of international women peacemakers sets out on a risky journey across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for an end to a 70-year war that has divided the Korean peninsula and its people. Comprised of Nobel Peace Laureates and renowned activists like Gloria Steinem and Christine Ahn, the intrepid team faces daunting logistical and political challenges as they forge a path with their Korean sisters toward peace and reconciliation.

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In Crossings, a group of international women peacemakers sets out on a risky journey across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for an end to a 70-year war that has divided the Korean peninsula and its people.

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https://tpt.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/asian-americans-pbs/

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Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that delivers a bold, fresh perspective on a history that matters today, more than ever. As America becomes more diverse, and more divided, while facing unimaginable challenges, how do we move forward together? Told through intimate and personal lives, the series will cast a new lens on U.S.

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A People's History of Asian America. PBS.

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A People's History of Asian America. PBS.

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https://www.pbs.org/show/a-peoples-history-of-asian-america/

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Skip to Main Content

The history of Asian Americans through the microaggressions and stereotypes they face. More More

Produced in partnership by the Center for Asian American Media and PBS Digital Studios, A People's History of Asian America tells the history of Asian Americans through the microaggressions and stereotypes this community faces.

Support for PBS.org provided by:

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A People's History of Asian America | PBS

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Skip to Main Content The history of Asian Americans through the microaggressions and stereotypes they face. More More Produced in partnership by the Center for Asian American Media and PBS Digital Studios, A People's History of Asian America tells the history of Asian Americans through the microaggressions and stereotypes this community faces.

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South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)

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South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)

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SAADA digitally documents, preserves, and shares stories of South Asian Americans.

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Yang, Jeff. “The ‘Black-Asian Conflict’ Is a Problematic Trope — and It’s Time to End It.” Medium. May 18, 2021.

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It’s Time to End the Trope of the ‘Black-Asian Conflict’

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Efforts to direct Asian American anger at the Black community are rooted in White establishment anxiety

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“#AtlantaSyllabus: An Asian American Studies Perspective on Anti-Asian Violence in 2021.” U Wisconsin-Madison Asian American Studies.

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Syllabus PDF Available Here
On March 16, 2021, eight people were killed at Atlanta-area spa businesses - six of whom were Asian women. Despite the fact that two of the women were Chinese and four were Korean, news media were quick to deny racist motivations. Worse yet, an official spokesperson for the sheriff's office investigating the case described the murderer as merely having "a really bad day." Yet as scholars of Asian American Studies, critical race theory, and feminism, we know that this kind of violence is deeply intertwined with long histories of anti-Asian hatred and misogyny in this country. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic there had been an alarming surge in violent attacks and hate crimes targeting Asians, and these episodes must be understood within larger discourses of disease and contagion that have long surrounded Asian immigrants and our communities. And the story goes even deeper than that - this violence is also connected to the immigration policies that excluded and then welcomed certain kinds of Asians to the U.S., to the stereotypical portrayals of Asians in mainstream media, to the gendering and racializing of certain kinds of labor, and far more.

The #AtlantaSyllabus was designed for those who want to better understand this incident and this moment in all of their complexity. While Atlanta is a politically contentious space with rich legacies of Black activism, the presence of Asian Americans in the U.S. South has often been obscured in dominant narratives. Without reducing the city to this tragedy, this syllabus represents a starting point for understanding the incident in relation to Asian American history, culture, and political solidarity with Black communities. Its contents includes canonical and more recent scholarship from the academic discipline of Asian American Studies, as well as contemporary journalism, podcasts, videos, and documentaries from Asian American artists and writers.

While its creation was motivated from an incident of trauma and pain, this syllabus also points to the active role that Asian Americans have always played in asserting their own unique and intersectional identities, resisting dominant narratives, and fighting for liberation and justice. The list of works below is in no way exhaustive, and clearly only scrapes the surface of the vast body of Asian American writing and creative works that come together to tell our story. But it's our hope that it begins to spark a more informed and sustained conversation about the experiences of Asian Americans that builds from all of the hard work that has come before.

The #AtlantaSyllabus was created by Dr. Lori Lopez, Dr. Lisa Ho, and Dr. Erica Kanesaka Kalnay from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Asian American Studies Program. For more information about our program, see: https://asianamerican.wisc.edu/

Week 1: Asian American and Pacific Islander Identities
Discussion Questions:
1. How can we think about identity through an intersectional and interrelational lens?
2. What are the different forces that challenge the cohesion and stability of Asian/Asian American Identity?
3. How can racial triangulation destabilize the Black/White binary of race?

Week 3: Yellow Peril and the Myth of the Model Minority
Discussion Questions: 1. Where did the "Myth of the Model Minority" originate, and how is it connected to "Yellow Peril"?
2. How do contemporary fears about Asian immigrants and Asian American success connect to foreign policy and American history?

Nguyen, Yves Tong of Red Canary Song. 2021. "I Want You to Care When People Are Still Alive." (podcast)

Pham, Minh-Ha T. 2020. "'How to Make a Mask': Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains." Feminist Stuides. 46(2): 316-26.

Putcha, Rumya S. 2021. "White Supremacy and the Wellness Industry, or, Why it Matters That This Happened at a 'Spa'." Society and Space.

Raval, PJ, Dir.. 2018. Call Her Ganda. (documentary film)

Sharma, Preeti. 2020. "Irresponsible State Care and the Virality of Nail Salons: Asian American Women's Service Work, Vulnerability, and Mutuality." Journal of Asian American Studies. 23(3): 491-509.

Week 10: Media Representations of Asian American Women
Discussion Questions:
1. What are the common patterns and tropes that have limited the way that Asian American women have been represented in mainstream American media?
2. How have media genres like science fiction, romance, and pornography shaped understandings of Asian American women?
3. How have Asian American women fought to recuperate and reinterpret problematic media images of their sexuality on their own terms?

Takasaki, Kara. 2020. "Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center: A Model of Collective Leadership and Community Advocacy." Journal of Asian American Studies. 23(3): 341-351.

Chan, Sucheng. 2010. "Asian American Struggles for Civil, Political, Economic, and Social Rights." In Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, edited by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas Chen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University press, pp. 213-238.

Omatsu, Glenn. 1994. "The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s." In The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan. Boston: South End Press, pp. 19-70.

Kuo, Rachel, Bianca Nozaki-Nasser and Turner Willman. 2020. "Online Formations: Asian American Digital Politics."

Lee, Grace, Dir. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. (documentary film)

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Syllabus PDF Available Here On March 16, 2021, eight people were killed at Atlanta-area spa businesses - six of whom were Asian women. Despite the fact that two of the women were Chinese and four were Korean, news media were quick to deny racist motivations. Worse yet, an official spokesperson for the sheriff's office investigating...

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A Model Minority? The Misrepresentation and Underrepresentation of Asian Pacific Americans in Introductory American Government Textbooks

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Asian American and PacificIslander Contributions

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Asian American and PacificIslander Contributions

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Chen, Emy Madeline. "Asian American and Pacific
Islander Contributions."

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Education Resources | Yuri Education Project | United States

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Yuri is an Asian American education project, providing curriculum and resources to tell Asian American stories in the classroom.

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AAJA commends The New York Times’ Decision to Drop the Hyphen in “Asian American”

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AAJA commends The New York Times’ Decision to Drop the Hyphen in “Asian American”

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Xiao, Jessica. (2021 June 11). "AAJA commends The New York Times’ Decision to Drop the Hyphen in 'Asian American.'"

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The Asian American Journalists Association is heartened that The New York Times has dropped the hyphen in "Asian American," and we look forward to more newsrooms following suit.

We also commend the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) for their efforts to un-hyphenate "Asian American" in media publications. The New York Times' change in style follows a letter ("Words Matter: Asian American No Hyphen," see an excerpt here) initiated and prepared by Shirley Hune, former AAAS president, and sent to Times' leadership from the current and past presidents of AAAS.

"We are especially grateful for the work of our longtime member and current National Board member, Henry Fuhrmann, who advised AAAS's effort after they reached out to AAJA for support in April 2021, and to AAJA's Catalyst alumna Karen Yin, the founder of Conscious Style Guide," says Naomi Tacuyan Underwood, the Executive Director of AAJA.

Fuhrmann's January 2018 piece " " for the Conscious Style Guide has been credited by the Associated Press Style Guide and BuzzFeed Style Guide as impetus for removal of the hyphen in their own guides. In an internal memo about the change, The New York Times references the Associated Press Style Guide's 2019 removal of the hyphen.

As Fuhrmann wrote in 2018:

...[T]o many of us in the trade and, more to the point, many of the people we write about, those hyphens serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure, but also something not American. " Hyphenated Americans " is one derogatory result of such usage.

A longtime leader of AAJA, Fuhrmann also serves on the board of ACES: The Society for Editing. Fuhrmann worked at the Los Angeles Times from 1990 to 2015 and for seven years served as standards editor and led the copy desks.

In AAJA's guide "Covering Asia and Asian Americans," which is currently undergoing updates, we advocate for an unhyphenated usage of Asian American:

Form the noun without the hyphen, as in "French Canadian." In compound phrases, where the term is used as an adjective, a hyphen may be used, as in "French-Canadian folklore." So, too, with Japanese American and Pakistani American. A few Asian Americans see a pejorative connotation to "Asian-American" with a hyphen, in part because of Theodore Roosevelt's denunciation early in the 20th century of "hyphenated Americans" who do not join the American mainstream.

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AAJA commends The New York Times' Decision to Drop the Hyphen in "Asian American", Asian American Journalists Association

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The Asian American Journalists Association is heartened that The New York Times has dropped the hyphen in "Asian American," and we look forward to more newsrooms following suit. We also commend the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) for their efforts to un-hyphenate "Asian American" in media publications.

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Rise in Asian American Discrimination and Violence During COVID Is Causing Mental Health Crisis

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Rise in Asian American Discrimination and Violence During COVID Is Causing Mental Health Crisis

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Kumar, Naveen. "Rise in Asian American Discrimination and Violence During COVID Is Causing Mental Health Crisis." Healthline. April 27, 2021.

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A recent surge in violent attacks against Asian Americans has captured the nation's attention. In addition to the mass shooting in Atlanta that claimed eight lives, including six women of Asian descent, assaults on Asian Americans have continued to rise at an alarming rate.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans in major U.S. cities skyrocketed by nearly 150% in 2020, even as overall hate crimes dropped, according to a recent report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

That figure may seem surprising to those who haven't previously considered Asian Americans as a particular target for racism over other minority groups.

But discrimination and violence against Asian Americans has been foundational to the population's history in the United States.

America's legacy of exploiting Asian immigrant labor at home while pursuing imperial interventions in Asia has resulted in damaging stereotypes and the violent subjugation of Asian Americans.

Asian Americans who've been trying to call attention to racist attitudes since before the COVID-19 pandemic have often experienced gaslighting from those who glossed over their concerns. For other Asian Americans, the recent spate of attacks has served as a rude awakening that their belonging is more tenuous than once believed.

For some, like me, it may be a combination of both. As a first-generation Asian American born to Indian parents, I feel horrified if slightly removed from recent attacks primarily targeting people of East Asian descent.

Still, when I called out the xenophobia of punch lines at the expense of Asian Americans just before the pandemic hit last year, it felt like I was crying wolf.

Whether Asian Americans foresaw the recent rise in hate crimes or not, the mental health impacts, including heightened rates of anxiety, have been severe.

Asian Americans face particular barriers to accessing appropriate mental healthcare.

This is due partly to reticence when it comes to talking about mental health in many Asian cultures and partly to a lack of competency among mental health professionals to address the specific needs of Asian Americans.

Understanding the historical context for recent anti-Asian discrimination and violence - and its mental health impacts on the community - are essential to paving a path forward.

The first significant wave of Asian immigration to the United States began with Chinese laborers coming to the West Coast during the 1850s Gold Rush. Valued as a cheap workforce, they were also subject to mob attacks.

"The double helix of the Asian American story is the United States wanting Asians to perform labor for the sake of society while ensuring that Asians remain vulnerable to violence and even death," said James Kyung-Jin Lee, associate professor of Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine.

A similar pattern of labor exploitation and racist violence characterizes the next century-plus of Asian immigration to the United States.

"The recent spate of anti-Asian sentiment and violence is not at all surprising if you take these incidents in the broader context," Lee said.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited immigration from China through the mid-20th century, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, for example, enacted anti-Asian sentiment on a federal level.

But regular attacks have also occurred on an individual scale all along. Among the most infamous is the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American falsely taken for Japanese and beaten to death by men who decried him for stealing American jobs.

America's history of military intervention in Asia, including World War II in Japan and the Vietnam War, has also been integral to how Asian bodies are considered in the American public imagination.

The slaughter of opposing troops and sexual conquest of local women impressed upon generations of American soldiers the perception of Asian men as weak or feminine and Asian women as subservient sexual objects.

The Atlanta killings "speak to a longer history of the ways that Asian women's bodies have been subject to both the desire and the violence of white men" through American wars in Asia, Lee said.

Despite a clear history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States, many Asian Americans have often felt their grievances overlooked.

"There is this feeling among a lot of Asian Americans of, I feel like I've been screaming into an abyss," said Helen H. Hsu, PsyD, former president of the Asian American Psychological Association.

Media representation of Asian Americans has expanded in recent years, with movies like "Crazy Rich Asians" doing big box office, and "Minari" garnering multiple Oscar nominations.

But the persistence of damaging stereotypes about Asian Americans in pop culture signals that anti-Asian racism has not been taken as seriously as racism toward other racial ethnic groups.

That's due in part to the model minority narrative, which casts Asian Americans as a high achieving and "safe" racial group, while setting them in contrast to negative stereotypes about Black and Latinx people.

Not only does the model minority myth minimize wealth disparity among Asian Americans, which is growing more rapidly than among any other racial group in the United States, it's also "a very shallow veneer," Lee said, underneath which lies "persistent, ugly, anti-Asian sentiment."

While Asian Americans have higher levels of integration into predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, any sense of assimilation isn't guaranteed, Lee said.

"Even if you enjoy some measure of wealth or status, your feeling of belonging is always precarious," he said, especially as an immigrant. Subsequent generations also have to contend with being seen as perpetually foreign, even when America is the only country they know.

Many Asian Americans, including the historians and mental health professionals quoted in this story, anticipated the spike in anti-Asian discrimination and violence that has coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and was exacerbated by callous, xenophobic messaging from the former Trump administration.

The result has been a burgeoning mental health crisis among Asian Americans.

Stop Asian Hate community rally in San Jose, March 2021. Photo by Jason Leung.

For a lot of American-born Asian Americans in particular, "there is a real rage" and shock over recent events, Hsu said, compared with those who were more accustomed to expect harassment or bias.

Some Asian Americans are even learning about America's history of violence against the community for the first time. While the facts are distressing in themselves, recognizing the history of anti-Asian violence can lessen the burden on individual mental health.

"Understanding the context takes away some of the shame or blame that can come up when people feel targeted," Hsu said. Instead of considering one's emotional response to racism as an individual mental health problem, looking at the larger picture helps people recognize the issue as systemic rather than personal.

Asian Americans are often less equipped to talk honestly about facing discrimination or harassment.

Hsu noted that Black families tend to be more accustomed to talking with their kids about racism, a custom colloquially known as "the talk" among African Americans and race scholars.

But, Hsu said, for many Asian Americans, "Our families rarely gave us the language to process this. I've heard a lot of Asian patients say things like, 'Well, my family said to work hard and stay quiet, then everything will be fine.'"

Stigma toward seeking mental healthcare, or even expressing emotions, is significant among Asian American cultures, Hsu said. Asian Americans are three times less likely to seek mental healthcare than white Americans, according to data collected in 2012 from the National Latino and Asian American Study.

A lack of cultural competency among mental health professionals in addressing issues specific to Asian Americans is also a big challenge.

"You don't have to be Asian or even a person of color" to be a culturally sensitive therapist, Hsu said. "However, very few therapists actually have this training - and I've heard countless stories of them actually doing harm and committing microaggressions in session."

While major health boards, including the American Psychological Association, have made diversity value statements, "translating that into action is a whole other reality," Hsu said.

Asian American therapists can play an especially vital role in creating space and understanding for those feeling the weight of current events.

"We are in a collective grief and trauma state right now," said Joy Lieberthal Rho, LCSW, a practicing clinician in New York City who is Korean American. "The best thing I can do for my clients is to sit with that and hold it."

Rushing through that grieving process might suggest there's an easy solution. "We really do need to learn this is going to be a very long process," Rho said, adding that conversations sparked by recent unfortunate events have been encouraging.

People have also found comfort in the solidarity of direct action, at rallies and other events calling for awareness and justice. But staying in tune with your own emotional needs is important, too. And for some Asian Americans, that may mean taking a step back.

"The work will always be there," Hsu said. "If somebody needs some time for rest and self-care and to turn off the news for a bit, that's OK."

Bystander training, in which allies learn how to respond in case of witnessing harassment or worse, is one form of direct action to take.

Lindsey Boylan, a progressive candidate for Manhattan borough president, called on New Yorkers to receive training this spring, in the wake of a broad daylight attack on a 65-year-old Filipino immigrant that shook the city. Boylan pointed to the organization Hollaback!, which offers free training sessions regularly.

In relationships with Asian American friends and loved ones, it's important for allies to emphasize listening over talking, Rho said. Taking the initiative to educate themselves, rather than expecting Asian American friends to lay groundwork for them, is also key to being a supportive ally.

"Be somebody who expresses concern but doesn't demand emotional labor," Hsu said.

Donating to organizations committed to supporting Asian Americans is another way to step in and help.

GoFundMe has created Support the AAPI Community Fund as an umbrella resource that's distributed across a range of local organizations. The site hosts individual fundraisers for many different AAPI-focused advocacy groups, as well.

Advocates and organizers have also called on people to support Asian American-owned businesses, which have been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic due in part to xenophobia.

Ultimately, there's hope and historical precedent for coalition building among different minority groups in demanding social justice. With outcry over anti-Asian hate rising up concurrently with the Black Lives Matter movement, there's a powerful momentum to keep pushing for more conversation and substantive change.

"As much as possible, we need to not let the story fade into the background," Lee said. "We need to pay attention and help each other."

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Asian Americans Are Facing a Mental Health Crisis From Recent Attacks

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A recent surge in violent attacks against Asian Americans has captured the nation's attention. In addition to the mass shooting in Atlanta that claimed eight lives, including six women of Asian descent, assaults on Asian Americans have continued to rise at an alarming rate. Hate crimes against Asian Americans in major U.S.

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“AAPI - Asian American & Pacific Islander.” History Comics and Comics in Education.

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AAPI - Asian American & Pacific Islander

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AAPI - Asian American & Pacific Islander — History Comics and comics in education

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I hate to even post this as I always post everything I do for free. I don’t want to put a paywall between this work and teachers who are already underpaid. Resources - like buying books, paying for my website, blog, etc. - gets expensive when funds are tight. If you use my resources and would like t…

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Teach Your Kids to Resist Hatred Toward Asians

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Teach Your Kids to Resist Hatred Toward Asians

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Lee, Michelle. “Teach Your Kids to Resist Hatred Toward Asians.” The New York Times, April 24, 2021.

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After a year with a marked increase indiscrimination and harassment aimed at Asian-Americans across the country, the past few months have been particularly shocking, in both the frequency and violence ofattacks.

A powerful way to fight racism is education. Conversations about prejudice with your children starting at a young age go a long way toward building empathy and acceptance, and books can be a great tool for sendingimportant messages. Thislist of 10 fiction, nonfiction and comic books will help kids of all backgrounds understand and combat this wave of anti-Asian hate and bullying, and provide more context to America's history of discrimination.

In this science-fiction story inspired by her family, the teenage Kiku Hughes time-travels to the 1940s and finds herself trapped in the same World War II internment camp as her grandmother. There, Kiku gets a life-altering history lesson. Ages 12 and up.
"Superman Smashes the Klan," by Gene Luen Yang, art by Gurihiru
Based on a 1946 Superman radio series, two Metropolis teenagers experience racism and attacks from the Ku Klux Klan when their family moves from Chinatown to the suburbs. Ages 12 and up.

Boy Scout summer camp is fraught with anxiety for the teenager Aiden Navarro when he is bullied for his Filipino heritage, while questioning his religion and sexuality. This graphic novel is a moving story about self-discovery and survival. Ages 14 and up.

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Teach Your Kids to Resist Hatred Toward Asians

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After a year with a marked increase indiscrimination and harassment aimed at Asian-Americans across the country, the past few months have been particularly shocking, in both the frequency and violence ofattacks. A powerful way to fight racism is education.

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Asian American Books for Middle and High School Students

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Asian American Books for Middle and High School Students

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MS/HS Student Book List

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Young Adult book about Vincent Chin and how his murder galvanized the Asian American movement

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Young Adult book about Vincent Chin and how his murder galvanized the Asian American movement

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New YA book details how Vincent Chin’s killing galvanized Asian American activism

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“From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry” by Paula Yoo details the 1982 killing and the way it changed how a generation of Asian Americans saw themselves.

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"Third World Liberation Front." UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender.

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2015 Panel reflecting on film, On Strike: 1969-1999, and the twLF movement:

On Saturday, November 21st 2015, UC Berkeley hosted activists, scholars, students and faculty to honor those involved in the Third World Liberation Front (twLF) strikes of the late 1960s at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley.

The Third World Multiracial Solidarity and Community Engagement Conference was organized by UCB Students from Ethnic Studies 41AC and Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies 20AC under the leadership of Prof. Harvey Dong and Prof. Emeritus Carlos Muñoz.

The Center for Race & Gender screened the film, On Strike: Ethnic Studies 1999, and led a panel discussion focusing on the second wave of twLF students from 1999. The panel discussion featuring students, faculty observers and former 1999 twLF strikers followed the film screening.

Invited panelists, Ziza Delgado (UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies), Prof. Roberto Hernandez (San Diego State University), Prof. Priya Kandaswamy (Mills College), Prof. Sara Clarke Kaplan (UC San Diego), Prof. Jeff Romm (Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley) and distinguished moderator, Prof. Paola Bacchetta (Gender and Womens Studies, UC Berkeley) discussed the importance of CRG as it has grown and evolved over the years to become a community hub committed to community-engaged research and the critical study of race, gender and sexuality at Cal. The panel discussion was especially valuable in light of recent events centering on the proposed restructuring of the CRG and the discussion and breakout sessions were an opportunity to clarify, inform and constructively brainstorm alternative solutions for the CRG's future.

Catalyzing Knowledge in Dangerous Times was a major conference organized by the Center for Race & Gender on April 14, 2011, marking CRG's 10th anniversary. It explored the ways in which knowledge is politicized, embodied, and imagined within a volatile political climate that targets education as a racialized and gendered battleground for defining legitimacy, visibility, and access.
The three videos below feature panels directly addressing issues related to the twLF:
From 1969 to the Present: A Brief History Outlining the Critical Role of Women of Color in the Struggle for Ethnic Studies Ziza Delgado, UC Berkeley

Ethnic Studies at Forty: Scholarship, Art, and Activism in the Formation of a Transdisciplinary Field Prof. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, UC Berkeley/Rutgers University

Staging Hunger, Embodying Pain: Some Queer Thoughts on Campus Organizing Prof. Sara Kaplan, UC San Diego

Decolonizing the University: Fulfilling the Dream of the Third World College
On February 26th and 27th, 2010, a gathering of activists, artists and scholars commemorated the 40th anniversary of Ethnic Studies by coming together at the University of California at Berkeley to renew and revisit the idea of the Third World College and of decolonizing the university.

Viewed by participants as both a celebration and a space for urgent work, the conference emphasized how the university can and should become a more welcoming space to people of color as well as an important institution that forges the desegregation and decolonization of society and knowledge at large.

The first day of the conference sought to emulate a version of a Third World College through a combination of teach-ins, dialogue, panels, performances, film screenings, and workshops. The second day of the conference aimed at having in-depth discussions about the ways in which a Third World College is necessary and possible at every college/university, what the near and long-term future of Ethnic Studies could look like, and why decolonizing the university as a social justice movement is particularly urgent now.

On Strike: Ethnic Studies 1969-1999 from Peek Media on Vimeo.

On Strike: Ethnic Studies 1969-1999 makes an encapsulated, incisive study of the context and events that led up to the Ethnic Studies demonstrations, hunger strikes, and student arrests that surprisingly roiled the UC Berkeley campus in May 1999. Opening with a quick historical study of the struggle that established Ethnic Studies in the late sixties, this record of modern-day activism soon moves into the urgent present-time, detailing the nineties' twLF (Third World Liberation Front) movement and their pitched battle against the university administration.

Directed by: Irum Shiekh

Runtime: 35 minutes

Release year: 1999
facebook.com/onstrike
DVD available through Progressive Films

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2015 Panel reflecting on film, On Strike: 1969-1999, and the twLF movement: On Saturday, November 21st 2015, UC Berkeley hosted activists, scholars, students and faculty to honor those involved in the Third World Liberation Front (twLF) strikes of the late 1960s at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley.

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Dear Asian Youth,

We are a group of Asian youths striving to uplift marginalized communities through education, activism, and celebration.

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The OSU Asian American Studies Resources compiled by Martin Joseph Ponce

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The OSU Asian American Studies Resources compiled by Martin Joseph Ponce

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The Atlanta area killings of Hyun Jung Grant (51), Paul Andre Michels (54), Xiaojie Tan (49), Delaina Ashley Yaun (33), Yong Ae Yue (63), and three other Asian American women on March 16, 2021, have thrust the question of anti-Asian racism into the spotlight in a way that the nearly four thousand incidents of verbal and online harassment, shunning (social avoidance), discrimination in the workplace and public spaces, and physical assaults reported to the Stop AAPI Hate website over the past year and disproportionately perpetrated against women did not and perhaps could not. In a country that clings so dearly to the "model minority" myth that it cannot imagine Asian Americans experiencing systemic and pervasive racial discrimination, is this kind of horrific violence what it takes to begin to recognize that anti-Asian racism in the United States-intersectionally mediated through gender, class, and other social differences-is not an open question, or a temporary aberration, but an ongoing condition? And if so, what will it take to contextualize and address this situation?

To say that anti-Asian racism is a structural condition is to complicate the well-meaning, but misleading, framing of the problem as "anti-Asian hate." After a year of hearing (finally) anti-Black racism publicly discussed in structural and institutional terms-that is, as a legacy of slavery and segregation manifested in lethal policing, racialized incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, housing and health care disparities, the school to prison pipeline, etc.-it is jarringly problematic to hear anti-Asian racism reduced to "hate." Hate talk individualizes the problem, places it within the domain of racial feelings, and implies that all that's needed to remedy anti-Asian racism is a change of heart. Don't hate us, be kind to us.

It has been heartening to me, therefore, to see so many of my Asian American studies colleagues and so many Asian American public intellectuals, artists, and activists from around the country drawing on the field's vast interdisciplinary knowledge to situate the tragedy not only within the year-long spike in anti-Asian racism since the onset of the pandemic and the insidious associations made between COVID-19 and "China" by the former president and a multitude of other professional xenophobic scapegoatists, but within a centuries-long history of Euro-American colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, and war that produced and depended on ideologies of racial difference and hierarchy. Those racialized systems of political, military, economic, and cultural domination in East, South, West, and Southeast Asia and their connections to U.S. contexts were and are mediated through exoticized notions of gender, sexuality, and kinship. Such orientalist projections of cultural difference are constituted by assigning gendered and sexualized attributes to racialized Asian bodies that mark them as deviant from the norm of white imperial patriarchal heteronormativity-and therefore colonizable, exploitable, consumable, and vulnerable to "elimination."

The Atlanta area shooting shows that while it may take a terribly violent event to propel anti-Asian racism into public consciousness, it also takes a great deal of effort to counter that event's singular spectacularization and to contextualize it within a much longer history and more complex set of dynamics. The resources that I'm assembling on this website attempt to acknowledge and document the immense time, energy, and labor that it takes (from so many of us) to historicize the present-both the interventions in public culture that are responding to this specific atrocity as well as the Asian American intellectual and activist histories which those responses draw on and contribute to.

Put more prosaically, writing for the digital public sphere means using the convention of the hyperlink to cite sources. Although I have seen some links to scholarly texts, most citations refer to non-academic news sites or public resources on the web-which is fine, of course, but inadvertently and inevitably obscures the wealth of knowledge that the field of Asian American studies has produced.

Put yet another way, several reading lists of Asian American literature and studies have, not surprisingly, appeared in the days following the shootings. Plenty of people have criticized the forms and functions of "the reading list" insofar as they are implicitly or explicitly addressed to external, uninformed audiences whose reading approach is then shaped by this need for insider information and affective righteousness (getting on "the right side of history"), which, in turn, can substitute for the daily grind of working toward social change. I, personally, have nothing against such reading recommendations since I don't advocate willful ignorance or pretend to predict where reading can lead. And I actually like and teach a lot of the books on those lists. Nonetheless, they are necessarily limited and tend to be tilted toward the canonical, the very contemporary, and/or the non-academic. So, consider this website an unabashed supplement of scholarly resources to the reading lists curated for the general public.

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Asian American Studies Resources | compiled by Martin Joseph Ponce

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In addition to the recent police killings of Daunte Wright (20) in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, on April 11, 2021, just miles away from the Derek Chauvin trial taking place in downtown Minneapolis, and Adam Toledo (13) in Chicago on March 29, 2021, and the release of body cam footage on April 15, 202…

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Stop AAPI Hate: A Resource Guide to Support the Asian-American Community

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Stop AAPI Hate: A Resource Guide to Support the Asian-American Community

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Special Features Stop AAPI Hate: A Resource Guide to Support the Asian-American Community

Starting steps on where to donate, organizations to support, and more.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began over a year ago, America has faced a troubling rise of attacks on people of Asian descent. President Joe Biden, in his first primetime address, called out the increase in crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, saying "it's wrong, it's un-American, and it must stop."

Supporting and protecting those within the community means taking action and standing up to those who racially attack or harass AAPI individuals. To help, you can choose to donate, support local business, educate yourself, patron AAPI theatres, and more. Below, you'll find a starter guide for suggested resources. While by no means comprehensive, this list is organic and will continue to grow and be updated as needed.

You can begin , with an overview of petitions to sign, places to donate, organizations to support, and more.

The AAPI Community Fund
This fund aims to amplify AAPI voices and find ways to uplift, empower, and protect the AAPI community. Donations will support organizations that support the AAPI community with initiatives such as increased community safety and support for those affected by violence. In addition, the fund has partnered with GoFundMe to create a landing page for a variety of AAPI support needs .

Asian Mental Health Collective
The mission of the Asian Mental Health Collective is to normalize and de-stigmatize mental health within the Asian community, making mental health easily available, approachable, and accessible. Through projects such as social media groups, resource libraries, and video web-series, the organization aims to not only provide mental health support but also facilitate the difficult conversations we need to have to move forward together.

National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association
The mission of the National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association is to promote the mental health and well-being of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. NAAPIMHA works to accomplish its goals of preventing suicide among youth, empowering mental health consumers, and pushing for access to high quality affordable mental health services for all by advocating for policy change, working with community-based organizations, training service providers, and developing developing mental health fact sheets in various languages.

Stop AAPI Hate
This reporting center tracks and responds to incidents of racism against AAPI individuals in the United States. Their aim is to serve as the leading aggregator of anti-Asian hate incidents, offer multilingual resources for impacted community members, provide technical assistance from rapid response to preventative measures, support community-based safety measures and restorative justice efforts, and advocate for local, state, and national policies that reinforces human rights and civil rights protections. Read their latest report, issued March 16, .

Welcome to Chinatown
A grassroots initiative to support NYC's Chinatown businesses and amplify community voices that generates much needed momentum to preserve the neighborhood. The group offers small business grants through The Longevity Fund, meals to essential workers and at-risk residents through The Sik Faan Fund, and even has a that highlights shops and restaurants in Chinatown. For more Welcome to Chinatown information, .

SUPPORT

Call Your Representatives
Read up on any current legislation that supports and protects the AAPI community, then call your local elected officials to ensure they are supporting the bill. If they're not yet, urge them to reconsider. If you're unable to reach them, you can look at their voting record on items like House Resolution 908, which denounced racism against Asians in America.

Protect Asian Americans
Groups like Compassion in Oakland are stepping up to accompany anyone who is nervous about walking alone. If you live in the Bay Area and want to volunteer, sign up . As an added layer of protection, all participants must show a negative test result for COVID-19. Compassion in Oakland is also starting to branch out, with applications open to start a group in your hometown. In addition, Hollaback! has begun offering virtual bystander intervention training to help allies develop the tools they need to respond to, stop, or de-escalate harassment faced by Asian Americans.

Report a Crime
Stop AAPI Hate's website lets visitors make a report of any racist or discriminatory incidents toward the Asian community. From March 19, 2020, to February 28, 2021, the organization has had 3,795 anti-Asian attacks reported. The organization hopes they can use this resource to demand and enact policies to stop the growing hate crimes towards the community.

LEARN

Check out this guide to responding to racism toward Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance project. Or, read this article from the Learning for Justice Center that explores the Model Minority Myth, which explores why racism and hate crimes against the Asian communities are overlooked.

Listen to The Los Angeles Times' Asian Enough? podcast, which dives into the identity and experience of Asian Americans. Each episode features a different guest, with Vice President Kamala Harris, Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, and Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu among those dropping by. Dear Asian Americans is another podcast for and by Asian Americans, focusing on authentic storytelling rooted in origin, identity, and legacy. Self Evident challenges the narratives of Asian Americans by sharing real and personal stories.

More of a visual learner? NBC Asian America has recently aired two programs that explore issues faced by the community today. "The Racism Virus" town hall focuses on the rise in hate crimes while Deported is a short documentary about a little-known crisis affecting Southeast Asian immigrants.
In addition, there are a number of theatre organizations focused on the AAPI experience that are worth checking out and supporting:
Asian American Performers Action Coalition
In 2011, a group of performers posed this question: "Where are all the Asian actors in mainstream New York theatre?" From there, AAPAC took on the responsibilities of organizing forums for the artistic community to discuss minority representation in New York theatre. Within a year, the group was working with theatres around the country to bring greater visibility to the lack of representation. Their most recent report explores the 2017-2018 season but the group has continued to do work with the Ghostlight Project during the pandemic.

East West Players
Founded in 1965, this Los Angeles-based theatre company creates open and inclusive spaces to raise the visibility of the Asian American experience with their productions, development programs, and youth education. They've premiered over 228 plays and musicals and over 1,000 readings and workshops. The works they produce advocate for multi-faceted representations of the Asian Pacific American experience in the performing arts.

Theater Mitu
While specifically focused on the South Asian experience, this NYC-based organizations is one of the biggest supporters of region's art. Over the last 15 years, the company has researched a wide variety of spiritual and performance traditions, including Kathakali, Mohiniattam, and Kalaripayattu in India, as well as Charya Nritya and Lakhe in Nepal. This creates a greater understanding to how cultural practices shape society, define the relationship between nature and the dramaturgy of urban planning, and narrate the history of artistic migrations across the continent.

Theater Mu
Using the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character for the shaman/artist/warrior who connects the heavens and the earth through the tree of life, this Minneapolis-based company focuses on giving voice to the Asian American community. The group offers a number of professional development programs as well as presenting thought-provoking works to mainstream audiences.

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Stop AAPI Hate: A Resource Guide to Support the Asian-American Community

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Special Features Stop AAPI Hate: A Resource Guide to Support the Asian-American Community Starting steps on where to donate, organizations to support, and more. Since the coronavirus pandemic began over a year ago, America has faced a troubling rise of attacks on people of Asian descent.

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List of Hmong Children’s Books: Board Books, Picture Books, Chapter Books and Graphic Novels

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List of Hmong Children’s Books: Board Books, Picture Books, Chapter Books and Graphic Novels

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List of Hmong Children's Books: Board Books, Picture Books, Chapter Books and Graphic Novels

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Last updated: October 13, 2021 Growing up as a Hmong-American girl in a mainly Caucasian community, it was difficult to find books (picture books, chapter books, novels, and graphic novels) featuring Hmong characters or experiences or books written or drawn by Hmong individuals. I always felt insecure about being Hmong and there were not enough...

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Are Your Kids Too Young to Talk About Race?

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Are Your Kids Too Young to Talk About Race?

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Food Literacy from the Ground Up

Good Reads & Good Eats. That’s what we’re about. Whether publishing, organizing events, or bookselling — we promote conversations about growing, cooking and eating food. Dig in.

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Readers to Eaters - Food literacy from the ground up. Book Publisher and Food Literacy events.

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Racial Justice Resources | Little Moments Count

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Racial Justice Resources | Little Moments Count

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it is important for parents and caretakers to learn about racial and social justice and becoming anti-racist

Little Moments Count is committed to helping parents understand how structural racism impacts us all and helping to provide resources that assist families on their path to greater racial and social justice.

Here is a list of key resources put together by racial justice experts across different fields to help you learn more as a person and as a parent.

watch

listen

act

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Racial Justice Resources | Littlemomentscount

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it is important for parents and caretakers to learn about racial and social justice and becoming anti-racist Little Moments Count is committed to helping parents understand how structural racism impacts us all and helping to provide resources that assist families on their path to greater racial and social justice.

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A Gut-Wrenching Illustration of the Asian American Experience

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A Gut-Wrenching Illustration of the Asian American Experience

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Liou, Caroline Ellen. "A Gut-Wrenching Illustration of the Asian American Experience." Hyperallergic. (April 6, 2021).

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LOS ANGELES - Gut-wrenching is the only word that can aptly describe , a solo exhibition of works by Ben Sakoguchi at Bel Ami. At the center of the exhibition is Sakoguchi's eponymous painting, an epic illustration of the Asian American experience spread across 15 panels. Each panel is a history lesson in miniature, ranging from the anti-Asian political propaganda accompanying the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the brutal murder of Vincent Chin 100 years later, in 1982, to the commonplace stereotypes of Asians today perpetuated by Hollywood, exemplified by famous comedians and athletes alike pulling the corners of their eyes into slits.

Ben Sakoguchi, "Chinatown" (2014), 15 panels, acrylic on canvas, wooden frames, 53 x 91 inches

These scenes circle around the centerpiece of the painting, a large panel commemorating the Chinese Massacre of 1871. Eighteen bodies in total, necks askew, hands tied behind their backs, feet dangling. Painted against a gradient sky, the figures seem so still it looks as if they were floating - until you notice the gruesome details of their lynching and you see that what seemed to be motionlessness is really the stillness of death. You can almost feel the weight of their bodies, beaten and limp, slowly spinning until the rope breaks. It's ugly. It's beyond ugly. As if to shield the viewer from fully witnessing the atrocity of these murders, Sakoguchi overlays a screen of decorative patterns that both displays and hides the bodies from sight.

Ben Sakoguchi, "Chinatown" (2014) (panel detail)

Ben Sakoguchi, "Chinatown" (2014) (panel detail)

"Chinatown" (2014) is a showstopper. As horrific as the images are, the painting is rendered with such intricate detail and technical virtuosity that it can't help but pull the viewer in to marvel at its execution. The framing device of the red and gold patterns serves as an eloquent metaphor for the ways in which Asian Americans are caught in a lacquered cage - at once invisible and hyper-visible, praised and disparaged, flattened into a monolith and forced to find solidarity within it. It speaks to the perpetual conundrum of the Asian American condition, encapsulated by the very idea of "Chinatown." Originally a method of subversion, and more importantly survival, Chinatowns across the US were constructed as simulacrums of Asia in order to be considered more palatable to Americans. However, the selfsame structure doubles as a trap of self-exotification that ultimately constrains the Asian American community.

The motif of the frame is repeated in the scenes of everyday racism that border the lynching, underlining the connection between the two. It's as if these "innocuous" symbols of racism - the Fu Manchu caricatures, the pulled eyes, the bad driving - are circling around the central image in a veiled threat, reminding the viewer of the very real possibility of violence at the core underlying it all.

Ben Sakoguchi, "Chinatown" (2014) (panel detail)

As an Asian American myself, it was nothing short of painful for me to look at "Chinatown" - the mockery, the things that mark me as other, the anti-Asian brutality that has always existed throughout American history. I can't imagine how it must have felt to paint it. And Sakoguchi does so with such care and such attention to detail that it becomes, in some ways, an object of beauty as well. What must it be like to spend so much time with these images and render them into art? "It's hurtful," Sakoguchi has said in an interview. "And you can't explain that pain ... So you do it ... you do it the only way you have a comedian can do with a joke. I can do it with pictures."

Ben Sakoguchi: Chinatown continues at Bel Ami (709 N Hill St, Chinatown, Los Angeles) through April 24.

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A Gut-Wrenching Illustration of the Asian American Experience

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LOS ANGELES - Gut-wrenching is the only word that can aptly describe , a solo exhibition of works by Ben Sakoguchi at Bel Ami. At the center of the exhibition is Sakoguchi's eponymous painting, an epic illustration of the Asian American experience spread across 15 panels.

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V. T. Bidania Author Q&A | St. Paul Public Library Read Brave

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V. T. Bidania Author Q&A | St. Paul Public Library Read Brave

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Learn more about the author of "Astrid and Apollo's Starry Campout"!

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Yes! I had a stuffed toy monkey that I took everywhere.

I felt braver and safer with it!

I got this as a gift from our sponsor when we first came to the U.S.

My parents kept it as a souvenir so after all these years, we still have it!

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Read Brave Saint Paul 2021: Kids: V.T. Bidania Author Q & A

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Yes! I had a stuffed toy monkey that I took everywhere. I felt braver and safer with it! I got this as a gift from our sponsor when we first came to the U.S. My parents kept it as a souvenir so after all these years, we still have it!

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"We Need Diverse Books™ is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and a grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people."

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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, WNDB aims to create a world where every reader can find themselves in the pages of a book. To reach this goal, we've created programs to mentor diverse writers and illustrators, support diverse publishing professionals, and provide books to classrooms nationwide.

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White People Keep Apologizing To Me And It’s Exhausting

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White People Keep Apologizing To Me And It’s Exhausting

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Hoang, Julie. "White People Keep Apologizing To Me And It’s Exhausting." Huffington Post. (April 14, 2021).

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You're probably aware that the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has been experiencing a surge in horrific hate crimes. In this environment, a lot of well-meaning white folks are thinking about what they can do to help. As a result, many are taking to their phones and "checking in" on their AAPI "friends."

The week of the shootings in Atlanta, my phone lit up with a Facebook messenger notification. I opened the app, which was probably last updated in 2016, and saw a name I didn't recognize. There wasn't a profile picture either. "Definitely a bot," I thought. I was about to swipe the message into the trash can when I stopped. With a furrowed brow, I read:

"Hey, just wanted to let you know I'm holding space for you. Sorry the world is garbage. Let me know if you want to talk."

I had no idea who this was for 20 minutes. Eventually it dawned on me that it was somebody I went to college with many moons ago. We had only one class together, yet she thought that meant she was close enough to me to call me "Ling Ling," a stereotypical Asian name she selected randomly.

She was also insufferable whenever I happened to sit by a specific guy in our class, making jokes suggesting that I was in love with him (because he also happened to be Asian). She never seemed to say anything when I sat by one of the other 50 students in our lecture hall though.

Yes, people are terrible in college and they're capable of change, but I think she needed to acknowledge her treatment toward me before offering to "hold space" for me. And even then, that would have been putting the cart before the horse. I would have preferred that she led with, "I don't know if you remember me, but we went to school together."

It was jarring that she messaged me out of the blue, but acted like we were buddies, or that I would instantly know who she was ― sans profile picture and all. It felt like the same entitled attitude with which she used to call me "Ling Ling." I decided I didn't want to give her my time in the year 2021, so I put my phone away.

Later, it lit up with another notification. This time from Instagram. Without opening it, I saw a little preview of a direct message.

"I want to apologize for playing 'Asian or Old Person' in the car all those times. I know it made you uncomfortable, but that was never my intention. I'd love to know how you're doing in all this."

Just in case you didn't know, "Asian or Old Person" is a game that awful white people play in the car. When they see a bad driver, they try to guess if it's an Asian person or an old person. Double points if it's both. So that was a former roommate of mine.

She never seemed to ask herself, "Hmm, should I be playing 'Asian or Old Person' in the car with my Asian roommate who has told me to stop playing that before?" I didn't bother opening her DM. I thought it could wait.

I did screenshot the notification (because it was truly an insane opening line) and send it to my cousin. She called me immediately and we discussed the sudden flurry of "check-ins" and "apologies" we'd been getting.

She described how her company had sent out one of those "We stand in solidarity with the AAPI community" emails, but otherwise just went about its business as usual, interrupting all the women of color in meetings.

Some of her white colleagues did reach out and say that if she needed anything, to let them know. "What, like give me a ride to the airport?! I don't get it!" she told me in disbelief. "What I need from them is to stop dismissing me like I'm new and don't know what I'm doing. If that's too much to ask for, maybe they could just learn to spell my last name correctly."

After much needed catharsis, I hung up my phone and looked down at the screen. There was an Instagram notification from an hour ago.

"This message is no longer available because it was unsent by the sender."

My brows furrowed so hard I got a migraine. "She did WHAT?!" I shouted. My former roommate quite literally took back her apology. She must have thought I hadn't seen it. But I had the receipts! "Do I really wanna go there?" I asked myself.

I sent them to her and asked if she wanted to clarify why she unsent it.

Maybe she changed her mind and thought it was better not to open old wounds. Maybe she took it back because I didn't respond right away and she decided she had nothing to apologize for anymore. Maybe she was embarrassed. I'll never understand! Or maybe this backpedaling and silence kind of already tells me everything I need to know.

One thing I know for sure is that being checked in on or apologized to is new for me. I am much more used to being ignored and dismissed, but now suddenly I feel responsible for telling white people, "Don't worry, I know you're not one of white people." I don't know how I am supposed to respond honestly to all of this without sounding rude (I, too, wish not to upset people) and it is exhausting.

It's not enough to just say you're an ally. Your actions have to match your words too. If someone says "I'm here for you" after the same meeting where they didn't value our input, we're going to be very confused and suspicious. If someone acknowledges that their racist games made us uncomfortable, wants to apologize for it, but then takes back the apology ... of course we will think they are that white person!

White people must examine their apologies. They need to ask themselves if they're really sorry and want to do better, or if they just need a person of color to exonerate them for their racism so that they can go about their day guilt-free again. If it's the latter, sorry but you don't need to further damage the AAPI community by "checking in" on your Asian "friends."

If they're the former, and they really believe their apology is genuine and sincere, the hard part will be for them to understand that they are still not entitled to forgiveness.

Despite that, they must continue to use their privilege to hold their white friends accountable. If white people really want to help, they've got to do that on their own. Marginalized people are not here to take on the burden of getting white people up to speed, nor are they responsible for holding their hands and patting them on the back.

These check-ins and apologies are just another way for white people to center themselves in the conversation and make it about their own emotions. Ultimately, they need to take up less space, because this isn't about them.

Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we're looking for here and send us a pitch!

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White People Keep Apologizing To Me And It's Exhausting

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You're probably aware that the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has been experiencing a surge in horrific hate crimes. In this environment, a lot of well-meaning white folks are thinking about what they can do to help. As a result, many are taking to their phones and "checking in" on their AAPI "friends."

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024 // AAPI Child Psychiatrist Roundtable

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024 // AAPI Child Psychiatrist Roundtable

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Join Jang and her fellow AAPI child psychiatrists Annie Li, Eunice Yuen, and Yesie Yoon as they share their best tips and thoughts on how to be tackle current events with your children. Recorded on Clubhouse on March 31, 2021.

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Join Jang and her fellow AAPI child psychiatrists Annie Li, Eunice Yuen, and Yesie Yoon as they share their best tips and thoughts on how to be tackle current events with your children. Recorded on Clubhouse on March 31, 2021.

Join Jang and her fellow AAPI child psychiatrists Annie Li, Eunice Yuen, and Yesie Yoon as they share their best tips and thoughts on how to be tackle current events with your children. Recorded on Clubhouse on March 31, 2021.
Jang Cho, MD

Child and adolescent psychiatrist

Owner of private practice, Cultivate Psychiatry www.cultivatepsychiatry.com

Host of Korean American Parenting Podcast

Co-founder and Co-chair of Asian Caucus of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Annie S. Li, MD

Director, Children's Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program (C-CPEP)

NYC - Health and Hospital - Bellevue Hospital Center

Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone

Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Child Study Center

Eunice Yuen, MD PhD

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellow

Yale Child Study Center

Founder of CHATogether Program

Yesie Yoon MD, MS

Director of Quality Improvement

Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences

Montefiore Medical Center

The University Hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine

NBC News After attacks on Asian American elders, here's how to talk to your kids about racism against us

// Meet your co-hosts of the Korean American Parenting Podcast!

Dr. Jang Cho is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist. She received her medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine and completed her psychiatry residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York City and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Dr. Cho is passionate about treatment, education and advocacy for mental health of Asian Americans and has given talks in various seminars and conferences, both locally and nationally. She is a co-founder and a co-chair for Asian Caucus of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and a faculty member of the MGH Center for Cross-Cultural Student Emotional Wellness. During her down time, Dr. Cho enjoys living in rural Washington state and navigating the challenges of raising her bicultural young daughter. She is delighted to share her journey - both the joy and the tribulation- of motherhood with everyone through this podcast.

She is a mother to an amazing four-year old daughter and together with her husband reside in Washington state.

Connect with Jang:
Jerry Won is the Founder & CEO of Just Like Media, a podcast company dedicated to sharing Asian American stories. He is the host of Dear Asian Americans and is producer of The Janchi Show, MBAsians, and Asian Podcast Network. Jerry is also the head of Beyond the Resumes, a podcast and community platform bringing career and life advice for the global, modern professional. Prior to podcasts, Jerry was an account director and WeWork and Senior Strategy Consultant at Accenture, roles he worked after earning his MBA at Michigan Ross. Between undergrad at USC and Michigan, he spent 10 years working in sales and marketing roles in various industries. His passion is to share Asian American stories and to normalize talking about many of the things we weren't encouraged to do growing up.

He is father to a three-year old son and one-year old daughter and together his wife Kyung live in Southern California.

Connect with Jerry:
// Follow the Show!

Instagram: http://instagram.com/koreanamericanparenting

Facebook: http://facebook.com/koreanamericanparenting

Web: http://koreanamericanparenting.com

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024 // AAPI Child Psychiatrist Roundtable

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Join Jang and her fellow AAPI child psychiatrists Annie Li, Eunice Yuen, and Yesie Yoon as they share their best tips and thoughts on how to be tackle current events with your children. Recorded on Clubhouse on March 31, 2021.

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Asian American Education Project: Teacher Training Workshops

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Asian American Education Project: Teacher Training Workshops

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Free Professional Development Workshops

In this series of virtual workshops, the Asian American Education Project will be showcasing our curriculum on the Asian American Pacific Islander ("AAPI") experience. It is divided into themes to make it easier for educators to adapt the whole or part of the curriculum into their own practice. The workshop participants will:

Learn more about some of the content of each thematic unit

Learn how to navigate our website

Be able to apply our curriculum into their teaching practice

Our lesson plans are developed in partnership with UCLA Asian American Studies Center and PBS LearningMedia. The thematic unit was created by Waka Takahashi Brown, Curriculum Specialist, Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) with our lesson plans.

You may be eligible to receive one-hour credit for professional development / salary advancement. Please check with your school to determine if this is an option. To receive a certificate, please check the professional development / salary advancement certificate box when you register. A full hour of attendance and the completion of the Professional Development Reflection Form are required to receive the certificate.

Workshops have been approved by LAUSD for Professional Development Salary Point Advancement Credits
Workshops have been approved by NYC DOE for CTLE Professional Development Certificates

Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) histories should be taught all year long. But, they should be especially amplified in May, which is officially designated as APIDA Heritage Month. In this workshop, The Asian American Education Project will share best practices and activities to ensure your K-12 curricula is inclusive and appreciative of the APIDA experience. Celebrate the significant contributions of our APIDA communities and commit to racial justice.

What does it mean to be a U.S. citizen? What are the barriers to citizenship? Even today, AAPIs still face such barriers. A forgotten point is that there are Asian DREAMers. What barriers do they face? The Citizenship unit examines the social construct of race, and the definitions of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship and constitutional rights. The unit looks into the barriers AAPIs face in realizing citizenship. The workshop will explore the Citizenship unit.

Civil rights are not handed to us. They are fought for. The AAPI population is not an exception. Faced with adversities, the AAPI community has found ways to participate in the civil rights struggle. The Civil Rights unit covers Asian Americans' legal battles in school desegregation, the constitutional violations of Japanese Americans during WWII incarceration, the Filipino Americans' grape strike for workers' rights, the victimization of South Asian Americans in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. In the workshop we will take a look at the Civil Rights unit, diving into its history and achievements the AAPI community has accomplished and challenges they face.

It is never too early to educate students about history and current events. This workshop will focus on delivering our curriculum to elementary school students.

What does it mean to be American? The criteria for what defines an American have changed throughout history at the detriment to minority populations. The Identity unit examines the model minority myth and perpetual foreigner myth as forms of systemic racism against AAPIs. The unit also examines the social construct of race, and the definitions of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship and constitutional rights. This unit coves what it means to be loyal Americans, using WWII as a backdrop. This unit covers the rise of Asian Americans in public offices, in advancing equality for women and LGBTQ rights. This unit covers the importance of knowing your own history as key to knowing yourself and your identity. This workshop will explore the Identity unit and how AAPIs have been stereotyped and how they have found ways to forge their own identities in American society.

Immigration for certain groups of people is not always welcomed to the United States. Barriers are often placed to bar and restrict certain groups of people, even in the present. The Immigration unit covers the contribution of Chinese Transcontinental Railroad workers, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which gave way to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which led to Asian Americans to become the fastest growing population. This unit also covers the Southeast Asian refugees' migration in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Asian American DREAMers. The workshop will explore the Immigration unit, the desire for immigrants to come to the United States and the past and present challenges they face. This unit also explores some of the past and present immigration policies, the motivation behind the creation of these policies, and their impact.

Recent times have brought acts of anti-Asian racism and hate to the national spotlight. However, this is not something new, but rather something old. Over the course of U.S. history, AAPIs have been the targets of hate crimes and discrimination. The Racism unit covers how the Igorot people were used as human zoo in 1904 World's Fair, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese American incarceration into concentration camps in WWII, McCarthyism and racial profiling, the American war in Vietnam, the hate crime murder of Vincent Chin and Joseph Ileto, the 1992 L.A. civil unrest and the systemic racism against Black Americans, 9/11/2001 and the victimization of South Asian Americans. This unit also examines the social construct of race, and the definitions of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship and constitutional rights. The workshop will explore our Racism unit. We will dive deeper into how discrimination and microaggressions affect minority groups and what we can do to prevent further discrimination and hate crimes in our society.

Asian American Pacific Islanders ("AAPIs") have been historically scapegoated for calamities in the U.S. Once again AAPIs are scapegoated for the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic we have seen an exponential increase of hate and racist acts towards the Asian American Pacific Islander ("AAPI") community. In this workshop, we will go over lessons that can be taught to students to help them better understand these issues. In a 3-part unit plan, your students will be able to look at the current rise of anti-Asian racism as a result of the pandemic and a history prior to that. This unit will end on a positive note of community building in order to promote a more just and safe society.

Why AAPI Curriculum Matters: Bridging History and Anti-Asian Hate

The history of AAPIs is an integral part of American history. Yet it is often forgotten or ignored in the classroom and public discourse. The workshop will give an overview of AAPI history by introducing five thematic units: Citizenship, Civil Rights, Identity, Immigration and Racism. It also explores the contribution of AAPIs in labor activism, the fight for school integration and citizenship rights. The workshop will also briefly describe the model minority myth as a racial wedge, the perpetual foreigner stereotype as part of systemic racism, and the intersectionality of Asians, Blacks, and Latinx.

Workshop Registration or Inquiry
(Free of charge)
Please check your SPAM folder one or two days before the workshop if you do not receive an e-mail from us on registering for the workshop Zoom link.

K-12 Professional Development Workshop Partner Toolkit

Register here. @AAAJ_AAJC fiscal sponsor

Suggested Copy for Facebook and Instagram:

Join us to learn about how Asian immigrants have contributed and shaped the way the country is today since their arrival as far back as the 1800s. From labor activism to fighting for school integration and citizenship rights in the courts, and against model minority, perpetual foreigner stereotypes and anti-Asian hate, this one of the fastest-growing populations has faced adversity, and fought for opportunities to create roots here in the U.S.

Subject: Telling the AAPI Stories: Sign Up for Free K-12 Professional Development Workshops

Learn more about some of the content of each thematic unit

Learn how to navigate the website

Be able to apply the curriculum into their teaching practice

Join us to learn about how Asian immigrants have contributed and shaped the way the country is today since their arrival as far back as the 1800s. From labor activism to fighting for school integration and citizenship rights in the courts, and against model minority, perpetual foreigner stereotypes, Asian Americans - one of the fastest-growing populations - have faced adversity, and fought for opportunities to create roots here in the U.S.

Help us spread the word to provide a more inclusive curriculum to schools nationwide.

The lesson plans are developed in partnership with UCLA Asian American Studies Center. The thematic units were created by Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) with our lesson plans.

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Free Professional Development Workshops In this series of virtual workshops, the Asian American Education Project will be showcasing our curriculum on the Asian American Pacific Islander ("AAPI") experience. It is divided into themes to make it easier for educators to adapt the whole or part of the curriculum into their own practice.

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45+ books on South Asian History and Culture

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45+ books on South Asian History and Culture

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Bajaj, Monisha. “45+ books on South Asian History and Culture.” Kitaab World.

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Diversity in YA: Puttin' a little diversity in YA since 2011

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Diversity in YA: Puttin' a little diversity in YA since 2011

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For Queer Asian American Youth Who Are Resilient & Tenacious

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For Queer Asian American Youth Who Are Resilient & Tenacious

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Kha, Douha. "For Queer Asian American Youth Who Are Resilient & Tenacious." Asian American Policy Review. (February 2, 2020).

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BY DOUA KHA

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review.
Since queerness is still a taboo topic in the Asian American community, the marginalization and invisibility of both queer and Asian American identities in schools and in their community call for a third space where queer Asian American youth can be around young people who look like them, share their identities, and offer guidance. Introduction
Eve Tuck cautions that to only talk about tragedies in our community is harmful and paints an image that is damaged-centered and deficit oriented 1. Too often, the only times we see queer folks on any social media websites or in the news is when tragedy strikes: the mass murder of 49 folks (with an additional 58 others wounded) at the gay Orlando nightclub; the murder of 15-year Lawrence "Larry" King by a fellow classmate and rumored partner; the rape and murder of Brandon Teena after acquaintances found out he was born biologically female; Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old lesbian who was murdered after rejecting a man's advance; the list goes on. News media do not even investigate the many murders of Black transgender women, whose deaths often go unnoticed 2.

To be queer in this country is arduous, and despite a growing body of literature surrounding queer identities in recent years, these still often exclude voices of queer people of color 3 4 5, and the narratives of queer Asian Americans remains largely unexamined. 6 7 Even though Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing population in the United States, increasing by 46% between 2000 and 2010, faster than any other minoritized groups, 8 we only constitute 5.6% of U.S. population, just over 17 million people. 9 Thus, we are often overlooked and invisible when it comes to political discussion, media representation, educational research, and especially, queer discourse. 10 In a study conducted by the Williams Institute, an estimated 325,000 (2.8%) of all Asian adults that identify as LGBTQ live in the United States, the majority of whom reside in more "queer liberal" states such as California, Hawaii, and New York. 11 Nevertheless, there continues to be a lack of research regarding queer Asian American identities, and even less research pertaining to queer Asian American youth-their experiences navigating schools and tensions that erupt between queer discourse and the values that shape Asian American youth. 12 13

Schools have long been "site[s] of social reproduction and socialization," 14 and heteronormativity and whiteness dominate the main "social reproduction" that schools breed. In recent years, the growth of Gay Straight Alliances (GSA), an after-school club for queer high school students, has resulted in spaces where queer-identifying students can conglomerate for social or political purposes-to challenge dominant "social reproduction." 15 Yet, we continue to see a lack of diversity in these spaces too, with many students of color voicing their discontent and frustration at the lack of intersectionality when it comes to queer identity representation. 16 Teachers also do not engage with the topic through their curriculum, and many voiced not feeling comfortable and/or feeling unprepared to teach about queerness. Because schools are not providing a "brave" space for queer students to develop and affirm their queer identities, research has shown that many flock to online spaces to build communities. 1718

While utilizing digital spaces to affirm one's existence and meet folks who share similar identities is important, I argue that we can create such spaces outside of the internet through community-based organizations (CBOs). CBOs that work with youth have evolved from informal gatherings to non-profit organizations, with their own set of mission, vision, and targeted youth. There are a diverse range of focus, from fostering leadership and team building to providing workforce preparations, while others see themselves as supplements to traditional classroom and learning. 19 By utilizing a culturally relevant pedagogy, CBOs that target youth of color have been instrumental in providing a space where youth of color can learn about themselves, their history, and their cultures, which are too often excluded in dominant school curriculums. 2021 Doing so allow CBO staff to create partnerships with youth of color more effectively compared with traditional classroom teachers, whom many students feel marginalize minoritized identities. Since queerness is still a taboo topic in the Asian American community, 22 the marginalization and invisibility of both queer and Asian American identities in schools and in their community call for a third space where queer Asian American youth can be around young people who look like them, share their identities, and offer guidance.

To better understand the significance of why it is crucial to create spaces centering queer Asian American identities, we first have to analyze how they are position within the United States education system. In 2013, 15.1 million students were enrolled in urban U.S. public K-12 schools, 23 2.2 million of which identified as Asian American. 24 In 2016, Pizmony-Levy and Kosciw found that only 127,400 Asian American students identify as LGBT or queer; 25 therefore, while Asian American students represent a small population in our school system, queer Asian American students even less.

Additionally, scholars note how Asian American students are often "invisible" from teachers and support staffs because of their status as "model minorities." 26 The model minority trope first appeared in the publication in the 1966 piece by William Petersen in ​The New York Times Magazine​ called "Success Story: Japanese American Style." A similar article "Success of One Minority Group in U.S.," by a ​US News & World Report​ staff also followed the same year. Both highlighted the economic and social mobility Asian Americans have attained in the United States, and argued that their success is due to Asian cultural values prioritizing education. 272829 This bled into the education system, resulting in teachers and educational scholars to believe that Asian American students are not "underrepresented" or "disadvantaged." 30 Many teachers feel that Asian American students do not experience discriminations, both in their personal life and at school, and do not reach out to them to provide support in and outside of the classroom. 31 32

In the past few decades, scholars found that the marginalization of Asian American students resulted in the dismissal of Asian American disparities in education, exclusion from students of color programs and resources, barriers to college access and retention, and lack of support from teachers and schools, consequently marking them as "invisible." 33 They further argued that the assumption that Asian Americans have attained economic stability and social upward mobility created a lack of support for students who have been made invisible by the myth. This is especially heightened for Southeast Asian American students, many of whom were resettled in the United States as refugees and are predominately first generations immigrants. 34, 35, 36 However, within these studies about how the model minority trope affects Asian American students, most - if not all - of the participants were straight Asian American students.
Queer students (of color) at school
Conversations about queer students in school have predominantly revolved around their experiences with bullying in education. Queer youth experience some of the highest rates of bullying in school spaces: half of students who reported being bullied identified as queer, 37, 38 with many of these students enduring verbal harassment, physical abuse, and cyberbullying. 39 Even youth who are perceived to be queer (especially "effeminate" boys) by their peers are harassed by cisgender and heterosexual boys in an effort to police their masculinities. 40

Compared to students who identify as part of the queer community because of their sexual orientations (lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc.), transgender youth face the most hostile school climates because of their developing sexual identity and receiving gender identity. 41 Sadowski's research with transgender youth found that 40% of them were not allowed to use their preferred names and pronouns in schools, 60% were required to use restrooms inconsistent with their gender identity, and a third were prevented from wearing clothes that conform with their gender identities. 42 Queer students often avoid schools altogether to avoid harassment, resulting in lower grades and impacting college aspirations. Many students choose not to report bullies to school staff because they feel their schools have failed to intervene or that staff would either not respond or make it worse. 43 Additionally, many queer youth reported that adults also participate in or perpetuate bullying through the use of biased language, victim blaming, minimizing bullying as "kids will be kids," and/or outing "closet" students to their parents. 44 45

Yet, while queer youth experiences in schools are slowly gaining traction among scholars, queer ​Asian American students' experiences in schools have yet to emerge. Studies that does include queer Asian American students (and queer students of color in general) often contradict larger queer studies. In 2012, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) National School Climate Surveys reported that Black/African American and Asian/Pacific Islander LGBT students experienced lower levels of anti-LGBT victimization in school. 46 However, other scholars indicate that queer youth of color are more pathologized compared to their white counterparts and face more hostile environments from their peers and racial community, in and outside of school. Pritchard highlighted the difference between teachers' and media's treatment of bullied queer white youth and their treatment of bullied queer youth of color in the case of Lawrence "Larry" King. 47 King was a fifteen-year-old biracial gay male student who was shot to death by white male student Brandon McInerney, after King confessed his love for McInerney. Instead of framing King as a victim of a hate crime, the media instead blamed King for making McInerney and other students uncomfortable for his flamboyant personality. McCready also saw how the policing of masculinity is more visible and toxic among Black boys in urban schools, causing many queer Black boys to act more "straight" in attempt to fit in, maintain friendships, and avoid harassment. 48 Transgender Black youth also face more physical violence. 4950 Peers and family members also commonly enforce strict gender roles among Asian Americans. 51 Since many communities of color also view being "gay" synonymous with "acting white," 52 the close policing of gender roles and lack of support and representation in larger queer discourse might be a contributor to why many queer youth of color, including Asian American students, choose to not be "out."

To combat queerphobia in schools and among youth, the United States has seen the rise of Gay Straight Alliance (GSAs), an in- and after- school club where queer students come together to support one another. GSAs are often advised by a school staff, and they can range from social clubs to politically engaging spaces where queer youth can discuss policies and participate in protests. Bidell argues that in schools where GSAs are available, queer students reported feeling safer and a better sense of belonging, with an increase in attendance and involvement in the school's culture. 53 Students also spoke of seeing more staffs intervene if there is bullying and better advocacy in general in schools where GSA exists.

However, since lower resources are available in urban schools, queer youth of color face barriers accessing or even starting GSAs. 54 Even in urban schools where GSA exists, they often fail to recruit and retain queer youth of color by neglecting the unique experiences that queer youth of color encompass, which scholars describe as a "tricultural experience" because they face racism due to their race, sexism due to their gender identities, and queerphobia due to their sexual orientation. 55 56 In his research at a diverse high school with a GSA-similar club called Project 10, McCready found that although the school was racially and ethnically diverse, Project 10 comprised entirely of white, female students. 57 When he interviewed two gay Black boys and inquired why they did not attend Project 10, both were critical about how the club did not address intersectionality adequately in conversations around queer identities. Project 10's central focus, the two students observed, predominantly catered to queer white students' experiences, and the advisor for Project 10 admitted that they did not know how to properly address issues affecting queer students of color.

GSAs also create tensions with already established cultural beliefs that shape Asian American students, often forcing them to feel like they must choose between their Asian American identity or their queer identity when navigating these spaces. 58 In her work with Asian American youth in high school, Lee found that Asian American students felt the pressure to conform to the "model minority" stereotype, not only because they view education as the pathway to economic and social mobility, but also because of the obligations they feel to their family. 59 This is especially heightened for Southeast Asian (Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese) students whose parents brought them to the United States as refugees to escape war-torn Southeast Asia and to achieve the "American Dream." 60 Scholars describe this sense of obligation to one's family as "filial piety," which Lor 61 explains as the "Confucian ideology that places emphasis on [...] respect for the elderly, and subordination to the father and parental care," 62 thereby creating "a sense of duty" in Asian American students to "assist others and to take into account the needs and wishes of the family when making decisions." 63 In the hopes of giving back to their family for their sacrifices, Asian American students tend to focus exclusively on academics, limiting their participation in after school activities, such as GSAs, even if they identify as part of the community. 6465

Additionally, the concept of "coming out," the "declaration of one's sexual orientation," 66 that GSA in schools often create programming around (i.e. "National Coming Out Day" etc.) fail to incorporate differences in cultural values. In championing individualism, the "coming out" narrative contrasts with many Asian cultures that prioritize familial bonds, kinship, and community building. 67 In his research with gay Hmong men, Thao noticed that while his participants believe in the concept, most of them did ​ not want to sever ties with their families like other queer folks because family is their support system. 68 In wanting to support their families after completing school, they often renegotiate the concept of "coming out," with many acknowledging that they are not always "out" completely. Instead, they are "out" in certain spaces and with certain folks (such as friends, school, or immediate family members) while "in" in others (such as extended relatives). 69 Language barriers also hinder many Asian American youth from coming out to their parents because vocabulary such as "transgender," "pansexual," etc., are not always possible to interpret into their native languages. 70 Often feeling entrapped by the debt that they "owe" their parents, 71 queer Asian American youth are constrained in navigating and negotiating between their families and their recognition of self.

In response, queer youth of color have rise to serve as catalyst for change and inclusion. Hoping to diversify her classroom's book collection, Justine, a middle-class, lesbian, African American student at an urban magnet high school, brought a lesbian love poem from the queer youth center she frequently engaged with and photos from a lesbian history book of her own to school as part of a class project. 72 Additionally, at an all-girls public charter middle- and high school in Chicago, queer girls of color started a GSA to challenge the notion that it was only for white girls. This received backlash from parents, who claimed it was immoral for young girls to associate themselves with sexual orientations. Although the GSA was eventually dismantled (though reinstated in recent years), the girls continued to be vocal about their two identities. 73 Similarly, transgender youth of color at a high school were at the forefront of advocating for trans-positive policy in their school. 74

Teachers' resistance to teaching about queer identities
Within the classroom, teachers are resistant to incorporating LGBT topics in the curriculum, 75 and many pre-service teachers admit to feeling underprepared to address race and sexual orientation (both separately and as intersections), whether in general or through the curriculum. 7677 While efforts have come from teachers to incorporate LGBT literatures, these continue to only be about white queer experiences and ignores queer students of color. 7879

Because English/Language Arts (ELA) classrooms often lend itself easier to engaging with the topic since they can incorporate texts that contain queer characters and/or is LGBT-themed, most studies have been about ELA teachers' perspectives on whether or not one should teach about LGBT in the classroom. 80 When surveying 21 pre-service English teachers from Kennesaw State University's undergraduate and Master's programs in English Education and 51 middle and high school English teachers in suburban school districts near Atlanta, Mason found that 56% stated that teaching young adult literature with LGBT characters does not belong in the classroom. 81 These teachers argued that discussing LGBT issues was not a part of their job 82 while others expressed that while they were willing to combat homophobic slurs in the hallways or call out students who are being hostile to another, they will not engage with it through the curriculum. 83 Some felt teaching about LGBT is synonymous with teaching about sex, 8485 and therefore, not appropriate for school in general.

They found similar results with 20 students enrolled in an online course for language arts teachers who taught at a variety of grade levels and who were enrolled from relatively diverse geographic regions both within and outside of the university's home state. 86 They, too, felt teaching about LGBT equated to sex and argued that it would be more appropriate in a Health class instead of ELA. 87 The belief that LGBT equates to sex, despite many books with LGBT character not involving sex, creates a sense of discomfort for teachers, who feel sex is an adult topic and should not be introduced to students in school. Other ELA teachers have expressed that students should not be making discoveries about their sexual orientations in schools, and feared that if they provided LGBT-themed texts, it would influence students' sexual orientation. 88 Some felt the topic would force students to perceive homosexuality as better than heterosexuality, and felt this is just as detrimental, 89 believing that it was "not fair" to heterosexual students to explicitly provide LGBT-themed texts when they did not provide explicit heterosexual texts. 90 There is also the belief that they are bringing in their own agenda into the classroom and would therefore indoctrinate students whose families see homosexuality as against their religion. 9192 When asked why a teacher did not incorporate LGBT-themed books into the curriculum or made it available on bookshelves within the classroom, one teacher stated "[i]f a gay student needs books with this theme, they may speak with the media specialist." 93 The concerns over backlash from parents, other teachers, and the school district is a recurring concern. 94 Mason found that ELA teachers who utilized texts that focus on race and racism in the past have received backlash, and felt the same will be similar if they introduced LGBT-themed books. 95 To avoid generating controversies, they instead avoid the topic. Another study found that despite wanting to teach about LGBT issues, some teachers felt unprepared to do so since their teacher education program (TEP) never discussed it with them. 96

There are, however, some ELA teachers who choose to incorporate LGBT-themed texts into their classroom, arguing that LGBT issues is not controversial. One teacher stated that "one of the reasons that we have this cultural idea that this is a controversial topic is because we only talk about it when we have to, instead of talking about it just like we talk about all sorts of other things with our students-about people who don't look like or live like or learn like others who are more familiar to us." 97 Teachers who utilize LGBT-themed texts in the classroom believe that it is their "civic duty to help their students become critically aware and informed citizens." 98 Not only will students be exposed to different and sometimes unknown topics, but they can pose questions if perplexed and challenge their own assumptions about other groups in order to learn more. 99 They also felt their students were more mature than parents and administrative staffs often give students credit for. 100 By introducing diverse topics through literature, teachers also felt students can become more empathetic to others and be responsible for their classmates to create a safe space for one another. 101 Since "the creation of a child's prejudicial attitudes usually occurs during a child's early" years, introducing the topic early can minimize prejudicial bias later in life. 102 Teachers believed that by having LGBT-themed texts available for students to read and as part of the curriculum, it can foster tolerance and combat homophobia in and outside of the classroom 103 by introducing to them how discriminations still exist. 104 Additionally, using texts will challenge the perceived notion of LGBT characters as "others" by centering their narratives. 105 Some ELA teachers employed literatures as a gateway to paralleling and bringing real-world issues into the classroom, 106 explaining that by employing multiple perspectives about LGBT, students get to understand that those who are part of the community are also just as human and diverse as heterosexual folks. 107

Due to the lack of support in schools and conversations from teachers, queer students tend to seek support in online spaces to build communities, learn more about themselves, and to socialize with others who share their identities. 108,109 While predominantly white queer youth see GSAs as a safe and supportive physical space to socialize and mobilize, many queer students of color opt for community-based organizations (CBOs). They feel that these organizations and the adults within them better address the intersectionalities they experience. 110 Parents of color also argue that CBOs are more supportive of their students, compared to the lack of racial identity inclusion in school's curriculum, disproportionate surveillance of students of color, and culture incompetence from school staffs. 111 Scholars found that CBOs not only addressed these issues in their environments and from their staffs, but CBOs were also able to bridge schools and communities of color. 112, 113 By implementing a culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), CBOS "have a long history of interrupting patterns of educational inequity and continue to do so under the current educational policy climate," 114 especially when partnering with youth of color. CRP is a method of teaching that integrates students' culture, knowledge, and community experiences into the curriculum with the following guiding principles: 115

Identity development in youth and acknowledgement of these identities from the teacher to build student-teacher connection,

Creating equity and excellence in the space by establishing a curriculum that is inclusive of students' cultural experiences, and setting high expectations for them,

Developmental appropriateness by incorporating relevant lessons and activities,

"Teaching the whole child" by recognizing that students bring an abundance of prior knowledge and influence into the class,

Creating authentic student teacher relationships by checking in with students, and

Managing student emotions by acknowledging their truths and using these as educational moments for growth

When studying low-income Chinese American youth at the organization Community Youth Center (CYC), Wong noticed how many students were not engaged in school because they felt the student-teacher relationship was inauthentic, and there was a lack of cultural and racial representation in the curriculum. 116 Additionally, Wong observed how schools often paint deficit images of parents of color to their students. Working long hours at minimum wage jobs often restricted parents' interactions with schools, and though parents stressed the importance of achieving academic success to their child/ren, they were not viewed as "engaging parents" by teachers because they did not attend conferences or were actively involved in Parent Teacher Organizations (PTOs). Wong felt the dominant school culture's view of parents of color as "deficient" due to "lack" of involvement was responsible for some of the intergenerational conflicts between parents and children, as Chinese American students often felt their parents were not as supportive as white parents. Yull et al, who studied Black/African American families living in a predominantly white community, also found the same disconnect and intergenerational conflict, critiquing the way white teachers view "engaging" parents. 117

In contrast, students involved in CBOs often find them to be more racially and culturally inclusive compared to school. In CBOs, students believe that more adults care about their well-being, compared with school staffs, 118 creating authentic student-teacher relationships. 119 Students were also able to explore more of their interests instead of being limited to the school's curriculum, which itself is restricted by Common Core standards. In doing so, they found more purpose in contributing to these activities, 120 which, not only speaks to developmental appropriateness, but also creates equity and excellence for students by including their interests and learning. 121 In these spaces, students felt more pride in their heritage, especially when provided with a venue where they can speak their first language without fear of judgement. 122 Staffs were also able to mediate conversations between school personnel and teachers, as well as help parents navigate these educational spaces. 123 Wong also praised how staffs at CYC were able to partner with parents of students in the hopes of reversing the "deficiency" image schools have painted by portraying their parents as bearers of knowledge, encouraging students to learn more about their heritage and history through dialogues and workshops with parents, 124 examples of identity development where staffs strive to "teach the whole child" by utilizing their culture and prior knowledge into the curriculum. Similarly, in Oakland, CA, Asian American youth at the CBO AYPAL fights against institutionalized racism, especially deportation of immigrants, a project that was initiated and led by the youth with staff supervision. Asian American youth felt they were not only learning teamwork and leadership skills, but that they were also learning about their history and current policies that affect their identities, which was lacking in school, an example of staffs respecting and listening to youth. 125

Though CBOs will not address all of the challenges that queer Asian American students face, they can become spaces where queer Asian American students can find support. The example of CYC's culturally relevant pedagogy showcases how the organization not only provides resources for Chinese American youth to navigate school environments, but also allocates support for their parents and extended families as well. CYC also advocates for families who do not understand English at school meetings/conference. Additionally, the predominantly Asian American staff encouraged a sense of Chinese and Asian American pride in the youth, which they often lacked in traditional schools. In replicating this for queer Asian American youth, CBOs can provide a space where they can learn more about and affirm their queer and Asian American identities with support and guidance. Staffs can also answer questions about queer identities and direct students to appropriate resources. Additionally, staffs can mediate tensions between queer Asian American youth and their parents by explaining what queerness is to parents, especially in households where language barriers hinder complete understanding of queer culture. Queer Asian American students can also build community among other queer Asian American students and youth of color in these spaces for the emotional, academic, and cultural support that is missing in school's GSAs. They can also use these spaces to deconstruct national policies that affect their dual identities and work with adults to challenge the main discourse, like Asian American youth who partnered up with AYPAL.

While school and society have taken steps towards queer inclusion, more work needs to be done to create inclusive spaces both in and outside of the classroom. We need to effectively evaluate the ways in which our Teacher Education Programs are preparing teachers to teach diverse students and learners, who hail from unique cultures and backgrounds. It is not enough that we only offer method courses for pre-service teachers. We need to facilitate pre-service teachers to name race and sexual orientation, to critically examine how intersection plays a role in students' lives in and out of schools, and to harness these strengths into the classroom to build a better classroom culture. Otherwise, teachers' lack of response against bullying, cultural competency, and resistance to talking about queer identities will continue to push queer youth of color out of school spaces. CBOs have already done engaging and empowering work with youth of color, and can definitely do more with queer Asian American youth.

Furthermore, since many ELA teachers surmised teaching about LGBT issues is only about sex and therefore not appropriate within a school context, better professional development needs to be implemented to dispel assumptions and stereotypes about the queer community. Addressing intersectionality in schools and in afterschool clubs will be a step forward in ensuring that diverse identities and cultures are respected and represented accurately. When we ignore students in our classrooms and fail to engage aspects of their identities (even the ones that are not physically apparent), we erase the very foundation of what makes them unique and push them out. Students are already exploring their sexual orientation from a young age, and it is more effective if we provide guidance rather than disregard the topic. Schools can start by adopting and mirroring the culturally responsive pedagogies that CBOs are already utilizing to create a more harmonious relationship between schools and queer Asian American communities.

Additionally, more studies need to highlight queer Asian American youth voices. Queer discourse needs to include the voices and experiences of Asian American students, and Asian American discourse needs to be more inclusive to those who are queer. Many scholars researching queer Asian Americans disproportionately focus on the experiences of adult gay Asian American men or Asian American men who have sex with men. This excludes voices of women, transgender and non-conforming Asian American individuals, youth, and other sexual orientations, whose narratives are equally important. Empirical work should also focus on the experience of queer Asian American youth's identity development in both schools and CBOs to document and validate their experiences. Furthermore, it is important to investigate the different rich and diverse ethnic communities that make up the "Asian American" category; future research should also focus on different ethnic groups and their unique experiences with queerness.

Moving forward, future questions for exploration could include:

How do CBOs that work with queer Asian American youth, such as Freedom Inc., Shades of Yellow, and Hmong Queer Suab (Hmong Queer Voices), mediate conversations between students, parents, and schools about queer identities, especially for those who are bilingual? What kind of programming are also in place to educate Asian American families about these topics?

What are some strategies queer Asian American youth, specifically transgender Asian American youth, utilize when navigating and negotiating different spaces?

What are the experiences of bisexual and pansexual Asian American women in their communities and what specific discriminations/struggles do they face? Additionally, if they are able to "pass" as heterosexual, how do they navigate these identities?

How do historically Asian religions (such as Hinduism, Shamanism, Shintoism, etc.) create further tension with queer identities for Asian American youth, especially in faith-based CBOs?

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Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

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Kedley, K.E. (2015) Queering the teacher as a text in the English Language Arts classroom: beyond books, identity work and teacher preparation. Sex Education, 15(4), 364-377.

Mason, K. (2008) Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading- Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. ALAN Review, 35(3), 55-61.

Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

Mason, K. (2008) Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading- Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. ALAN Review, 35(3), 55-61.

Mason, K. (2008) Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading- Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. ALAN Review, 35(3), 55-61.

Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

Mason, K. (2008) Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading- Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. ALAN Review, 35(3), 55-61.

Mason, K. (2008) Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading- Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. ALAN Review, 35(3), p. 57

Thein, A.H. (2013) Language Arts Teachers' Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. Language Arts, 90(3), 169-180.

Mason, K. (2008) Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading- Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. ALAN Review, 35(3), 55-61.

Flores, G. (2012). Toward a More Inclusive Multicultural Education: Methods for Including LGBT Themes in K-12 Classrooms. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 7, 187-197.

Hermann-Wilmarth, J. & Ryan, C.L. (2013) Interrupting the Single Story: LGBT Issues in the Language Arts Classroom. Language Arts, 90(3), p. 227

Burke, B.R. & Greenfield, K. (2016). Challenging Heteronormativity: Raising LGBTQ Awareness in a High School English Language Arts Classroom. English Journal, 105, p. 26

Steffel, S. & Renzi-Keener, L. (2009) Breaking Down the Last Taboo: LGBT Young Adult Literature in the Preservice Classroom. Language Arts Journal of Michigan, 24(2). 29-37.

Burke, B.R. & Greenfield, K. (2016). Challenging Heteronormativity: Raising LGBTQ Awareness in a High School English Language Arts Classroom. English Journal, 105, p. 26

Steffel, S. & Renzi-Keener, L. (2009) Breaking Down the Last Taboo: LGBT Young Adult Literature in the Preservice Classroom. Language Arts Journal of Michigan, 24(2). 29-37.

Flores, G. (2012). Toward a More Inclusive Multicultural Education: Methods for Including LGBT Themes in K-12 Classrooms. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 7, 187-197.

Kedley, K.E. (2015) Queering the teacher as a text in the English Language Arts classroom: beyond books, identity work and teacher preparation. Sex Education, 15(4), 364-377.

Leal, P. & Crookes, G.V. (2017) "Most of my students kept saying, 'I never met a gay person'": A queer English language teacher's agency for social justice. System, 1-11.

Steffel, S. & Renzi-Keener, L. (2009) Breaking Down the Last Taboo: LGBT Young Adult Literature in the Preservice Classroom. Language Arts Journal of Michigan, 24(2). 29-37.

Flores, G. (2012). Toward a More Inclusive Multicultural Education: Methods for Including LGBT Themes in K-12 Classrooms. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 7, 187-197.

Hermann-Wilmarth, J. & Ryan, C.L. (2013) Interrupting the Single Story: LGBT Issues in the Language Arts Classroom. Language Arts, 90(3), p. 227

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Baldridge, B.J. (2014). Relocating the Deficit: Reimagining Black Youth in Neoliberal Times. American Educational Research Association, XX​(X), 1-33.

Baldridge, B.J., Beck, N., Medina, J.C., & Reeves, M.A. (2017). Toward a New Understanding of Community-Based Education: The Role of Community-Based Educational Spaces in Disrupting Inequality for Minoritized Youth. Review of Research in Education, 41​​, p. 381

Brown-Jeffy, S. & Cooper, J. E. (2011). Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: an Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature. ​Teacher Education Quarterly. 38​(1), 65-84.

Wong, N.A. (2010). "Cuz They Care About the People Who Goes There": The Multiple Roles of a Community-Based Youth Center in Providing "Youth (Comm)Unity" for Low-Income Chinese American Youth. ​Urban Education,​ ​45​(5), 708-739.

Yull, D., Blitz, L.V., Thompson, T., & Murray, C. (2014). Can We Talk? Using Community-Based Participatory Action Research to Build Family and School Partnerships with Families of Color. ​School Community Journal,​ ​24​(2), 9-31.

Baldridge, B.J. (2014). Relocating the Deficit: Reimagining Black Youth in Neoliberal Times. American Educational Research Association, XX​(X), 1-33.

Brown-Jeffy, S. & Cooper, J. E. (2011). Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: an Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature. ​Teacher Education Quarterly. 38​(1), 65-84.

Heath, S.B. & McLaughlin, M.W. (1994). The best of both world: connecting schools and community youth organizations for all-day, all-year learning. Educational Administration Quarterly. 30(3), 278-300.

Brown-Jeffy, S. & Cooper, J. E. (2011). Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: an Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature. ​Teacher Education Quarterly. 38​(1), 65-84.

Wong, N.A. (2010). "Cuz They Care About the People Who Goes There": The Multiple Roles of a Community-Based Youth Center in Providing "Youth (Comm)Unity" for Low-Income Chinese American Youth. ​Urban Education,​ ​45​(5), 708-739.

Baldridge, B.J. (2014). Relocating the Deficit: Reimagining Black Youth in Neoliberal Times. American Educational Research Association, XX​(X), 1-33.

Wong, N.A. (2010). "Cuz They Care About the People Who Goes There": The Multiple Roles of a Community-Based Youth Center in Providing "Youth (Comm)Unity" for Low-Income Chinese American Youth. ​Urban Education,​ ​45​(5), 708-739.

Brown-Jeffy, S. & Cooper, J. E. (2011). Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: an Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature. ​Teacher Education Quarterly. 38​(1), 65-84.

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For Queer Asian American Youth Who Are Resilient & Tenacious - Asian American Policy Review

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BY DOUA KHA This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Since queerness is still a taboo topic in the Asian American community, the marginalization and invisibility of both queer and Asian American identities in schools and in their community call for a third space where queer Asian American youth can be around young people who look like them, share their identities, and offer guidance.

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I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as the 22nd President of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA), alongside Vice President Dr. Nellie Tran and past-president Dr. Helen Hsu. I am honored to serve under a legacy of great AAPA presidents and alongside several amazing leaders who comprise our current AAPA Executive Committee!
Founded in 1972 by a group of Asian American psychologists and other mental health professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area, the mission of the Asian American Psychological Association is to advance the mental health and well-being of Asian American communities through research, professional practice, education, and policy.
AAPA is an intersectional community composed of multi-disciplinary professionals, educators, researchers, clinicians, advocates, students, and allies. We are not only psychologists and psychology professors, but also social workers, marital and family therapists, public health professionals and other disciplines who are committed to Asian American mental health and well-being. We are a community of US born, immigrants, refugees, mixed heritage, or from dozens of varied Asian, Native and Pacific Islander heritages, of every sexual orientation and gender expression and varied socioeconomic and disability status.

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Home - Asian American Psychological Association

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I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as the 22nd President of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA), alongside Vice President Dr. Nellie Tran and past-president Dr. Helen Hsu. I am honored to serve under a legacy of great AAPA presidents and alongside several amazing leaders who comprise our current AAPA Executive Committee!

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About: "AAPI Data is a nationally recognized publisher of demographic data and policy research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, with hundreds of news mentions in national and local outlets. Our reputation is built on data and research that is accurate, compelling, and timely. In addition to our news impact, community organizations, government agencies, and decisionmakers regularly reach out to us, to better understand key aspects of AAPI communities."

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Demographic Data and Policy Research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

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GLAAD: Asian Pacific Islander Resource Kit

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GLAAD: Asian Pacific Islander Resource Kit

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FAIR ACCURATE & INCLUSIVE

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Asian Pacific Islanders (API) are minorities within a minority. Although the media are covering the lives, stories and issues of LGBT people more frequently, and often in a more fair, accurate and balanced manner, repeatedly API LGBT voices, perspectives and opinions are left out of the picture. Within the "mainstream" LGBT community, Asian Pacific Islanders can feel invisible since images in LGBT publications are primarily white. Furthermore when APIs are represented, they are presented stereotypical, exoticized or as the "china doll", which reinforces stereotypes of APIs being silent, demure and sexual objects.

With this resource kit, GLAAD encourages journalists to cover API LGBT people's lives, families, accomplishments and issues in their own right, and include their perspectives in other relevant coverage. The Communities of Asian Pacific Islander Media Kit provides guidelines for coverage, terminology and contact information for API LGBT organizations for more inclusive, fair and balanced coverage of the API LGBT community.

GENERAL RULES

Stories and opinion pieces by the API community are good opportunities to increase the diversity of voices in the media. Here are some general rules and suggestions to create an inclusive representation of this vastly diverse community.

Recognize that the API LGBT community is diverse and that no one voice can or should represent an entire community. API LGBT people encompass a broad spectrum of life experiences. We are a community that spans several languages, countries of origin, religions and are present in every region of this country and every economic class.

Include the API LGBT community in coverage that does not necessarily have to do with Asian or Asian Pacific Islanders. Interviews and public opinion pieces are good opportunities to be inclusive.

Differentiate between those who are American citizens and those who are citizens of other countries. If a story is about American citizens of Japanese descent, use "Japanese American" rather than "Japanese." The same rule can be used for other ethnic groups - Chinese/Chinese Americans, Filipinos/Filipino Americans, Korean/ Korean Americans, Indian/ Indian Americans, etc. This reduces implications that people of Asian descent are all foreign or foreign born. If referring to Asians from both Asia and the U.S., the term "people of Asian descent" can alternately be used. This can also apply when describing specific ethnicities.

Avoid hyphenating racial and/ or ethnic identities. Use "Chinese American" or "Asian American" rather than "Chinese-American" or "Asian-American". Hyphenation implies that a person is not a true American.

Avoid common stereotypes, particularly in ad and fashion spread imagery. Images of the "China Doll" and "Geisha" reinforce stereotypes of Asian Pacific Islanders as passive, weak or as sex objects. Conversely, images of the "Dragon Lady" imply Asians and Asian Americans cannot be trusted and are foreign enemies.

Don't exoticize Asians, Asian Americans and Asian culture. This reinforces stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans being "foreigners." There are a large number of Asian Americans who were born in the United States and have never been to Asian countries; unless the article is specifically about Asian Americans, try to avoid making connections to Asian countries unless the article is specifically about Asian Americans visiting Asia or about immigration.

Avoid Eurocentric terms such as "The Orient" and "Far East" to describe Asia. Also, avoid the term "Asiatic" as an adjective to describe Asians or Asian Americans. This can imply an enemy race.

Do not use the term "Oriental" to describe somebody of Asian Descent. This term is only appropriate for describing inanimate objects, such as rugs.

Consult with API LGBT leaders and organizations if you have questions about complex issues. When dealing with an issue that is unfamiliar, community leaders and experts can offer invaluable resources that can assist you in providing the best possible coverage.

STORY POSSIBILITIES

There are a wide variety of stories that are inclusive of API LGBT lives:

From the issuance of marriage licenses to the Musgrave Federal Marriage Amendment, LGBT issues are heavily present in the media. While covering these stories, represent diverse opinions by including API LGBT voices and perspectives. Interviews and public opinion pieces are good opportunities to be inclusive.

Media Professionals can:

Profile the work of prominent figures in the API LGBT community, locally and nationally, in politics, entertainment or other professional positions.

Cover your local API organizations and their events. Cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Washington DC all have very active API organizations that hold several impressive events per year. Covering these events will bring diversity and interest within Features and City Life news sections.

Explore some of the socio-cultural factors within API families and cultures such as the taboo of expressing sexuality, religion and the family or the myth of homosexuality as a Western epidemic. These contribute to the difficulties of being out and LGBT in the API community.

Explore stories of bi-national LGBT couples and the many problems they face when asked to leave the U.S. because of undocumented status.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Asian: A term that either describes somebody of Asian descent or something that comes from Asia. When writing about Asians who are American citizens use Asian Pacific Islanders (API), Asian Pacific American (APA) or Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI)

Asian American: This phrase was first used in the 1980 Census to describe American citizens from all Asian ethnic backgrounds. It is a commonly used term and is preferred by those of Asian descent who were born and raised in the United States.

Asian Pacific Islander (API): This is a relatively new term that is inclusive of both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as a community. Some other acceptable terms are Asian Pacific American and Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI).

Desi: This is a colloquial name for people of South Asian descent, particularly those of Indian and Pakistani descent, to self describe each other or their community. The term is derogatory outside of the South Asian community. The media should avoid using this term unless quoting somebody or used within a title of an event.

Hapa: This is a term that describes somebody of mixed ethnic or racial background, usually (but not always) Asian/Pacific Islander and Caucasian. It comes from the Hawaiian term "hapa haole", which means "half-white." It is becoming increasingly used by the Asian Pacific Islander community and is not necessarily considered derogatory.

Indian, Indian American: Terms used to describe somebody of Indian descent (not "Native American"). Avoid using the term "Asian Indian".

Filipino/Filipina: Filipino is used to describe either men or mixed groups; Filipina is used to describe women. Since there is no "f" in Tagalog, the official language of the Philippines, an alternate spelling is either Pilipino or Pilipina.

Native Hawaiian: This is a term to describe somebody who is born of Polynesian descent whose ancestors are originally from Hawaii. This is not to be confused with somebody who resides within the state of Hawaii.

NHOPI: An acronym for Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

Pacific Islander: A term to describe somebody of Polynesian, Micronesian or Melanesian descent. This indicates, but not limited to, people of Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and Guamanian descent.

Pinoy/Pinay: This term describes a Filipino American man (Pinoy) or woman (Pinay). While it is widely used within Filipino American communities, some consider it derogatory. It is advised that media use "Filipino American" unless quoting someone who self-identifies that way.

Potato Queen: This is a slang term to describe LGBT Asian Pacific Islanders, particularly men, who only date Caucasian people. While it is used tongue-in-cheek, it is considered derogatory by some people and, therefore, advised that media avoid it, unless quoting someone who self-identifies as a potato queen or uses that term or when it is used by an Asian Pacific Islander in an opinion or editorial piece.

QAPA: Queer Asian Pacific American. An acronym that is used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning Asian Pacific Americans. While commonly used within the LGBT Asian Pacific American community, it is not universally used.

Rice Queen: This is a slang term used to describe LGBT Caucasian people, particularly men, who only date Asian Pacific Islanders. While it is used tongue-in-cheek, it is considered derogatory by some people and, therefore, advised that media avoid it, unless quoting someone who self-identifies that way or if it is used by an Asian Pacific Islander in an opinion or editorial piece.

South Asia: An area of Asia that includes the Indian subcontinent. It is made up of the following countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet.

Southeast Asia: An area of Asia that is comprised of the following countries: Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Sticky Rice: This is a slang term used to describe LGBT Asian Pacific Islanders, particularly men, who only date other Asian Pacific Islanders. While it is tongue-in-cheek, it is considered derogatory by some people and, therefore, advised that media avoid it, unless quoting someone who self-identifies that way or if it is used by an Asian Pacific Islander in an opinion or editorial piece.

Organizations
Community Groups

Atlanta
Asian Pacific Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Network (APLBTN)
Phone: 404.795.0680
e-mail: info@aplbtn.net
http://www.aplbtn.net

Bay Area
API Family Pride
PO Box 473
Fremont, CA 94537
Phone: 510.818.0887
Fax: 510.742.1102
e-mail: info@apifamilypride.org
http://www.apifamilypride.org

Asian Pacific Lesbian, Bisexual, Women And Transgender Network (APLBTN)
PO Box 210698
San Francisco, CA 94121
http://www.aplbtn.org

Boston
A Slice of Rice
93 Massachusetts Avenue #3
Boston MA 02115
Phone: 617-266-3349
http://www.asliceofrice.org

China Rainbow Network (CRN)
http://www.chinarainbownet.org

Dallas
Dragonflies of Dallas
PO Box 192707
Dallas, TX 75219-2707
Phone: 214.521.5342 ext.1752
e-mail: info@dragonfliesofdallas.org
http://www.dragonfliesofdallas.org

Los Angeles
Asian Pacific Crossroads Orange County
A-PC c/o The Center O.C.
12832 Garden Grove Blvd
Suite A
Garden Grove, CA 92643
Phone: 714.534.0862
e-mail: chair@apc-oc.org
http://www.apc-oc.org

Barangay
PO Box 3013
Hollywood, CA 90078-3744
e-mail: info@barangayla.org
http://www.barangayla.org

Chinese Rainbow Association (CRA)
PO Box 252181
Los Angeles, CA 90025
e-mail: chinarainbow@hotmail.com
http://www.chinarainbow.org

New York City
Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY)
e-mail: gapimny@gapimny.org
http://www.gapimny.org

Mandarin Connection
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Mandarin_Connection

South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association of NY (SALGA-NYC)
PO Box 1491
Old Chelsea Station
New York, NY 10113
Phone: 212.358.5132
e-mail: salganyc@hotmail.com

Washington DC
Asian Pacific Islander Queer Sisters (APIQS)
Phone: 202.986.2393
e-mail: info@apiqs.org
http://www.apiqs.org
HIV/AIDS Organizations
Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT)
605 W. Olympic Blvd, Suite 605
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Phone: 213.553.1830
Fax: 213.553.1833

Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center
730 Polk Street
4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109
Phone: 415.292.3400
Fax: 415.292.3404
e-mail: info@apiwellness.org
http://www.apiwellness.org

Southeast Asian Transgender AIDS Prevention Program (T-PRO)
Southeast Asian Community Center
Attn: Southeast Asian Transgender AIDS Prevention Program (T-PRO)
875 O'Farrell Street; Lower Level
San Francisco, CA 94019
Phone: 415.309.4667
Religious Groups University/Youth Groups
AQU25A
C/o API Wellness Center
730 Polk Street
4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109
Phone: 415.292.3420 x315
e-mail: sabrina@apiwellness.org

EquAsian - API LGBTQ youth group run by/for youth
Asian/Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA)
150 Lafayette St, 6th Fl.
New York, NY 10013
Phone: 212.334.7940 ext. 219
e-mail: apicha@apicha.org
http://www.apicha.org/apicha/pages/education/ypp
http://www.apiwellness.org/v20/youth/youth.html

Queer Asians at the University of Michigan (MOTHRA)
e-mail: mothracoordinator@yahoo.com
http://www.umich.edu/~inqueery/aplgb/

University of California, Berkeley Queer and Asian (Cal Q&A)
e-mail: info@calqa.org
http://www.calqa.org

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The media are covering the lives, stories, and issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people more frequently, and often in a more fair, accurate, and balanced manner. Repeatedly, however, Asian Pacific Islander Community LGBT voices, perspectives, and opinions are left out of the picture.

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Race-based hate is out there, but it’s inside of us, too. Here is how to disrupt the pattern

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Race-based hate is out there, but it’s inside of us, too. Here is how to disrupt the pattern

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Wellington, Elizabeth. “Race-based hate is out there, but it’s inside of us, too. Here is how to disrupt the pattern.” The Inquirer. (April 5, 2021).

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I spent the last year cooped up in my apartment doing my part to stem the spread of COVID-19, and like many of you, I'm eager to return to the fun of going out: shopping, dancing, and dining.

But I'm concerned that even though vaccines will usher us closer to herd immunity, it still won't be safe to gather. Why? Because hate and anger are raging, and there's just no way to know when and where it's going to boil over. When it gets to the point that bullets are flying, it's too late because bullets don't have names. Just ask the victims of the recent Atlanta shootings.
" READ MORE: Philly Asian Americans have experienced a year of hateful acts, and fear it's going to get even worse
Those who study hate are predicting that hate crimes against Asian American Pacific Islanders will, unfortunately, continue to rise. And as Philadelphia and national officials relax COVID-19 restrictions, additional hate crimes will likely pick up steam, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernadino. We've had a year filled with economic hardship and death, Levin said. People are angry. We've all been isolated so our discontent has grown out of control. People are looking for scapegoats. And gun sales, although they dipped in February, still remain at record highs.

"I would say that intergroup violence, of which hate crime categories are a part of, will likely increase as people start going into densely populated areas," Levin said. "You can't punch someone [from across the street]."

We may not be able to single-handedly stop a mass shooting.But we can all do our part to stop perpetuating and internalizing hate against others and that will have a collective impact on ending violence.

"It's the small things that we think and do every day that are destructive and get us to this place."

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, California State University.

Hate doesn't explode into violence overnight. It's planted into our souls and watered with a lifetime of denial, avoidance, and guilt until it looms so large it unintentionally guides our actions. In this way hate is like a virus that is just as indiscriminate and as deadly as COVID-19. And, like the novel coronavirus, it's spread through silent carriers.

"It's the small things that we think and do every day that are destructive and get us to this place," Levin said.

In other words: There's work we can all do to prevent hate from spreading. Your intentions may not be hateful, but your actions may very well be. And the only way to disrupt the process is to recognize these dynamics and stop them. Here are some ways.

Simply put: Centering the white experience as the default American experience normalizes hate in this country, said Edwin Mayorga, an associate professor of educational studies, Latin American and Latino Studies at Swarthmore College. When we make white people the benchmark of American excellence, when we think that the experience of white people is what is "normal," everyone else - Black, Latino, AAPI, Indigenous - is othered.

"When we other, hate becomes present in the air we breathe and the food we eat," Mayorga says, "Othering gives us structural norms and anyone who fits outside of those norms are targets of the culture of violence that enforces the investment in whiteness." The result: We don't recognize the everyday experiences of people in our communities until, of course, something egregious happens, like a mass shooting, and we are left trying to figure out how we got here.

"When we other, hate becomes present in the air we breathe and the food we eat."

Edwin Mayorga, associate professor, Swarthmore College

" READ MORE: Systemic racism has affected all of us. Here's how to start unlearning its harmful lessons. | Elizabeth Wellington
When we other people, we lump them all into one group. We ignore their differences and overlook the diversity in cultures. And worse, we perpetuate tropes. So, statements like - All Black men are criminals. All Asian women are submissive. All Latin Americans are lazy - are used to scapegoat and wreak violence on entire communities, said James Kyung-Jin Lee, a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California Irvine.

Even seemingly harmless or positive tropes are actually harmful. One trope that has caused immeasurable harm in Asian communities is the "model minority," Lee said. The Asian as model minority trope frames the Asian experience as one that has a close proximity to whiteness. That means Asians are considered the "good" minority; the ones who are smart, polite, and behave. This does not bode well for many in the Asian community, Lee said, because they are expected to live up to the stereotype. And any time you have to live up to a stereotype, whether it's good or bad, it chips away at your humanity.

"We [Asian people] have been lulled into this sense that we are not targets," Lee said. "All it has taken was a virus that originated in China for that veneer to be broken and we go from model minority to menace to society."

Here's the thought to take notice of: When you use the word "all" to describe a group of people - women or a cultural group - check yourself, even when it's positive. The moment you do that, you are robbing that group of its complexity and humanity and that leaves room for hate.

If your intentions are good, but the outcome is inequitable, it still stokes the fires of hate, Lee said. Consider this: No, you don't believe schools should be segregated. But you move your child from an inner-city school into another district or a private school where resources are abundant. Eventually all families with means - Black and white - leave the school and the children left behind are left with a below subpar education.

"Resource hoarding is a form of racial maintenance that is rooted in hate," Lee said. "Those who are othered are trading on their proximity to whiteness for equality. This is just one example of the way everyday actions reinforce the structures of white supremacy, even without people really being aware of what they are doing. Overt racial advantage is not written into the law anymore, but we constantly click the 'hate' levers when it comes to institutional accesses and resources."

Here's the thought to take notice of: Ask yourself: What's your true motive? What's behind it? Is your action benefiting you? Are you robbing a community of resources? Why is it OK in your mind to do that?

Try not to insist that your truth is someone else's truth, said Malika Rahman, visiting lecturer and diversity criminal justice fellow at Community College of Philadelphia.

Yet another consequence of othering is believing that another person's experience isn't real because it's not yours. And an offshoot of that is not trusting a person of another race as an expert in their field, because they don't fit neatly into your box of who they are. People of other races are experts on their experience, Rahman said. They know what hate feels like when it is lobbed at them. They know what unfair treatment feels like.

When we expect another person's experience to mirror ours, we allow them to define another person's experience. And this is how the oppressor defines hate, Rahman said. And that does nothing to stop hate. "When you come into an unfamiliar space, you can't assume you know more about another person's truth than they do," Rahman said. "Ignoring someone else's story perpetuates hate because you are saying your story is the only one that matters."

Here's the thought to take notice of: Be aware of who you inherently trust. How do you feel when a person of another race tells you that you might be wrong? What perspectives are you missing?
" READ MORE: Pandemic trauma affects our memory. Here's how to be intentional about the way we tell the story of this year. | Elizabeth Wellington
All too often we cling to our beliefs because they play a role in defining who we are, says Mamta Accapadi, vice provost for university life at the University of Pennsylvania. "And at the end of the day we have to wonder if we are more interested in learning from a new opportunity or holding on to old ideas that don't serve us?" Isolation, Accapadi said, has led many of us to double down on our beliefs. And the separation has intensified this sense of other. When we feel the pull to resist a shift in thinking, we should consider the following: Do we want our resistance to turn into hate, or do we want to embrace the new ideas and look at them as an opportunity to do better?

Here's the thought to take notice of: Are you holding on to stereotypes? Where do they come from? Look at your friend circle: Do your friends bring perspectives different from your own? If they don't, how can you expand your friend circle to be more inclusive?
" READ MORE: I'm sitting at home during the pandemic. You're going out. How to make sense of these friendships now. | Elizabeth Wellington
Disrupting any narrative - especially a hateful one - often boils down to the questions we ask ourselves when we become aware of our imperfect thoughts, says Tricia Brouk, motivational speaker and author of The Influential Voice: Saying What You Mean for Lasting Legacy. "Just because you realize you have a hateful thought doesn't mean you are a hateful person. But it's important to recognize it so you don't take it to the next level."
Consider these questions:

How can I better understand those who are different than me?

How can I cultivate moments that generate empathy for others?

What can I do to better understand the historical context of those whom I'm othering?

Am I considering others' values? Am I requiring that other people's values mirror mine?

"When you understand the power of your words, you are consciously eliminating violence and hate from the universe and that in itself is progress."

Tricia Brouk, motivational speaker and author

"When you understand the power of your words, you are consciously eliminating violence and hate from the universe, and that in itself is progress," Brouk said.

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Race-based hate is out there, but it's inside of us too. Here is how to disrupt the pattern | Elizabeth Wellington

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I spent the last year cooped up in my apartment doing my part to stem the spread of COVID-19, and like many of you, I'm eager to return to the fun of going out: shopping, dancing, and dining. But I'm concerned that even though vaccines will usher us closer to herd immunity, it still won't be safe to gather.

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Yang, Gene. "Why comics belong in the classroom." TEDxManhattanBeach. December 2, 2016.

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Why comics belong in the classroom | Gene Yang | TEDxManhattanBeach

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What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist

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What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist

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Lin, Grace. "What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist." PBS News Hour. (August 11, 2017).

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What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist

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The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf

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The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf

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Lin, Grace. "The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf." TedxNatick. (March 18, 2016).

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The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf | Grace Lin | TEDxNatick

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After attacks on Asian American elders, here's how to talk to your kids about racism against us

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After attacks on Asian American elders, here's how to talk to your kids about racism against us

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Song, Suzan. "After attacks on Asian American elders, here's how to talk to your kids about racism against us." NBC News. (March 30, 2021).

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Suzan Song, director, division of child, adolescent & family psychiatry, George Washington University Medical Center

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Opinion | Racism against Asian Americans is heartbreaking. How do we talk to our kids about it?

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Many AAPI parents didn’t have “the talk” with their parents or they had a very different one from what is needed now. But you don’t have to start from scratch.

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Asian Author Alliance: 2021 Asian & Pacific Islander American Book Events

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Asian Author Alliance: 2021 Asian & Pacific Islander American Book Events

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To celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we present AAPI Book Month! It is a month-long celebration of AAPI identities and cultures. AAPI authors and artists will come together for virtual panels and events throughout the month of May! Join us for discussions and celebrations of Asian and Pacific Islander identities and cultures! (All of our Livestreams will be hosted on our YouTube channel!)

2021 AAPI Book Month Schedule
Pre-Event

April 30, Friday

8pm ET
(7pm CT / 5pm PT)

Black April - Refugee Stories from the Vietnam War ( YouTube)

April 30, 1975 is known as Black April, the day Saigon fell and the Vietnam War ended. This year marks the 46th anniversary of the fall. Three authors of the Vietnamese diaspora share their stories of struggles and the effects of being a refugee post Vietnam War. ( Link)

First Week:
Second Week: Third Week:

May 15, Saturday

2pm ET (1pm CT/11am PT)

Join authors Van Hoang and Aliette de Bodard as they geek out over their favorite fountain pens, notebooks, and analog writing tools! ( Fountain Pens, Notebooks, and Analog Writing Tools ( Instagram Live)
Van Hoang and Aliette de Bodard Link)

May 17, Monday

8pm ET (7pm CT/5pm PT)

We Contain Multitudes: Supporting Diverse Diversity Within Asian American Voices (focus MG) ( YouTube)
Debbi Michiko Florence, Christina Soontornvat, Andrea Wang, Veera Hiranandani, Mike Jung Join MG authors as they share their experiences growing up as Asian Americans and how their backgrounds influence the books they write. Discussion will center on the need for MANY Asian American penned novels to reflect the diversity of the Asian American experience. ( Link)

May 22, Saturday

12pm ET (11am CT/9am PT)

Entertain your little ones! Join six Asian American/Asian Canadian authors as they read their recent picture books: Andrea Wang (WATERCRESS), Kristen Giang (GINGER AND CHRYSANTHEMUM), Benson Shum (ALEX'S GOOD FORTUNE), Wendy Wan-Long Shang (THE RICE IN THE POT GOES ROUND AND ROUND), Gracey Zhang (LALA'S WORDS), and Mượn Thị Văn (WISHES). ( Story Time with Asian American Picture Books ( YouTube)
Andrea Wang, Kristen Giang, Benson Shum, Wendy Wan-Long Shang, Gracey Zhang, and Mượn Thị Văn Link)***Video will be Live for a LIMITED TIME between May 22 - 23, 2021!***

Fourth Week:

May 24, Monday

6pm ET (5pm CT/3pm PT)

Asian agents, editors, and marketing folks, discussing the placement and sales of Asian-created stories ( A Discussion with Asian Publishing Professionals ( YouTube LIVE)
Jenny Bak, Rebecca Kuss, Deeba Zargarpur, Saba Sulaiman, Moderator: Linda Sue Park Link)

May 24, Monday

8pm ET (7pm CT/5pm PT)

The recent spike in anti-Asian violence has surprised many people, in part because of the misperception that Asians are relatively "safe" from systemic racism. Do our books, even when addressing racism as authentically and honestly as possible, contribute to this misperception? Should we be writing more (and more hard-hitting) books that focus on anti-Asian racism? And how do we successfully incorporate anti-Asian racism as subplot and subtext in romance, sci-fi, fantasy, and other genres? Please join Joanna Ho (EYES THAT KISS IN THE CORNERS), Nancy Ohlin (B*WITCH; WITCH RISING), Misa Sugiura (THIS TIME WILL BE DIFFERENT; LOVE & OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS) and moderator Mary Choy (HEALTHCARE HEROES) for a fascinating discussion on the challenges of writing about racism as Asians in kidlit. ( The Challenges of Writing about Racism in Kidlit ( Youtube)
Nancy Ohlin, Misa Sugiura, Joanna Ho, Moderator: Mary Choy Link)

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Asian Author Alliance " Asian & Pacific Islander American Book Month

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To celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we present AAPI Book Month! It is a month-long celebration of AAPI identities and cultures. AAPI authors and artists will come together for virtual panels and events throughout the month of May! Join us for discussions and celebrations of Asian and Pacific Islander identities and cultures!

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Abdelfatah, Rund; Ramtin Arablouei; Jamie York; Julie Caine; Laine Kaplan-Levenson; Lawrence Wu; Parth Shah; Victor Yvellez. “Our Own People.” NPR Throughline. (April 1, 2021).

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“Build bridges, not walls.” Solidarity was at the heart of Yuri Kochiyama’s work. A Japanese-American activist whose early political awakenings came while incarcerated in the concentration camps of World War II America, Kochiyama dedicated her life to social justice and liberation movements. As hate…

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Explore Project Jose Antonio Vargas announces his second book, WHITE IS NOT A COUNTRY In the new work, which Pantheon Books will publish in 2023, he will explore race and identities like his - neither Black nor White - through historical research, interviews, reportage and analysis.

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Amplifying Asian and Asian diasporic literature since 1991.

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What a Forgotten Kids' Book Reveals About U.S. Publishing

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What a Forgotten Kids' Book Reveals About U.S. Publishing

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Makhijani, Pooja. "What a Forgotten Kids' Book Reveals About U.S. Publishing." The Atlantic. (October 3, 2017).

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In 1927, the author Dhan Gopal Mukerji published a slim novel, Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, which follows the adventures of the titular Calcutta carrier bird, and the bird's young owner, Ghond. Gay Neck (referring to the bird's Bengali name, Chitra Griva) sympathetically portrays a bond between a young boy and his beloved pigeon as they encounter hawks and tigers in the jungles of Bengal and elude German fire in France during World War I. "The message implicit in the book is that man and the winged animals are brothers," Mukerji explained in an interview published in Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955.

Gay Neck is as informative as it is lyrical and profound. Mukerji not only traces the bird's flight patterns and mating with exacting insight, but he also allows the bird to "speak" directly to the reader. "It is not hard for us to understand him," the first-person narrator says of the pigeon, "if we use the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of the imagination." In a deeper sense, the novel is a meditation on courage and redemption in a time of war. When Gay Neck and Ghond return to India after their military service, they are battle-scarred. "I need to be healed of fear and hate," Ghond says. "I saw too much killing of man by man." War leaves Gay Neck fearful and unable to fly. But with the help of the lamas in a Buddhist monastery deep in the Himalayas, the duo overcome their wartime fears and find inner peace.

At the time of its release, the book was widely lauded. The magazine The Horn Book said of the novel: "Gay Neck is truly a carrier pigeon, a bearer of messages, and his messages are words of courage and love." The New Republic called Gay Neck "a distinguished contribution," and praised Boris Artzybasheff's illustrations as "altogether beautiful." In 1928, Mukerji won the John Newbery Medal, awarded every year for the best work of American literature for children. He's widely considered the first Indian American who successfully wrote for American audiences, and Gay Neck was his fourth book for young readers.

Yet, 90 years on, this once-celebrated book, which has remained in print since its publication, is rarely mentioned in discussions of racial and ethnic diversity in books for kids, as if Mukerji were some sort of aberration rather than an early chapter of what could have been. In recent years, there has been more activism in the children's literature community centered on representation-but diversity advocates can sometimes have a limited view of the genre's history, argues Uma Krishnaswami, an author and an instructor in the low-residency MFA program in writing for children and young adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. "By all reckoning, Gay Neck should have established a publishing trend, but didn't for many complicated reasons," she told me.

Gay Neck and Mukerji found unlikely success nearly a century ago thanks to the collision of a number of forces, both personal and historical-including Mukerji's prodigious talent, U.S. immigration policy, and seismic events such as world war and decolonization on the Indian subcontinent. Understanding why the book fell out of public view can help American writers and illustrators, as well as educators, better understand how geographical shifts, politics, and migration today shape the literary world for the children of tomorrow.

Mukerji's life illustrates the ways the history of South Asian literature intersects with the history of the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. The writer was born in 1890 in a village outside Calcutta, and made his way to California in 1910, soon earning his bachelor's degree in English at Stanford University.

It was at Stanford where Mukerji began distinguishing himself as a literary talent. "My father was a masterful storyteller," his son, Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr., told me in a phone interview in 2004, five years before his own death. "He discovered that he could make more money as a poetry reader than washing dishes while he was a graduate student at Stanford." So Mukerji connected with Paul Elder, a prominent San Francisco publisher who later released Mukerji's first two volumes of poetry and his first play. "My father would charge 50 cents per head to listen to him recite poetry. He had a great command of the English language and knew Milton's Paradise Lost by heart. He would charge a special price on the nights he recited that," Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr. said.

Soon after the publication of his early works, Mukerji and his wife, Ethel Ray Dugan, became involved in cultural life, first in San Francisco and then in New York City, where Mukerji became serious about pursuing a literary career. He was not only a prolific writer but also a prominent public intellectual, said Daniel Elam, an assistant professor of postcolonial literature and transnational studies at the University of Toronto. "He advocated for Indian independence, interracial dialogue, and greater awareness of Indian philosophy," Elam said. Mukerji befriended American intellectuals, such as Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and corresponded with Jawaharlal Nehru, a leader in India's independence movement at the time who later became the country's first prime minister after the end of British rule.

Mukerji's first three children's books, Kari, the Elephant; Jungle Beasts and Men; and Hari, the Jungle Lad, were well-received and sold handsomely, bringing him national fame. "He was incredibly savvy about figuring out the American publishing industry at a time when a lot of people weren't," Elam said. Mukerji's correspondence with his publisher, E.P. Dutton, reveals that he was especially adept at identifying markets and "translating" India for a middle-class white audience.
Bookshelves might look very different today had Congress not passed such restrictive immigration laws.
Gay Neck, Mukerji's fourth children's book, won him popular acclaim. In 1928, when Mukerji went to collect his award in West Baden, Indiana, he had to be hidden behind a stand of trees on the hotel grounds prior to the announcement of his win, according to Irene Smith's A History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals. The identity of the winner had been shrouded in secrecy by the award's jury, and they worried that the presence of an "East Indian man" in a crowd of all white librarians would make the evening's winner obvious. Mukerji may have taken this drama as a slight, or all in good humor. "He was very Indian, although he was not self-conscious about it," his son said.

Although his best-known works were behind him, Mukerji continued to publish children's books for the remainder of his career. Toward the end of his life, he fell into a depression that robbed him of his "fantastic sense of humor," in his son's words. Prior to his death by suicide in his Upper East Side apartment, he suffered from a six-month nervous breakdown, perhaps exacerbated by repeated and exhausting cross-country lecture tours, explained Elam. According to his New York Times obituary, headlined "Friend of Gandhi Dies by Hanging," Mukerji was 46 years old. His death shocked family, friends, and fans at the time, and then Mukerji and his work faded. "His popularity in the 1920s was matched only by the obscurity into which he fell following his suicide in 1936," Elam said.

Mukerji was one of a handful of students from colonial India who migrated to the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. Although the first known South Asian immigrant entered the United States in 1790 as a maritime worker in Massachusetts, emigration from the region began in earnest in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Many of these early migrants were either Sikh men from Punjab who settled in farming communities in California and Washington, or Bengali Muslim peddlers who integrated into other communities of color in New Orleans, New York, Detroit, and Baltimore.

Shortly after Mukerji came to the United States, Congress closed the door to all immigrants from South Asia by passing the Immigration Act of 1917. Six years later, in the landmark case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that immigrants from India were not only barred from naturalization, but could also retroactively have their American citizenship revoked. (This ruling was reversed in 1946 with the passage of the Luce-Celler Act.) In 1965, in response to the American civil-rights movement, the Immigration and Nationality Act ended this immigration-admissions policy based on race and ethnicity.

The effects of that 1965 bill's passage were profound, influencing the flow of immigrants to the United States, the country's demographic profile, and ultimately its cultural output. A provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act gave preference to professionals with skills in short supply in the United States, so "when [immigration] got started again, South Asian people didn't come to the United States to become writers; they came to be engineers and doctors," Krishnaswami said.

Children's bookshelves might look very different today had Congress not passed such restrictive immigration laws designed to maintain a white majority in the United States. Once the door closed on migrants from Asia, so closed the white publishing establishment's imagination, it would seem. One can easily imagine an alternate reality in which South Asians immigrated to the U.S. in increasing numbers in the early decades of the 20th century, formed literary communities, and accumulated capital, and in which the publishing of South Asian books for children flourished following the commercial success of Gay Neck.

Generations later, as the children and the grandchildren of the migrants who arrived on American shores after the passage of the 1965 act have come of age, several South Asian books for children have been recognized by establishment institutions for their literary merit and popularity. Tanuja Desai Hidier's seminal early-aughts young-adult novel Born Confused-the first book about a South Asian teenager coming of age in the United States-was named as one of the greatest young-adult novels of all time by both Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. Mitali Perkins's 2007 children's book, Rickshaw Girl, about the changing roles of girls and women in Bangladesh, was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the top 100 books for children in the past 100 years. Perkins's 2017 release, You Bring the Distant Near, a sweeping multigenerational saga of the girls in a Bengali family struggling to find acceptance in the United States, was just named as one of 10 contenders in the Young People's Literature category of the National Book Awards. "It's taken time to establish a presence long enough and vocal enough to matter again in the American context," Krishnaswami said.

Still, despite increasing viability, no other South Asian American writer has been awarded the Newbery Medal, the pinnacle achievement in the field, since Mukerji took home this honor in 1928, and the Newbery's next awardees of color came almost a half century later: Paula Fox, whose mother was Cuban, in 1974 for The Slave Dancer, and Virginia Hamilton, who was African American, for M.C. Higgins, the Great, in 1975. Only two other Asian Americans have won the Newbery-Linda Sue Park, in 2002 for A Single Shard, and Cynthia Kadohata, in 2005 for Kira-Kira.

"There are contentious, ongoing conversations regarding the lack of diversity among award winners," said Sarah Park Dahlen, an associate professor of library and information science at St. Catherine University who teaches courses on children's and young-adult books. She attributes this lack of diversity among award winners, in part, to the lack of diversity in librarianship. "The committees [who select the winners] tend to be white," she said. "Although they know that diversity continues to be an issue, perhaps their criteria are still determined by what they already know and are comfortable with."

According to census projections, non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority of the U.S. population by 2044-but the publishing industry hasn't kept apace: The Cooperative Children's Book Center found that in 2015 only about 11 percent of children's books were written by and about people of color. The CCBC's statistics only go back to 1985, and there is little hard data about the diversity of books published before this. The rise and quiet disappearance of Gay Neck is not only a reminder of how publishing success waxes and wanes with shifts in groups' social and economic capital, but also how erasure hurts and representation does, in fact, matter to contemporary narratives about art. "Whose story is being told and why?" Krishnaswami said. "Why do these collective choices get made? These are really important cultural questions for us all to consider."

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What a Forgotten Children's Book Reveals About the Publishing Industry

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In 1927, the author Dhan Gopal Mukerji published a slim novel, Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, which follows the adventures of the titular Calcutta carrier bird, and the bird's young owner, Ghond.

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Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

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Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

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Home | Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

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The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center tells Asian Pacific American stories through innovative museum experiences.

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About Discover Nikkei

Explore and celebrate the commonalities and differences in our "Nikkei" experiences through shared stories from around the world with diverse topics, such as cultural identity, community and family history, art, sports, music, literature, and much more with JANM's Discover Nikkei project!

Read articles published daily, watch clips from life history interviews, check out events, and more!

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Homepage | Japanese American National Museum

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Explore and celebrate the commonalities and differences in our "Nikkei" experiences through shared stories from around the world with diverse topics, such as cultural identity, community and family history, art, sports, music, literature, and much more with JANM's Discover Nikkei project! Read articles published daily, watch clips from life history interviews, check out events, and more!

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JACL Applauds Confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

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Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment

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120,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated during World War II. Learn about this unprecedented denial of civil liberties and why it still matters today.

Learn about Japanese American history and the legacy of WWII incarceration by exploring personal stories from those who lived through it.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Join us in putting the lessons of Japanese American WWII incarceration into action today.

Densho Content Director Brian Niiya answers a question about the origin of the concentration camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

Percussionist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist Paul Kikuchi speaks with Densho Community Curator Erin Shigaki about the influences of his ancestors, identity, and community on his art. Kikuchi shares, "How easily...

Thank you to everyone who tuned in on October 5 for Densho's 2023 virtual fundraiser, Our Voices Will Not Be Silenced!

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Campu: A Podcast

Campu weaves together the voices of survivors to spin narratives out of the seemingly mundane things that gave shape to the incarceration experience: rocks, fences, food, paper. Follow along as hosts Hana and Noah Maruyama move far beyond the standard Japanese American incarceration 101 and into more intimate and lesser-known corners of this history.

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Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment

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Preserving Japanese American stories of the past for the generations of tomorrow.

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Anita Felicelli and Huda Al-Marashi Discuss Diaspora, Breaking the Rules, and Reality vs. Likability

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Anita Felicelli and Huda Al-Marashi Discuss Diaspora, Breaking the Rules, and Reality vs. Likability

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"Anita Felicelli and Huda Al-Marashi Discuss Diaspora, Breaking the Rules, and Reality vs. Likability." The Millions. (November 27, 2018).

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In 2014, Huda Al-Marashi and I met at a writers' meet-up. Afterward, we kept up with each other's writing on social media. By reading each other's personal essays, we discovered we shared similar cultural concerns as hyphenated Americans, and we have even more in common now that we're both writers with three children each-it's a great solace to know another writer who is a mother. I first heard Huda read from her memoir at Hazel Reading Series in San Francisco, and I was impressed by her skillful weaving together of humor and deep insights about her Iraqi-American family. How did I not know how funny she is? I was excited to get my hands on a galley of her debut memoir First Comes Marriage, published this November, just after my debut short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent.

First Comes Marriage is a tender examination of love and virgin sexuality from an Iraqi-American perspective. It shatters the Muslim monolith by painting Huda's Iraqi Shia family in glorious specificity, while also doing the same for other Muslim families within the scope of her love story. Hadi Ridha is a boy she's known since she was 6 years old. Huda details their relationship from their first meeting to a difficult prom arranged by their mothers, from the istikharas her family did to determine whether she should marry him to their tumultuous year in Mexico early in their marriage.

The characters in the 13 stories that make up my debut short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent are almost congenitally rebellious. Nonetheless, there are a number of overlapping themes between our books. The collection is about the stories we tell ourselves about our identities, the murky quandaries of a grayscale world, and what Huda calls "the fictions of love" in her memoir. Many of my characters are Tamil and Tamil Americans from the Indian subcontinent.

Anita Felicelli: I think you did a beautiful job excavating the complexities of your own love story. In your book, you mention how, as an adolescent, you loved Victorian love stories and then realized, "I would have never been the protagonist of one of these stories. I would have been the Mohammedan, the exotic Oriental or the native savage." When did you know you wanted to write yourself into literature?

Huda Al-Marashi: Growing up, I read Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series. In Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, the girls venture into Little Syria, and they meet this little girl and her family who should have been the closest I'd ever come to seeing a kid like myself represented in a book. But at the time, I saw myself in the protagonists, Betsy and Tacy, and their encounter of the other. It wasn't until college when I was researching the first wave of Syrian immigration to the United States that I remembered Betsy and Tacy's visit to Little Syria, and I realized that my entire life I'd been inserting myself into stories that only had room for me in the margins.

But it never occurred to me that I could actually write my own story until years later when I was sitting in this haze of the post-9/11 years and the Iraq War. I feared that war and global terrorism had taken over our narratives, and while these stories are vital and necessary, they also make it easier to write off a group's suffering, as if it's their destiny only to die. And, I felt this pull to tell a story that reflected an Iraqi family in their daily lives, preoccupied with everyday concerns, like love and weddings.

One thing I love about your collection was seeing your characters preoccupied with mundane relationship concerns but also against the backdrop of what one of your characters calls the -isms, colonialism and imperialism. Particularly, I'm thinking about Tarini in "Once Upon the Great Red Island," and her struggle to see herself in the colonial past she inherited as both the daughter of Tamil immigrants in the U.S., and now, as the girlfriend of a man who descended from colonizers and who has returned to essentially recolonize Madagascar through his new business venture. In what ways, if at all, has that colonial legacy played out for you? And, as a writer, do you think it's something we can rectify by centering ourselves in our stories?

AF: I've had similar thoughts about the Syrian girl in Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill. But unlike my upper-caste Hindu character Tarini, I grew up in a multi-caste, interfaith household, and I was hypersensitive to different contexts and perspective shifts early on. The more research I did as an adult, the more I realized colonialism was atrocious, but it impacted castes and regions of India differently. When upper-caste Tamils fought for freedom, they were fighting for absolute power, but it was Brahmins, the highest caste, who also most readily adapted to British Victorian culture. The situation of lower caste people and Dalits fighting for freedom was complicated. The British strengthened and manipulated caste tensions, but their presence also resulted in lower-caste people gaining benefits. My grandmother's family, for example, converted to Catholicism to escape caste discrimination from fellow Tamils. I intensely love fiction, but I don't know that we can rectify power imbalances by writing our own stories. Maybe for the world to change, those with power need to read those stories, and make the active, painful decision to truly see us in our equal complexity, beauty, ugliness, and humanity.

On that topic of seeing ourselves with complexity, at one point, you and your husband disagree about whether you should wear a bathing suit and you explain, "I'd assumed we shared such a similar background that our religion and culture were going to be the conflict-free areas of our lives, but here we were, one of us willing to bend the rules, one of us not." It's interesting how we might attribute differences we have with our partner to culture, rather than individual personalities.

HA: Culture was such a crutch for me in 20s. It was the easy answer to everything-where I went to college, why I got engaged, and, of course, this bathing suit argument. But writing this memoir after over a decade of marriage, I had insights into my spouse's character that I didn't have access to as a newlywed, and it made me look back on my younger self with pity for my own ignorance. Now I know that my husband just doesn't mess around with rules. He makes a full and complete stop at stop signs every single time. There is no unfastening your seat belt in his car until he is in park. And at the time of that scene, he was a young man, too, and someone had taught him these were the rules for privacy, and he believed in them for himself, too.

But these disagreements came as a shock to me because I was convinced that as long as I married another Iraqi who was born in the U.S., rather than abroad, then we'd share the same "Iraqi-American culture" and we'd agree on everything. I think that's a fairly common tendency among children of immigrants, to perceive a division between those people in their community that were in raised in diaspora and those who were raised in their country of origin. You captured that tension so brilliantly in several of your stories. We see it between cousins, lovers, and friends. Do you believe there's an irreconcilability between say, in your case, a Tamil person raised in India, and one raised in the U.S.?

AF: I do think there's irreconcilability between diasporic Tamils and Tamils in India-migration and geopolitics discombobulate the power in relationships. In "Snow," the character Devi grew up in India believing she's entitled to every success as a fair-skinned, middle-class Tamil Brahmin, a privileged status in India, but her top dog entitlement is very painfully, unjustly challenged when she immigrates and is confronted with the harsh realities of race in America. Meanwhile, her cousin, Susannah, grew up understanding herself as polluted, inferior because her father is Dalit. She's ostracized due to diasporic caste prejudice. She's an invisible, reviled brown girl who grew up in an underclass in America. Yet, like a lot of Americans, Susannah is obnoxiously, offensively blind about how relatively lucky she's been in the global scheme of things.

Speaking to that challenge of properly contextualizing your own experience, I really liked your discussion of how, in some instances, you'd conflated religion with rules that were specific to your family. Of your mother, you realize: "I attributed so much to our religion and culture that I rarely allowed her the everyday motivations of instinct and fear." The memoir is full of deep insights that parse what's individual, what's cultural and what's just human. Has writing this memoir been a process of discovering those sorts of insights, or did you know beforehand your conclusions?

HA: It was a mixture of both. I came to this with the sense that I'd woven this tight knot about culture and religion's role in my marriage, but I didn't know where I'd applied that bias too liberally. Writing forced me to unravel which of the many restrictions I grew up with were from my religion and culture and which were my parents trying to keep me safe. And I hadn't realized just how much of my life was shaped by mom's anxieties and a traumatic childhood where she had lost her mother and then her stepmother before the age of 15. However, I do think some of that tendency to filter everything through the lens of culture and religion is a consequence of this outsider's gaze that you can't help but pick up living in diaspora.

You conveyed that tension so poignantly in the title story where your unnamed narrator is pursuing an academic career studying his own Tamil history and folklore. Would you agree that being raised in the U.S. and educated under the white gaze is what allows him to see the value in the mythology that his own father and other elders dismiss? And do you think there is anything exploitative about your narrator's interest in his cultural background?

AF: Oh, interesting! That interpretation works, but in my own mind, I was examining a man's search for something tender and real, in contrast to what his Silicon Valley upbringing offers. His father dismisses the folklore because he's culturally Tamil Brahmin-Tamil Brahmin culture tilts in favor of Sanskrit, as well as British cultural and educational standards.

In contrast, Komakal's lower-caste family arises out of indigenous Tamil culture, but like working-class parents worldwide, her parents believe the narrator should be making money in a "real job," not conducting esoteric research. I don't find the narrator's fascination with folklore exploitative since it's his only maternal inheritance. But I can see how the ethics of his documentary film-that aestheticizes the mythology of poorer, lower-caste people to whom he's linked by blood, but not really a part of-might be questioned. On the other hand, he's also alien in Silicon Valley. So where's his place? Perhaps nowhere.

I love the character of Mrs. Ridha, your mother-in-law! She says at one point, "We did not expect you to listen to everything we said." It makes you realize you'd been viewing your community's code of conduct as a matter of life, death and God, but your parents had been trying to protect you, and even understanding you might break rules. I admire your willingness to really reveal yourself, to make yourself real before "likable."

HA: I'm relieved to hear that because I consistently got feedback that I wasn't likable in certain parts of the book, and I struggled with how much weight to give those comments. It's a story of an evolving worldview more than it is about action, and who is likable in their own mind? Who has censored, wonderful thoughts? Our minds are where we are ruthless and cruel to ourselves and those we love. But I didn't think it was fair to apply that same kind of scrutiny to my loved ones in the book. I made a conscious effort to hold them in my mind's eye with love and generosity as I was writing about them. And I think being loving doesn't mean you paint someone glowingly. Rather, you render them alive and fully human.

Which is something I think you've mastered in your book. Your characters are so endearing even though they are not always doing the nicest things. They leave lovers without any closure, make promises they don't keep, and fling cocktail glasses at bartenders. Were there any moments, while writing this, where you struggled with the burden of the representation and the need to paint your community in a positive light?

AF: During revisions in 2016-17, I did worry. I understood America was falling apart, that pluralism as a value might seem quaint. But I didn't think about social justice concerns while drafting. Fiction should work at a subterranean, not a prescriptive level. Characters should be complicated and even problematic. As humans, we're always falling short of our ideals; sometimes our ideals are awful, too. Why should white American writers get to corner the market on complex characters? Of course, some readers will believe I've taken my penchant for complexity too far in these characters: a little girl whose lie costs someone her job, a casteist cokehead, an affluent folklorist who betrays his lover, a Galatea-like hitchhiker reinvented as a con artist. Still, trouble is vital in fiction.

Any books you're looking forward to reading in the coming year? So far, I'm especially excited to read Kavita Das's forthcoming biography Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar; Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias; and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread.

HA: There are so many! Soniah Kamal's Unmarriageable, Devi Laskar's The Atlas of Red and Blues, Cameron Dezen Hammon's This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession, and my close writing-friend, Laura Maylene Walter is one to watch. Her book is going on submission soon, and I'm excited to see where it's going to land.

Anita Felicelli and Huda Al-Marashi ANITA FELICELLI is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. Her stories have appeared in The Normal School, Joyland, The Rumpus, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, and elsewhere. Her essays and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times (Modern Love), Slate, Salon, SF Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Babble, Romper, and Electric Literature. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley School of Law and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in the Bay Area with her family. ||| HUDA AL-MARASHI is the Iraqi-American author of First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story. Her other writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times, al Jazeera, VIDA Review, Refinery 29, the Rumpus, the Offing and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Arts Cleveland Creative Workforce Fellowship and an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writer Fellowship. Huda currently resides in California with her husband and three children.

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Anita Felicelli and Huda Al-Marashi Discuss Diaspora, Breaking the Rules, and Reality vs. Likability - The Millions

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In 2014, Huda Al-Marashi and I met at a writers' meet-up. Afterward, we kept up with each other's writing on social media. By reading each other's personal essays, we discovered we shared similar cultural concerns as hyphenated Americans, and we have even more in common now that we're both writers with three children each-it's a great solace to know another writer who is a mother.

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This list represents some of our favorite Children's and Young Adult books that we read and were published in 2021. As with our previous lists, these choices are based on their thoughtful and nuanced treatment of Muslims and Islam, and the intersections of identity. We are pleased to see the steady growth of books by Muslim authors and with Muslim protagonists being published by mainstream publishers, and considered over 100 titles, children's, young adult, and adult titles with YA appeal when creating this list. This year, graphic novels are in their age associated categories. A PDF version of our list will be available soon.

Again, we have not included fantasy and sci-fi titles by Muslim authors whose worlds and characters do not reflect explicit Muslim identity in this list. As stated on our release calendar there is power in speculative fiction/fantasy/scifi world building in exploring issues related to the real world and adding to the canon. We are highlighting these works on the calendar and plan to add a future, separate list with many of these excellent and thought-provoking titles.

What were your favorites of 2021?
Picture Books
Amira's Picture Day. Reem Faruqi, Illus. Fahmida Azim. 2021. 40p. Holiday House, $17.99. (9780823440191). PreS-Gr. 3. Link to review by Ariana .

Bangladeshi Muslim Zubi Chowdhury is an absolute sweetheart of a girl - bold, friendly, and full of life. While preparing for her first day of school, Zubi witnesses her family and friends make comments about how they are either 'fat' or 'going on a diet,' and having her to question why, and ultimately making her feel that she may need to do the same. When Zubi announces her intention to go on a diet too, her family reflects on the effect of their words, and how "we can be mean to ourselves without even realizing it," resulting in an important conversation about the toxicity of negative self-talk, body acceptance and strength, and acceptance of oneself. Visual and textual references are made to Islamic practice and Bangladeshi culture, with Zubi's mother wearing a hijab and putting on a sari, Zubi's bangles, and food like laddoos and parathas mentioned on many of the pages. Zu bi's school is a diverse, multiracial community, and one child, wearing a dress, uses they/them pronouns. Backmatter includes a glossary and a photo of the author. This simple story tackles body image, body confidence, and self-acceptance, and can be used as a model to have conversations about body image with young children. Pair this with Laxmi's Mooch for conversations about body acceptance and a broader representation of South Asian countries and cultures.

. Fatima's Great Outdoors. Ambreen Tariq, illus. by Stevie Lewis. 2021. 40p. Kokila (PYR/PRH), $17.99. (9781984816955). Gr. K-3. Link to reviews/discussion by Ariana, Noureen and Amna

Halal Hot Dogs. Susannah Aziz, illus. by Parwinder Singh. 2021. 40p. Little Bee Books, $17.99. (9781499811575). Gr 2-4. Link to review by Mahasin .

Hannah and the Ramadan Gift. Qasim Rashid, illus. by Aaliya Jaleel. 2021. 40p. Viking Books for Young Readers (PRH), $17.99. (9780593114667). PreS-Gr. 2. Link to review by Ariana .
I Went for Hajj. Na'ima B. Robert, illus. by Paula Pang. 2021. 32p. The Islamic Foundation, $11.95. (9780860377528). PreS-Gr. 2.
This charming book, told in the rhyming style of By Bill Martin, Jr., describes the Hajj journey through the eyes of a young child. While some rhymes are more successful than others, the scheme helps to break down important parts of Hajj as easy to understand actions. The foreword includes an author's note explaining the use of rhyming text to appeal to children, but emphasizes that it is not prescriptive for the performance of the rituals of Hajj. There are, however, points of discussion to breakdown points and rituals of Hajj to readers. End papers include a glossary of terms. Illustrations feature female and male hajjis/hajjahs (pilgrims) dressed in white, in various skin tones, and some papers include illustrations of pilgrims in wheelchairs. On the spread that features the kaaba, building at the center of the Masjid al-Haram, readers will appreciate the detail of the gold-colored foil used for the kiswah, the black brocade cloth that adorns the building. Illustrations are done in a retro, simple style, but reflect the contemporary backdrop of Makkah. Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

. In My Mosque. M. O. Yuksel. illus. by Hatem Aly. 2021. 40p. Harper (Harpercollins), $17.99. (9780062978707). Pre-S-Gr. 3. Link to review by Noureen

Little Seeds of Promise. Sana Rafi, illus. by Renia Metallinou. 2021. 48p. The Innovation Press, $15.99. (ISBN‎ 9781943147939). Grades K-3. Link to reviews by Amna and Noureen .

This joyous, vibrant counting book follows Musa and his Dada (older sister) as they head to Nungwi beach on the daladala, a minibus common in Tanzania. Along the way they stop for a plethora of passengers and their wares. While Musa complains that there can't possibly be room for them all, Dada insists that they can make room for everyone. Unlike other counting tales where space capacity might lead to bursting, there is room indeed for everyone as they joyfully and inclusively make space for all with wiggles and giggles galore. And even Musa is convinced-Alhamdulillah-that the whole motley crew will make it to the beach together. The backmatter includes a brief glossary of terms and an author's note. Illustrations by Mercè López are rich in color, pattern, and texture, and readers familiar with Unguja (Zanzibar island) may recognize architectural elements of Stone Town including the minaret of the Malindi mosque on the cover. In Betsy Bird's interview with Naaz Khan , the author discussed her travels in Zanzibar, cultural consultation, and why it was important to have different shades of dark brown skin in representing Zanzibaris, and widening representation of Muslims in children's literature.

After losing her leg in an accident, Aria is finally returning to school, but finds that sitting on the floor all day with her prosthetic "helper-leg" is painful. With all the wooden furniture in the school used as fuel to keep houses warm during the war, Aria comes up with the idea to build a bench with discarded materials. Her classmates doubt she can do it, but Aria is determined to do "anything a boy can do" and barters a loaf of sweet bread with Kaka Najar, a carpenter, for instruction and use of his tools. Kaka Najar gifts her a can of blue paint to use for her project, sky-blue signifying courage, peace, and wisdom. Illustrations are beautifully vibrant and colorful, particularly in the markets of the Old City, and residents are dressed in a variety of styles, skin tones in various shades of brown, and facial expressions. Aria's actions not only inspire her classmates, she passes on her knowledge, skills, and hope to them and to her brother, knowing that they can "build everything we need together." End papers show Aria putting on her new red shoes on while the back end papers show Aria and her classmates planning and collecting materials together to improve their classroom. Though there is no specific time period specified in the text of the story, the author's note indicates that elements of the story reflect his own experiences growing up Afghanistan in the early 90s and the need to use wooden furniture as firewood and teaching children to be able to identify land mines, particularly "butterfly mines" that had a reputation for being attractive to children. A Sky-Blue Bench was a 2022 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor Book Winner.

Nonfiction

Written by Syrian child refugee and activist, Bana Alabed, this book opens with a young Bana asking her mother, depicted wearing a light green hijab, why she gave her the name "Bana." Her mother tells her that she is named after a tree that grows in Syria and like the tree, Bana's parents hoped that she would be "qawia," strong. Following up by asking what it means to be strong, Bana's mother explains different elements of strength, including the most important, "amal," hope. One of the spreads, shows Bana on a computer while her mother stands behind her, referring to Bana's initial use of Twitter to bring increased awareness to the Syrian Civil War and the siege of Aleppo. Bana reflects on how she embodied strength during the war while in Syria, in moving to a new place, and in using her voice to speak up for children's rights. Illustrations are simple and sensitive in their depiction of war, showing the mother and children turning away from a red-tinged sky with texts addressing bombing. An afterword from the author assures child readers that she is safe now, living in Turkey with her family and concludes that while she's encouraging children around the world living in war zones to be strong, her message to adults is that "kids shouldn't have to always be so strong. Every child deserves to live in peace."
Early Readers
Yasmin series. (Yasmin the Librarian, Recycler, Singer, Scientist). Saadia Faruqi. Illus. by Hatem Aly. 2021. 32p. Picture Window Books (Capstone), $5.95 (Paperback: 9781515883722, 9781515883746, 9781515883753, 9781515883739). K-Gr.3. Fountas & Pinnell Level K.

The newest additions to the series feature Pakistani American second-grader Yasmin helping in the library, encouraging her classmates to recycle, shyly singing in secret at a wedding party, and coming up with a project for the science fair. Yasmin's interactions with her multi-generational Pakistani American family are endearing and her everyday adventures recognize child agency and actions. Faruqi's sprinkling of Urdu words and Aly's beautiful and bold illustrations convey cultural details and insights into Yasmin's world. Some titles are available in Spanish and French.

Sadiq series (Sadiq and the Big Election, Gamers). Siman Nuurali, illus by. Christos Skaltsas. 2021. 64p. Picture Window Books (Capstone), $6.95. (9781663921901, 9781663921918). K-Gr. 3. Fountas & Pinnell Level M.

These followup voliumes about Somali American Muslim third-grader Sadiq continue to show the importance and value in involvement in community service and relationships. Each volume contains information around Somali culture, a glossary of words in Somali as well as terms that pertain to each story, and a reader/educator guide to asking questions about the story and related activities. In Sadiq and the Big Election, a class election for president, vice president, treasurer, and secretary has Sadiq coming up with big ideas to improve things in his school, but what will happen when one of his best friend's announces that he's running for the same position? In Sadiq and the Gamers, his gaming club is hosting a competition and trying to find a way to also serve the community. Could their gaming possibly engage the seniors in the local retirement community? Sadiq and his friends come up with ways to solve problems and make their community better than ever.
Middle Grade
Fiction

Ahmed Aziz's Epic Year. Nina Hamza. 2021. 320p. Quill Tree (HarperCollins), $16.99. (9780063024892). Gr 3-7. Link to review by Mahasin .

Amina's Song. Hena Khan. 2021. 288p. Salaam Reads (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), $17.99. (9781534459885). Gr. 3-7. Fountas & Pinnell Level U. Amina's Song was the 2022 Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children's Literature.

In this sequel to the well-received Amina's Voice (2017), Pakistani-Muslim American Amina has traveled to Pakistan to visit her extended family. She returns home to the U.S. excited to teach her friends about the beauty of the country and its people. A school project promises that opportunity, but Amina finds that her task is more difficult than she anticipated, as she must confront her classmates' biases. A realistic narrative about identity formation and friendships in middle school.

This graphic novel iteration of Ms. Marvel, written by Nadia Shammas and ably illustrated by Nabi H. Ali, opens with Kamala Khan firmly established as Ms. Marvel. In fact she is so established as a superhero and next-gen member of the Avengers (alongside Spiderman/Miles Morales, Squirrel Girl/Doreen Green, and mentor Iron Man/Tony Stark), a website moderator, fanfic writer, and babysitter that she finds herself stretched a bit thin, sometimes literally. In keeping her superhero identity and powers a secret from her family, Kamala's relationship with them is a bit strained, and she appears to be neglecting them, her home life, and her Qur'an classes at the mosque. But even though her best friends white, Bruno and Turkish American, Nakia, know her secret, they also feel that Kamala is ignoring them and clearly needs help managing all her tasks. Everything comes to a head when a robot tries to take over Avengers Tower and Kamala must sort out her issues in order to fix this...and everything else. Though some more dedicated readers may feel like plot points are a little too on the nose (the villain will be obvious to all), this is clearly aimed towards younger readers, and works towards focusing on Ms. Marvel's relationships and her consistent humor. Easter eggs abound, with a nod to Pakistani actor Fawad Khan and his role in the upcoming Ms. Marvel television series

Omar's teacher has been abducted by aliens! Or at least that's what Omar believes happened. What else could possibly explain why their wonderful Mrs. Hutchinson has suddenly been replaced by the awful Mrs. Crankshaw and why all the teachers won't explain where she went? Though his best friends Charlie and Daniel don't quite believe the alien theory, their attempts to find any clues lead nowhere. And with Omar's family off to Pakistan for a wedding, their rescue plans are stalled. Where in the world could Mrs. Hutchinson be? A great addition to the Planet Omar series, this third volume is equally full of humor and heart and infused with Islamic terms and values.

Unsettled. Reem Faruqi. 2021. 352p. HarperCollins, $16.99 (9780063044708). Gr 4-6. Link to review by Mahasin .

Based on Trebinčević's own life as a Bosnian refugee, this story details three years of young Kenan's life, as an 11-year-old at the start of the Bosnian war and the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation. Though many Bosniaks are fleeing to other parts of Europe, Kenan cannot believe that his best friends would treat him any differently because his family is Muslim, especially when he sees his family as not being particularly religious. His father equally believes that because he is well-liked, respected, and keeps out of politics, that they will not be targeted. When it becomes evident that not only have their former friends turned on them, including Kenan's teacher, the family also realizes that they may have waited too long to flee. Kenan and his family face food deprivation, threats of violence and death, and constant fear for their lives as they struggle to survive and possibly flee. Somewhat miraculously, they are able to flee to Austria, even with Kenan's brother and father being taken to a concentration camp at one point where other Muslim men have faced death. Kenan's uncle Ahmet even remarks at one point that they are the luckiest Bosnian Muslim family having not lost any of their relatives. Through the narrative the reader sees psychological and emotional costs of war as they are betrayed by former friends and neighbors and Kenan is often skeptical of who to trust, if friendship is real or lasting. And even when they make their escape they never feel safe or settled, relocated several times in Austria and then again to the United States where, like many refugees, they are treated at times with compassion but also as unwanted, degraded guests. But despite the trauma and palpable, authentic anger, Kenan learns that there is good and bad amongst all people and that despite all of the loss he is grateful that he and his family can be together. Though the narrative sometimes falters in pacing and some concepts and historical events may need more context for younger readers, it is overall a poignant and important story. Text also alludes to violence and sexual assault, but is never overly explicit, and is well-suited for upper middle grade readers.

​​Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero. Saadia Faruqi. 2021. 368p. Quill Tree (HarperCollins), $16.99. (9780062943255). Gr 3-7. Link to review by Mahasin .

Nonfiction

New Yorker and Guinea American Adama Bah was a typical teenager when the September 11th terrorist attacks were carried out. Soon afterwards, however, her life changed forever when she and her father were falsely accused of terrorism and plans to become suicide bombers. Subsequently separated from her family and detained, she learns that she is not an American citizen, her father is deported, and she must work to support her large family in the U.S. and in Guinea. This well-paced narrative offers an informative and terrifying look at what it was like for many Muslims in the days and years following 9/11 and offers much needed representation about Muslims of African heritage.
Young Adult
The Awakening of Malcolm X. Ilyasah Shabazz and Tiffany D. Jackson. 2021. 336p. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Macmillan), $17.99. (9780374313296). Gr. 7-12. Link to review by Nada .
Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating. Adiba Jaigirdar. 2021. 352p. Page Street Kids, $17.99. (9781645672579). Gr. 9-12.
Bangladeshi Irish and Muslim Hani, has just come out to her two best friends Aisling and Dee as being bisexual, but they don't believe that she can know for certain since she has never even kissed a girl. Bengali and Indian Irish (as well as atheist and closeted) Ishu is studious and serious, always wanting to please her parents, who only have eyes for their golden child, Ishu's older sister Nik. But Nik has recently fallen from grace, having left university to get married, and Ishu's parents are more on her than ever to succeed. When Hani proposes to Ishu that they should fake date Ishu, who normally would hate being pigeonholed into being THE two queer brown girls dating, agrees since Hani's popularity could help Ishu become Head Girl and convince her parents that Ishu is not like her sister. Jaigirdar navigates the fake dating trope with aplomb, bringing in multitudes of layers of identity, racism, homophobia and bierasure, with a delightful amount of romance and angst. Hani is out to her parents who are accepting of her sexuality. Hani also attends mosque, prays, reads Qur'an and does not drink alcohol, and faces disdain and confusion from her friends who signal that she doesn't seem like "one of those" Muslims (since she does not wear hijab) and further solidifies their continuous aggressions against her sexual identity.

Home Is Not a Country. Safia Elhillo. 2021. 224p. Make Me a World (PRH/RHCB), $17.99. (9780593177051). Gr. 8-12. Link to review by Nada . Home is Not a Country was a 2022 Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor Winner.
Huda F Are You? Huda Fahmy. 2021. 192p. Dial Books (PRH), $14.99. (9780593324318). Gr. 7-17.
to place her high school story in the present day with references to contemporary social media tools, but adult readers will see familiar references to discrimination and targeting of the Muslim communities in the immediate years following 9/11. Fahmy's humorous, laugh-out-loud work continues to entertain, educate, and resonate with all readers and is also an important work of self-reflection for Muslim readers. Huda Fahmy's fictionalized graphic memoir follows a high school-aged Huda who has moved with her family from a place where she was the only hijabi in her class to Dearborn, Michigan with a significantly higher Muslim and Arab population. Huda struggles to find her place in the high school hierarchy and realizes that not only has she made hijab her personality (harder to do when surrounded by other hijabis and cliques of hijabis), but that she has made herself small in order to be pleasing to others. Her humor, while witty, is often self-deprecating and her internalized self-loathing causes further harm to herself and the ones that she loves. Fahmy made the deliberate choice

Listen, Layla. Yassmin Abdel-Magied. 2021. 288p. Penguin Australia, $15.99. (9781760896065). Gr 7 and up. Link to review by Mahasin .

Misfit in Love. S.K. Ali. 2021. 320p. Salaam Reads (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), $19.99. (9781534442757). Grades 9-12. Link to Review by Nada .

Perfectly Parvin. Olivia Abtahi. 2021. 320p. G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers (PRH), $17.99. (9780593109427). Gr. 7-12.

Fun-loving prankster Parvin Mohammadi is elated to start high school with her new boyfriend, Wesley, only to have him dump her at freshman orientation for being "loud" and "too much." Wallowing in romance movies, Parvin comes to the (false) realization that demure girls get the guy and plans to show up Wesley by getting bisexual sophomore Matty Fumero to be her Homecoming date. Parvin's attempt to 180 her personality and style has best friends pansexual, Korean American Ruth and gay, Mexican American Fabian doubtful and disapproving. Parvin's aunt Sara, who is viewing it all via Skype from Iran while waiting on her U.S. visa to arrive, also urges Parvin to be herself. Compounding this self-doubt is Parvin's internalized identity struggle and how much this affects her perception of beauty and romance. Despite their obvious affection, she is not able to glean much from her Iranian Shi'a father, does not look much like her white Episcopalian mother or any of the beautiful women in the media, nor does she feel Iranian enough to fit in with the other Iranians Americans, even as it becomes obvious that one of her classmates from Farsi school may want to be more than friends. But when her schemes and internalization lead her to ditch her friends when they need her most and her aunt Sara's plan to visit is threatened by the Muslim ban, Parvin must decide what is most important to her and what kind of person she truly is. Even in her most self-deprecating moments, Parvin is funny, witty, and lovable. And while some elements of representation might give readers pause, it is all in the cause of learning acceptance. A truly enjoyable read.

Piece by Piece: The Story of Nisrin's Hijab. Priya Huq. 2021. 224p. Abrams, $22.99. (9781419740169). Gr. 7 and up. Link to Review by Mahasin .

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This list represents some of our favorite Children's and Young Adult books that we read and were published in 2021. As with our previous lists, these choices are based on their thoughtful and nuanced treatment of Muslims and Islam, and the intersections of identity.

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For 40 years, AAJA has advocated on behalf of AAPIs in the newsroom on the front lines for stronger representation and more inclusion. We are proud to stand on the shoulders of our fearless founders. This year, we celebrate our 40th anniversary at a critical moment in U.S. history, and honor our trailblazers while looking forward to the next generation of AAPI journalists.

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Front Page, Asian American Journalists Association

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For 40 years, AAJA has advocated on behalf of AAPIs in the newsroom on the front lines for stronger representation and more inclusion. We are proud to stand on the shoulders of our fearless founders. This year, we celebrate our 40th anniversary at a critical moment in U.S.

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Conscious Language + Design - Conscious Style Guide

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For anyone curious or serious about conscious language. The latest observations, opinions, and style guides on conscious language-all in one place.

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13 Asian American & Pacific Islander Authors On The First Time They Saw Themselves In A Book

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13 Asian American & Pacific Islander Authors On The First Time They Saw Themselves In A Book

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Fellicelli, Anita. "13 Asian American & Pacific Islander Authors On The First Time They Saw Themselves In A Book." Bustle. May 1, 2019.

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The past year has seen the publication of numerous brilliant works of fiction by Asian American and Pacific Islander authors, yet there are so many narratives still to be explored. There are 48 countries in Asia and three Oceanic sub-regions, and the experiences of those with heritages from these cultures vary dramatically from state to state, city to city, and individual to individual. The publishing world has only recently begun to catch up to the striking diversity of these experiences.

Bustle asked 13 Asian American and Pacific Islander authors about the first time they saw themselves in a book. Their answers are revealing. Just a few decades ago, there were fewer works of fiction in which readers might see themselves reflected. Some authors didn't see characters with whom they identified until they were already adults. Others may not have been looking for characters with a particular heritage. Some authors made do with makeshift glimpses of representation.

Today, authors are creating a phenomenal, heterogenous canon for readers. Books spring to life when readers read and talk about them. During the present moment, in which some seek to narrow what it means to be American, what it means to be us, it's more vital than ever to buy, read, and support these rich, pioneering works:

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13 Asian American & Pacific Islander Authors On The First Time They Saw Themselves In A Book

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The past year has seen the publication of numerous brilliant works of fiction by Asian American and Pacific Islander authors, yet there are so many narratives still to be explored. There are 48 countries in Asia and three Oceanic sub-regions, and...

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On Whiteness Part I: Jess Row and Timothy Yu Talk Writing About Rac‪e

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On Whiteness Part I: Jess Row and Timothy Yu Talk Writing About Rac‪e

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fiction/non/fiction podcast

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In the first half of a special two-part episode, novelist and critic Jess Row and poet and critic Tim Yu talk to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about writing about whiteness in America. How can white writers render their communities' part in the country's history of racism, and also challenge them? Row and Yu also share their responses to Bob Hicok's recent Utne Reader essay about diversity in poetry.
To hear the full episode, subscribe to the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (make sure to include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below.
Guests:Jess RowTim YuReadings for the Episode:Jess RowWhite FlightsYour Face in Mine"What Are White Writers For?" in The New Republic, Sept. 30, 2016"Native Sons: A straight white American man on loving James Baldwin and learning to write about race" in Guernica, Aug. 13, 2013
Tim Yu "The Case of the 'Disappearing' Poet: Why did a white poet see the success of writers of color as a signal of his own demise?" The New Republic, August 7, 2019White Poets Want Chinese Culture Without Chinese People Calvin Trillin's "Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?" is the latest in a long artistic tradition. The New Republic, April 8, 2016, 100 Chinese Silences

Whitney TerrellThe King of Kings CountyThe Huntsman
Others:White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo (book)"White Fragility," by Robin DiAngelo (article)"The Authentic Outsider: Bill Cheng, Anthony Marra, and the freedom to write what you don't know," by V.V. Ganeshananthan"The Dominance of the White Male Critic: Conversations about our monuments, museums, screens and stages have the same blind spots as our political discourse," by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, The New York Times, July 5, 2019"The Promise of American Poetry," by Bob Hicok, Utne Reader, Summer 2019 (originally appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2018)"Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?" by Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker, March 28, 2016Orientalism by Edward SaidMapping Prejudice
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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on whiteness part i: jess row and timothy yu talk writing about race

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‎fiction/non/fiction: On Whiteness Part I: Jess Row and Timothy Yu Talk Writing About Race on Apple Podcasts

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In the first half of a special two-part episode, novelist and critic Jess Row and poet and critic Tim Yu talk to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about writing about whiteness in America. How can white writers render their communities' part in the country'...

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11 Books Featuring South Asian Characters to Read in 2021

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11 Books Featuring South Asian Characters to Read in 2021

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Makhijani, Pooja. "11 Books Featuring South Asian Characters to Read in 2021." Teen Vogue. (Feb 22, 2021).

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11 Books Featuring South Asian Characters to Read in 2021

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The Conscious Kid is an education, research and policy organization that supports families and educators in taking action to disrupt racism, inequity and bias

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Perry, Alyssa Jeong; Shereen Marisol Meraji; Gene Demby; Kumari Devarajan; Jess Kung; Leah Donnella. "Screams and Silence." NPR Code Switch. (March 24, 2021).

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

subscribe to Code Switch podcast

Asian American organizers and influencers have been trying to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism over the last year, and have been frustrated by the lack of media and public attention paid to their worries. Then came last week, when a deadly shooting spree in Georgia realized many of their worst fears and thrust the issue into the national spotlight.

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Asian American organizers and influencers have been trying to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism over the last year, and have been frustrated by the lack of media and public attention paid to their worries.

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Why So Many Asian Americans Are Learning Remotely

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Why So Many Asian Americans Are Learning Remotely

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Kamenetz, Anya. "Why So Many Asian Americans Are Learning Remotely." NPR. (April 9, 2021).

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Last month, Tsong Tong Vang was walking his 5-year-old grandson to the school bus in St. Paul, Minn., when, according to local media reports, a woman pulled up in a car and started yelling anti-Asian abuse and threats at him.

Reports of such incidents have been growing around the country since early last year, amid public statements by President Trump and others linking China with the coronavirus pandemic. And they may be one reason for some Asian families not to send children to school in-person right now.

Asian American students are far more likely to be learning remotely than members of any other racial or ethnic group in the United States. As of February 2021, almost 7 in 10 Asian American K-12 students were still learning online only, according to the U.S. Education Department's latest school survey. That's 12 points higher than Hispanic students, 15 points higher than Black students, and 45 points higher than white students.

Some of that gap may be because a large number of the nation's Asian students live in California, where most public schools remained closed in February. But the gap holds across the Northeast, the Midwest and the South, suggesting that Asian students are choosing to stay remote even where there are in-person options.

"I think it is striking that Asian-Americans are so hesitant to send their kids back to school," says Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of the group Stop AAPI Hate. They published a report last fall in which youths detailed hundreds of incidents of harassment and physical assault.

Jeung and other experts say anti-Asian racism and even violence, as exemplified by the Atlanta-area mass shooting last month, may be keeping some students at home.

"Concern about the pandemic, plus the concern over the racism that their kids may experience on the way to school or within the classroom," Jeung says, "are both major issues to sending your kid back to school."

OiYan Poon agrees. She's an expert in the racial politics of education, access and Asian-Americans, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"I know plenty of people, including myself, who experienced this kind of racialized bullying in schools as children," she said. "And as a parent to a young child in public school systems, I'm not comfortable, personally, now with sending my child in to school for that reason."

Poon, Jeung and other experts say that, beyond the rise in anti-Asian racism, there are other reasons that Asian-Americans may be staying home from school in larger numbers than others. They are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to live in intergenerational households, making them potentially more worried about putting grandparents at risk from COVID-19, while also providing more adults who can help balance the demands of work and remote learning.

And, says Poon, "Asian-Americans tend to be a very transnational population, meaning that the majority of this population is immigrant or has immigrant ties. "

WIth friends and family living overseas, Poon says, she is looking at the experience of places like South Korea or Taiwan where they are "living their best life," having brought the pandemic well under control. Some Asian Americans may feel that the U.S. is not taking the pandemic seriously enough. "The last few decades, places in Asia have experienced epidemics and have managed things very differently than how the United States has been handling this current pandemic."

Van Tran is a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research has found that Asian-Americans are historically more loyal to public schools than other racial and ethnic groups. He points out yet another reason that Asian families may be hesitant to go in person: They are more likely to choose magnet schools which require them to travel longer distances. In New York City, that can mean public transit.

Asian families, Tran says, including his own sibling's, are sharing information over WhatsApp and on social media, and concluding that New York City's schools are just not physically safe right now.

And that, he adds, is a real loss: "It cuts to the very core of trust and among immigrant families, what we call an institutional trust, with the public education system being one of the most important ones that many Asian immigrants encounter upon arriving in the United States."

When New York City recently had another chance for students to opt-in to in-person learning, he said, some families that had already gone back to school in person told their friends and neighbors that it wasn't worth it because of the frequent quarantines.

"And this kind of mismanagement, of the opening and closing of the transition from remote and online that we experienced over the last year has been tremendously disruptive," Tran says.

Tran and other experts worry the educational consequences of this extended time in remote learning could be grim, especially for Asian students who are English language learners.

Poon's 6-year-old daughter is in the Chicago public schools, learning remotely this year. And she agrees it hasn't been ideal. Her daughter sometimes wanders away from Zoom class altogether.

Still, they are debating about what to do in the fall.

"My husband and I have talked about sending our daughter back in physically in September, but we've also said, 'let's see what happens,' " Poon says. "Let's have another check in in August about what that looks like and what that means and how the school is handling things."

She says that rebuilding trust and making public schools feel safe for her family - both physically and emotionally - will take time and effort.

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Why So Many Asian Americans Are Learning Remotely

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Last month, Tsong Tong Vang was walking his 5-year-old grandson to the school bus in St. Paul, Minn., when, according to local media reports, a woman pulled up in a car and started yelling anti-Asian abuse and threats at him.

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Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic

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Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic

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Huyck, David, Sarah Park Dahlen, Molly Beth Griffin. (2016 September 14). Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic. sarahpark.com blog. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversity-in-childrens-book-publishing/

Statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/books-by-about-poc-fnn/

Released for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

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Huyck, David and Sarah Park Dahlen. (2019 June 19). Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. sarahpark.com blog. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/books-by-about-poc-fnn/. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/.

Released for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0 license). You are free to use this infographic in any of your work, including presentations and published work, so long as you provide the full citation noted above.

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Karate, Wonton, Chow Fun: The end of 'chop suey' fonts

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Karate, Wonton, Chow Fun: The end of 'chop suey' fonts

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Quito, Anne. "Karate, Wonton, Chow Fun: The end of 'chop suey' fonts." CNN. (April 8, 2021).

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Written by Anne Quito, CNN

This feature is part of CNN Style's new series Hyphenated, which explores the complex issue of identity among minorities in the United States.

Here's a thought experiment: Close your eyes and imagine the font you'd use to depict the word "Chinese."

There's a good chance you pictured letters made from the swingy, wedge-shaped strokes you've seen on restaurant signs, menus, take-away boxes and kung-fu movie posters. These "chop suey fonts," as American historian Paul Shaw calls them, have been a typographical shortcut for "Asianness" for decades.

Shaw traces the fonts' origins to the Cleveland Type Foundry which obtained a patent for a calligraphy-style printing type, later named Mandarin, in 1883. It is perhaps no surprise that this Eastern-inspired lettering emerged in the late 19th century, an era when Orientalism coursed feverishly through the West.

"Mandarin, originally known as Chinese, is the granddaddy of 'chop suey' types," Shaw wrote in the design magazine, Print. "Neither the food nor the fonts bear any real relation to true Chinese cuisine or calligraphy. But this has not prevented the proliferation of chop suey lettering and its close identification with Chinese culture outside of China."

Type designers in the West have since cooked up many of their own versions of chop suey. Variations on the font are commercially distributed as Wonton, Peking, Buddha, Ginko, Jing Jing, Kanban, Shanghai, China Doll, Fantan, Martial Arts, Rice Bowl, Sunamy, Karate, Chow Fun, Chu Ching San JNL, Ching Chang and Chang Chang.

It's hard not to cringe at the Chinese stereotypes bundled up with each font package -- especially when seen through the lens of today's heightened vigilance toward discrimination and systemic racism. Critics believe that using chop suey typefaces is downright racist, particularly when deployed by non-Asian creators.

White politicians, meanwhile, have been using chop suey fonts to stoke xenophobia for over a century. In her book, "This is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot," Cooper Union professor Alicia Cheng draws attention to the "chopsticks font," as she calls it, used by San Francisco politician Dr. C. C. O'Donnell on a 1876 ballot, as he vowed to deport all Chinese immigrants if he was elected into office.

More contemporary examples include Pete Hoekstra, the former US ambassador to the Netherlands, who -- during his run for Senate in 2012 -- was criticized for campaigning with an ad featuring a caricature of a Chinese woman and a website with chop suey lettering. And in 2018, The New Jersey Republican State Committee used a version of the all-too-familiar font in a mailer attacking Korean American Democrat Andy Kim. The incendiary headline read, "There's something REAL FISHY about Andy Kim."

Hoekstra's press team and the New Jersey Republican State Committee did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

Companies and advertisers have also looked to exploit stereotypes associated with the typefaces. During World War II, oil giant Texaco produced a series of posters featuring chop suey fonts next to a buck-toothed caricature in order to vilify the "Yellow Peril."

When asked to comment on the historical posters, a spokesperson for Chevron Corporation, now Texaco's parent company, told CNN: "Texaco's World War II posters are regrettable and inconsistent with Chevron's values."

Similarly, online grocer Fresh Direct, clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch and the game developers behind "Cyberpunk 2077," CD Projekt, are among the many companies criticized for using culturally appropriative fonts in the last two decades.

A spokesperson for FreshDirect told CNN that the company "unequivocally" denounces racism and discrimination and regrets usingacontroversial typeface on advertising and packaging for its "stir fry kits," adding that no-one involved in the 2012 decision is still at the organization. A spokesperson for Abercrombie & Fitch, meanwhile, said in an email that T-shirts featuring caricatures and stereotypical fonts from 2002 "were inexcusable 19 years ago when they were released, and they do not reflect A&F Co.'s values today." The spokesperson added that the company encourages a "culture of belonging" and is "committed to doing better in the future."

CD Projekt, which used stereotypical Asian fonts in game graphics last year, did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

In 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic ushering a new tide of Sinophobia, Canadian apparel brand Lululemon fired its art director after he seemingly endorsed a "Bat Fried Rice" T-shirt design bearing the words "No Thank You," by posting it to his Instagram. The design featured a chop suey font on a take-out box with bat wings, alluding to the purported origins of the coronavirus. While the shirt wasn't his creation, the art director told various media outlets, "It is something I deeply regret, and my eyes have been opened to the profound ripple effect that this mistake has had." Lululemon quickly distanced itself from its art director emphasizing that the brand had not produced the "inappropriate and inexcusable" shirt.

Racist undertones

For an older generation of Asian Americans, spotting the faux brushstroke lettering can trigger past traumas.

"I think of words in anti-Asian or anti-Japanese signs," wrote Japanese American journalist Gil Asakawa, who began his career during a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment or "Nipponophobia" in the 1980s. "I see (the font) Wonton and I see the words 'Jap,' 'nip,' 'chink,' 'gook,' 'slope.' I can't help it. In my experience, the font has been associated too often with racism aimed at me."

But can a font, in itself, truly be racist?

In 19th-century Germany, using a calligraphic blackletter typeface called Fraktur was considered as an expression of nationalism. German books were printed in this gothic-style font, despite being hard to read. The Nazi party then embraced Fraktur -- it was even used on the cover of Adolf Hitler's manifesto, "Mein Kampf" -- before suddenly banning the font in 1941 and categorizing it as Judenlettern ("Jewish letters").

Yet, there are also examples of fonts harmlessly evoking national or regional pride. Take the distinctive Euskara lettering, used throughout the seven provinces of the Basque County, and deployed on everything from monuments to restaurant menus. The " large-footed, big-eyed, Roman-styled characters," as a 19th-century chronicler of the region's monuments once described them, emerged during the pinnacle of Basque nationalism in the late 1800s.

It's worth noting that, in 1930s America, some Chinese immigrants themselves used chop suey fonts on their restaurant signs, menus, and advertisements, as a way to heighten the exotic appeal of their establishments.

And " Oriental simulation fonts" (or letterforms designed with aesthetic markers of a particular culture) didn't just approximate Chinese calligraphy. Decorative fonts like El Dorado or Taco Salad were designed to represent Mexico. The same goes for the Pad Thai font, which borrows strokes from the Thai script. Similarly, there are a host of crude, hand-drawn fonts purporting to capture the aesthetic of the entire African continent.

Shaw said that the persistence of ethnic types, as offensive as they appear to some, lies in their graphic efficiency. They survive "for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose," he wrote. "They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices. There is no room for cultural nuance or academic accuracy in a shop's fascia."

For Yong Chen, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, it is not the font, per se, that's the issue -- but how it's used. His 2014 book "Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America," even features the typeface on its cover. "The font issue never came up during discussions of the cover design," Yong said in an email. Problems only arise, he said, when the font is deliberately used to "depict Chinese Americans and Chinese food as the Oriental other."

Chris Wu, a scholar of Chinese typography and co-founder of the New York-based design studio Wkshps, echoed Young's tempered view. "I am not offended by those typefaces, rather intrigued by them," he explained in an email. "I am glad to see the discussions and criticism about the ethnic fonts today -- it reflects a much well-informed visual culture and the sensibilities to respect minorities. However, I'd be careful about over simplifying the stories and the sentiment of embracing authenticity."

Beyond chop suey

As diverse and modern as Asia is, its prevailing typographic representations remain stuck in a bygone era. So, can we ever escape chop suey font?

"In light of the tensions in the US around race and racial stereotypes in 2020, (these fonts are) not the kind of thing I would want to be developing today," said Tom Rickner, creative director at Monotype, a 134-year old digital foundry with several chop suey fonts in its catalog.

Recalling the lone Chinese restaurant in the town he grew up in during the 1970s, Rickner explained that the foreigner-friendly chop suey fonts helped proprietors attract diners, much like the first wave of immigrant Chinese business owners in San Francisco in the 1930s. "Back then, a menu item like Peking duck was considered avant-garde and completely new and different, but we've gone so far beyond that," he said, adding that we now have alternatives to worn-out typographic tropes.

Rickner, who was once Apple's lead typographer, points to the flourishing of non-English digital typefaces in recent years. For example, there's Caspar Lam and YuJune Park's elegant serif Ming Romantic, commissioned by Vogue China and Google's open source Korean fonts, created by a team of Korean type designers, including E Roon Kang, who spoke on the challenges of creating digital fonts in the language.

Korean's Hangul writing system has a "unique way of combining consonants and vowels for a single letter" that results in a greater volume of letterforms, and therefore larger file sizes for browsers, Kang explained in an email. He said the 2018 project had made fonts -- which can be complicated and involve creating various subsets -- easier to access by designers and developers, while adding that part of its design includes an interactive function that emphasizes the letters' "malleable nature" to encourage more participation.

There's also a growing catalog of high quality Arabic type. Design schools, like KABK (The Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, Netherlands, and the University of Reading's department of typography and graphic communication in the UK, are also training students to design fonts in the world's languages -- including Chinese, which is notoriously onerous to recreate digitally.

"We need to democratize the education of type design across different ethnic and economic, socioeconomic backgrounds," Rickner said. "There's work to be done there, but it's happening.

"The right way forward is to have bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual typography," he added, suggesting that Chinese restaurant menus could perhaps, be presented in both English and (either simplified or traditional) Chinese characters.

"As a type designer, I want to celebrate those languages and those cultures. What we love is building new typefaces that support multiple scripts and languages, and today we're in such a better place than we were even just five years ago."
This article has been update to include a response from Abercrombie & Fitch. It was also updated to reflect that Pete Hoekstra is the former US ambassador to the Netherlands.

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chow fun: the end of 'chop suey' fonts - cnn

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Karate, Wonton, Chow Fun: The end of 'chop suey' fonts

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Written by Anne Quito, CNN This feature is part of CNN Style's new series Hyphenated, which explores the complex issue of identity among minorities in the United States. Here's a thought experiment: Close your eyes and imagine the font you'd use to depict the word "Chinese."

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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Book Recommendations

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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Book Recommendations

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Frick, Kaitlin. "Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Book Recommendations." ALSC Blog. (April 29, 2020).

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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Book Recommendations - ALSC Blog

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As a collection development librarian, doing my best to serve my community mostly entails purchasing e-books, creating booklists, and sharing electronic book recommendations and resources. For this post, we’re celebrating Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month (which is just around the corner).

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Resources for Pacific Islander Heritage Month

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Resources for Pacific Islander Heritage Month

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Yao, JoAnn. "Resources for Pacific Islander Heritage Month." We Need Diverse Books. (2020).

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Pacific Islanders or Pasifika are indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, which contain a multitude of rich, distinct cultures. During Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we honor not only the Native people who hail from the Pacific Islands but folks in the Pacific diaspora as well.

Below is a list of resources that is by no means comprehensive, but which highlights authors, educational tools, and more to help folks begin delving into Pasifika kidlit.

Book Collections and Resources

Pacific Picture Book Collection : "[A] collection of 36 picture books nominated by nine librarians based in New Zealand with specific responsibility for providing library services for Pasifika communities." ( Note: Includes but is not exclusively books by Pasifika authors.)
More about the collection, its inception, and a deeper dive on some of the books it includes .

Talk Story's Hawaiian & Pacific Islander Book Collection : A list of picture books, children's chapter books, Young Adult books, and more curated by a group of librarians for Talk Story, "a joint family literacy project between the Asian/Pacific American Library Association and the American Indian Library Association." ( Note: Includes but is not exclusively books by Pasifika authors.)

Pasifika Authors

Publishers

Waka Story Books : "IOE has been publishing children's books since 1976, in over 8 Pacific languages. The Institute develops the talents of local writers and artists, and adds the expertise of trained USP educators and linguists to create each of its books. IOE believes it is every Pacific child's right to read books in languages familiar to them, and enjoy stories which reflect and celebrate their own cultural experiences and values."

: "Since 1991, HUIA has made a commitment to produce wonderful and provocative books and resources allowing an insight into the diversity of Māori and Pacific perspectives, young and old alike. We undertake the challenge of exploring the stories and aspirations of our people of Aotearoa; we aim to provide a mirror for Māori to reflect and interpret their experiences and to open a fascinating window for the rest of the world."

******

JoAnn Yao is the Social Media Manager for We Need Diverse Books. Among other things, she has conducted research for the American Film Institute, provided book and script coverage for a Hollywood agency, designed an online narrative game, and written a comic for a New Frontiers anthology. She lives in New York City with her dragon's hoard of books. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

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Resources for Pacific Islander Heritage Month

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Pacific Islanders or Pasifika are indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, which contain a multitude of rich, distinct cultures. During Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we honor not only the Native people who hail from the Pacific Islands but folks in the Pacific diaspora as well.

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Kokila (pronounced KO-ki-la) brings together an inclusive community of authors and illustrators, publishing professionals, and readers to examine and celebrate stories that reflect the richness of our world.

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About Us

Lee & Low Books is the largest multicultural children's book publisher in the country. We are also one of the few minority-owned publishing companies in the United States.

Founded in 1991, we have always been family-owned and independent, which means we publish what we want and aren't afraid to take risks. Our books have won major awards including the Coretta Scott King Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the NAACP Image Award, and many more.

Lee & Low Books is committed to publishing diverse books that are about everyone, for everyone. We are dedicated to cultural authenticity, and we make a special effort to work with new authors and illustrators of color.

We publish multicultural children's books for every age, including leveled books for beginning readers, picture books, early chapter books, middle grade, and young adult books. We also publish a wide selection of bilingual and Spanish language books.

Visit our testimonials page to see some of the people and organizations who support our work!

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Lee & Low Books is the largest multicultural children's book publisher in the United States. We are your diversity source.

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Mango and Marigold Press is an award-winning independent publishing house that shares the sweet and savory stories of the South Asian experience.

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HŪLILI JOURNAL Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being offerings include No ka Pono o ka Lāhui (vol. 11.1), a special issue guest-edited by Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua and Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright, and vol. 11.2, which features a tribute to Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell. EXPLORE

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The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books

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The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books

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Ishizuka, Katie and Stephens*, Ramón. (2019). "The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books." Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 1(2).

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Recommended Citation

Ishizuka, Katie and Stephens*, Ramón (2019) "The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books," Research on Diversity in Youth Literature: Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 4.
Available at: https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss2/4

DOWNLOADS

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The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books

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Recommended Citation Ishizuka, Katie and Stephens*, Ramón (2019) "The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books," Research on Diversity in Youth Literature: Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 4. Available at: https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss2/4 DOWNLOADS

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Mountain Movers: Student Activism & the Emergence of Asian American Studies

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Mountain Movers: Student Activism & the Emergence of Asian American Studies

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Edited by Russell Jeung, Karen Umemoto, Harvey Dong, Eric Mar, Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani, Arnold Pan. Mountain Movers: Student Activism & the Emergence of Asian American Studies. 2019.

(includes a high school curriculum guide.)

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Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies shares the history of student movements at SF State, UC Berkeley, and UCLA during the 1960s and features oral histories of prior and current student activists. These student movements emerged in the midst of the Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-war, and feminist movements of that turbulent time. Student activists at these universities envisioned an education that would reflect their histories and prepare them to address the problems they saw in their communities and in society. African American, Latinx, Native American, Asian American, and Pacific Islander students demanded a quality education that was accessible to historically marginalized students of color and relevant to problems such as segregation, poverty, and political neglect.

SF State was the epicenter of the movement for ethnic studies and affirmative action and the site of the longest student strike in American history, starting in fall of 1968 and lasting five months. The SF State strike was led by African American, Asian American, Latinx and Native American students who formed the Third World Liberation Front. A similar coalition was established at UC Berkeley, which went on strike for the entire Winter quarter of 1969, and called on the university to establish ethnic studies. This movement spread and students at UCLA and elsewhere joined in demanding the establishment of ethnic studies and greater access for students of color at their respective campuses.

During this period through the early 1970s, Asian American Studies programs or departments were founded at Merritt College in Oakland, the College of San Mateo, Santa Clara University, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and California State University at Pomona and Long Beach. They were also established at campuses such as the University of Hawai'i, Yale University, and Hunter College of the City University of New York, among many others. The flourishing of a new interdisciplinary field of inquiry, along with new learning opportunities that linked students with Asian American and Pacific Islander and other communities of color, transformed higher education. And it formed the basis for a deeper understanding of the histories and experiences of communities of color in the US and their larger diasporas. There is much to learn from this rich history of social transformation.

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Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies shares the history of student movements at SF State, UC Berkeley, and UCLA during the 1960s and features oral histories of prior and current student activists. These student movements emerged in the midst of the Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-war, and feminist movements of that turbulent time.

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UCONN Asian and Asian American Studies Institute

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UCONN Asian and Asian American Studies Institute

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Want to see the work some students have done with the mental health and arts initiative involving the COVID-19 pandemic?
See this page, linked here!

With great excitement, we are proud to announce the inaugural winners of the Nom and Boulieng Vorasane Scholarship - Lynna Vo and Georgia Mikan.

Lynna is a Sophomore in Human Development and Family Sciences with an Early Childhood Development Specialization applying to the School of Education.

Georgia is a Junior in the Pre-Teaching Elementary Education program in the School of Education specializing in teaching History and Geography in Social Studies.
Read more...

Ali Asgar Tara (they/them/she/her) is a Bangladeshi transgender artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Tara combines video, text, drawing, and community performance to create political, site responsive, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Twitter @aliasgarart

Tara's scholarship and art are reflective of their past & present experiences in a very different social, cultural, political, and educational environment. Tara's current research-based art practice looks at the narratives of queer liberation in the context of the global north and juxtaposes it with their experience and understanding of queerness from the global south and argues how the neoliberal global market economy depoliticizes queerness as an Identity.

This semester, they will lead regular encounters through the Decolonial Critic Lab, a bi-weekly meeting/discussion, designed to provoke critical discussion among the student and the faculty community of UConn which aim to examine the connection between decolonial methods and how Asia has been constructed, represented, mediated, and conceptualized by artists and curators across the globe at the end of the 20th century and early 21st century. Please email jason.o.chang@uconn.edu for information on

virtual attendance.

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Home | Asian and Asian American Studies Institute

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AAASI's Illuminating Resilience Project Want to see the work some students have done with the mental health and arts initiative involving the COVID-19 pandemic? See this page, linked here! "Academic Integrity at Stake: The Ramseyer Article - Four Letters" edited by Alexis ...

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Use MyUCLA Message Center to contact the Asian American Studies Department Academic Advisor as well as to set up academic advising appointments. The academic advisor advises undergraduates and graduate students on academic issues for the Department and coordinates admissions, recruitment, and awards funding.

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Use MyUCLA Message Center to contact the Asian American Studies Department Academic Advisor as well as to set up academic advising appointments. The academic advisor advises undergraduates and graduate students on academic issues for the Department and coordinates admissions, recruitment, and awards funding.

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Trying times like these require us to muster the strength and resolve to overcome the tragic and disruptive impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic. We hope that you and your families remain safe and well. All of us at the Asian American Studies Center are working remotely while our Library/Reading Room and physical offices remain closed to the public until further notice. Please check the UCLA COVID-19 website for up-to-date information on the campus situation.

We continue our work in spite of the pandemic and in response to the xenophobia that has been emerging alongside it. In particular, we will be working on educational materials to raise awareness of the history and dangers of racial scapegoating. Words matter. This disease does not discriminate. It will take all of us working together across state and national boundaries to quell the worldwide problem of COVID-19.

In the meantime, let's continue to practice kindness and compassion as we navigate the day-to-day challenges ahead.

With warm regards,
Karen

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Trying times like these require us to muster the strength and resolve to overcome the tragic and disruptive impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic. We hope that you and your families remain safe and well. All of us at the Asian American Studies Center are working remotely while our Library/Reading Room and physical offices remain closed to the public until further notice.

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The history of tensions — and solidarity — between Black and Asian American communities, explained

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The history of tensions — and solidarity — between Black and Asian American communities, explained

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Demsas, Jerusalem and Rachel Ramirez. "The history of tensions — and solidarity — between Black and Asian American communities, explained." Vox. (March 16, 2021).

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Against the backdrop of anti-racism protests last summer, racist violence was surging in Chinatowns and Asian American communities across the country.

In July, an 89-year-old Chinese woman was set on fire while walking on the streetafter being slapped in the face in Brooklyn, New York. The two assailants, she said, didn't say a word before attacking her. She scrambled to put out the fire, but it left a large burn mark on the back of her pink blouse - a grisly reminder of the attack.

It was not an isolated incident. Between March 19 and December 31, 2020, there were more than 2,808 "firsthand accounts of anti-Asian hate," according to a report by Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that has been tracking reports on anti-Asian violence - a 150 percent rise since 2019.From being barred from establishments to being spat or coughed on, Asian Americans have reported physical and verbal harassment throughout the pandemic, as they've been used as a xenophobic scapegoat for the spread of a virus that originated in China. According to one survey conducted last April, 32 percent of Americans have "witnessed someone blaming Asian people" for Covid-19, and 60 percent of Asian Americans have witnessed this behavior.

This year, the attacks have seemed to take a more gruesome and visible turn: A 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face as he rode the subway in New York; a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman was robbed in a parking lot in San Jose ahead of Lunar New Year; and an 84-year-old Thai man was shoved to the ground in San Francisco, which resulted in his death.

These attacks may have been spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and then-President Donald Trump repeatedly using racist terms for the virus, but anti-Asian sentiment in the United States is not new - just look to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens, and President Franklin Roosevelt's executive order in 1942 that put Japanese Americans into internment camps.

"When the pandemic emerged and the president began calling the virus 'kung flu' or 'China virus,' those who were aware of how race operates knew that we were about to experience a surge of racism that we haven't seen in a while," said Pastor Raymond Chang, founder and president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, a faith-based group advocating for Asian American communities while also leading Black and Asian solidarity. "Racism against Asian Americans has always been a part of the fabric of our society. It just depends on whether it's overt and violent, or subtle and kind of flies under the radar."

What also isn't new in times of anti-Asian sentiment is the focus on relationships between Black and Asian communities. Many of the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured Black assailants, and have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans andBlack Americans. While Vox found no evidence that Black Americans are predominantly responsible for this rise in attacks, or that they areparticularly hostile to Asian Americans relative to the rest of the population, the narrative of Black-Asian hostility is rooted in immigration and economic policies that have historically pitted these communities against one another.

In America, "what we need to realize is that there's this timeless structure, in which there's always one group on top and another at the bottom," Scott Kurashige, professor and chair of comparative race and ethnic studies at Texas Christian University, told Vox. "Though there certainly is an unchanged structure in the sense that this country has had a white supremacist ruling class structure since the beginning, it's not the same techniques of governance or the same ideology, and certainly not the same people."

Ultimately, there is a failure to remember what got America to this place of racial hierarchies and lingering Black-Asian tensions: white supremacy. White supremacy is what created segregation, policing, and scarcity of resources in low-income neighborhoods, as well as the creation of the "model minority" myth - all of which has driven a wedge between Black and Asian communities. In fact, it is white Christian nationalism, more than any other ideology, that has shaped xenophobic and racist views around Covid-19, according to a recent study. And for Black and Asian American communities to move forward, it is important to remember the root cause and fight together against it.

There is already a long history of Black-Asian solidarity against oppression and structural racism, which has been obscured by these recent fissures. In the late 1960s, for instance, Black and Asian activists led the Third World Liberation Front movement to establish race and ethnic studies in college and university curriculums in California. And today, members of both communities are showing up for each other in demonstrations for Black lives and against anti-Asian violence.

"This is a moment for us to really tell that history to share that not only have Asians and other immigrants and people of color been blamed and scapegoated, but that there's also a history of our community, mobilizing, and demanding change and action - that we've stood in solidarity together with other communities," said Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate.

How policy created the conditions for Black-Asian tensions

The models we have for understanding and interpreting racism are often oversimplified and lead to frustration and resentment.

A simple model of racism that casts people as either perpetrators or victims of racism is divorced from the reality that individuals have dozens of identities outside of just their race. The fact is that Black Americans are native-born Americans, and, like all native-born people, they are susceptible to xenophobic and nationalistic sentiments that can place blame on an "other" - in this case, Asian Americans, who can be seen as "forever foreigners" even if they, too, are native-born.

While Black Americans (who are overwhelmingly Democratic) often have more liberal views on immigration reform, there is also existing research that indicates that Black people may feel economic competition with new immigrant communities that can manifest as broad anti-immigrant sentiment and racism.

"It's not that Asian-Black tensions or racial hierarchies don't exist today but that there is a failure to remember what got America to this place: white supremacy"

Scholars also highlight that a lot of this competition is due to a racial hierarchy that has placed Black Americans at the bottom. When newcomers enter the country, they encounter a system that reserves the best for wealthy, white Americans, engendering resentment and zero-sum thinking among everyone else for whatever is left.

The conflict between Korean Americans and Black Americans is one of the most visible examples of this phenomenon.

In 1965, the United States ended the quota-based system of immigration and began to push for high-skilled labor to enter the country. One group that was able to enter the country were Korean Americans who were hyper-selected - that is, they had much higher socioeconomic and educational attainment relative not only to their country of origin but also to the native-born US population.

Yến Lê Espiritu, a professor of ethnic studies who specializes in Asian American studies at the University of California San Diego, explained how this highly educated population came to the United States and was often unable to replicate the social status that they enjoyed in their home country due to racial discrimination and other barriers. Instead, they found employment as small-business owners, opening up shops in predominantly Black communities.

"Many of these immigrants didn't intend to be small businessmen. The structural context is that Korean immigrants couldn't regain the employment and educational status they once held," Espiritu told Vox. Their proximity to Black people was because they were only able to start businesses in "economically disadvantaged areas." This, coupled with the fact that anti-Black racism in financing meant Black people often couldn't start their own businesses, sparked bitterness on both sides.

Espiritu added that an additional barrier was that both groups had already been primed to mistrust each other. As Koreans consumed American media, they internalized the racist depictions of Black Americans as violent, uneducated, and poor - similarly, Black Americans had watched (with the rest of America) as Koreans were depicted as untrustworthy during the Korean War.

Edward T. Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California Riverside, explained the "middleman minority" theory, which helps further explain the tensions that arose at these Korean-owned businesses.

"'Middleman minority' is a term derived from the historical experiences of Jews in Europe and Chinese in Southeast Asia and Asian Indians in Africa," Chang told Vox. Middlemen minorities exist between dominant and subordinate groups in society and often hold professions heavily concentrated in the retail and service industries like grocery markets and liquor stores, he explained.

These groups often have daily contact with one another in a way that white Americans often do not due to segregated neighborhoods, shopping centers, and schools. Between the racist stereotypes both groups have internalized and the linguistic and cultural barriers separating them, it's little surprise the continual interactions could lead to conflict.

In America's collective memory, the most notable such collision occurred during the 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked by the acquittal of four white LAPD officers after they were videotaped beating Rodney King, a Black man. Over the following week, more than 50 people were killed and 1,000 were injured in the uprising that showcased not only anger at the verdict but also longstanding resentments between Black and Korean communities in the LA area. According to CNN, roughly half a billion dollars' worth of damage was borne by Korean-owned businesses.

Many believe the 1992 riots are emblematic of the relations between Black Americans and Asian Americans despite being the product of a specific time and place. After the riots, churches and community organizers worked to educate the two communities on their shared histories of oppression - many Korean business owners, for example, were unaware of the violence and discrimination Black people have faced in America.

Today, more than nine in 10 Korean Americans believe there is at least some discrimination against Black people, according to a survey by Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Meanwhile, 70 percent of Korean Americans agree that the government should do more to protect the civil rights of Black Americans.

White supremacy is at the crux of these tensions, including the model minority myth

According to scholars and activists who have experienced it firsthand, Black-Asian tensions have obscured America's root problem: white supremacy.

"Racism and white supremacy have created longstanding rifts between communities of color," Pastor Chang said. "The way the system works, the rhetoric around Black and Asian tensions will be used to discount the white supremacy that actually drives these tensions."

To be white is to sit atop America's ruling class - and since darker skin has historically been deemed undesirable and equated with being poor under Western and Eurocentric views, anyone who is not white falls at the bottom of this hierarchy. In this dominant Black-white paradigm, Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have had to find a way to fit in, rendering them at risk of invisibility. Those who could assimilate into the dominant framework often did, buying into the notions of racial hierarchies and white supremacy - including internalizing racism against their own communities.

But not all Asians are offered this opportunity: The categorization of Asian Americans encompasses roughly 40 ethnicities and a vast range of economic statuses, religions, regions, and cultures. While it's true that Asian Americans are the wealthiest minority group in the country, they also have the widest income gap of any racial group. Myanmarese Americans, for example, have a far higher poverty rate than other Asian groups, particularly Japanese Americans. A huge reason for this divide is due to the disparity between Asian immigrants who arrived in the US with skill-based visas and those who arrived as refugees.

"Our history is a story of seeking to belong but finding that our choices were often either erasure or exclusion or assimilation," Pastor Chang said. "We ultimately chose to try to fight erasure in the form of assimilation to the degree that made us give up a lot of our cultural heritage. When it benefited the broader white society, they didn't punish Asians as much, but when Asians are perceived as a threat, they either incarcerated or excluded us altogether."

This rush to assimilation is what has perpetuated the model minority myth and helped further racial tensions. The model minority myth took root around the time Japanese Americans were put in internment camps in World War II. Asianswere scared of returning or being put into camps, so they remained reticent and wereseen as hard workers who, as Choi puts it, "have been able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps or overcome barriers." This perpetuated the belief that nonwhite Americans can succeed and overcome racism in the US, without acknowledging the specific historical struggles of Black and Latino Americans and the role of skin color in creating a caste system meant to stoke interracial conflicts.

"The model minority stereotype really isn't meant to define Asian Americans. Rather, it's meant to define African Americans as deficient and inferior to white people by using Asian Americans as a proxy or a pawn to serve that purpose," Kurashige told Vox. "It was never an accurate portrayal of Asian Americans, but actually consciously meant to distort and stereotype Asian Americans."

The recent rise in anti-Asian attacks has reflected the anti-Asian sentiment that has always coursed throughAmerica

For example, there are other ethnicities that meet the surface criteria of a so-called model minority but are unlikely to be seen that way. According to researchers at Columbia University and UC Irvine, nearly two-thirds of Nigerian immigrants are college-educated - far exceeding the US mean at 28 percent. Like Koreans, Nigerians were defined by hyper-selected migration, but unlike Koreans, they were racialized as Black in the US context. Nigerians are not held up as a "model," yet more evidence that the minority myth was not about the outcomes of a specific group but a way to reemphasize the existing racial caste structure and absolve the government of removing barriers to success for Black people.

The model minority myth is to Asians what the "Black criminality" myth is to Black communities. Any image of Black people acting inherently violent toward Asian Americans or other groups of color feeds into the systemic tropes that have long painted Black people as criminals, which has been perpetuated by both American media and Asian media platforms like WeChat and Weibo. Last summer, Asian news media furthered the "Black criminality" image during the protests for racial justice, creating a fearmongering framework around incidents of looting and violence, rather than focusing on the largely peaceful protests.

In recent months, videos circulated in social media showing elderly Asians getting shoved and attacked, with a few of the attacks perpetrated by Black assailants, and the news and social media were quick to put the spotlight on historically complicated tensions between Black and Asian communities. Again, it's not that these fissures don't exist after decades of white supremacy-inflected policy - it's just that the emerging narrative has too easily attributed the violence to these tensions when there are other factors in play. For example, anti-Asian (and anti-China) sentiment is on the rise globally - from Australia to Europe to Canada, people are registering increasing hostility toward China and people who they think are Chinese. Not to mention in America, it is white Christian nationalists who are the most likely to say that it isn't racist to call Covid-19 "the Chinese virus."

Ultimately, the recent rise in anti-Asian attacks has not only reflected the anti-Asian sentiment that has always coursed throughAmerica, but also underscores how Asian Americans' perceived model minority status has kept that racism out of the public consciousness for so long.So when America needs an answer to why this violence is happening - the same way it was quick to blame Asians for the pandemic - the tendency is to scapegoat Black people, or to claim that these incidents aren't racially motivated.

Moving forward through solidarity

As author and activist Helen Zia said, Asian Americans are not "missing in action"; they are " missing in history." And because of this invisibility, Asian Americans are often unaware of their own communities' history of activism and solidarity with Black communities and other communities of color.

While the decades-long acculturation into a predominantly white society will take a lot of work to undo, the intergenerational gap between Asian immigrants who have absorbed anti-Black sentiment and younger US-bornAsians who are much more willing to speak out against injustice will play a major role in this shifting narrative. And it starts with looking at the moments of solidarity that have come before.

In his book The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans In the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, Kurashige examines the coexistence of Black and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles, before, during, and after World War II,going back to the creation of the model minority myth.

While Japanese Americans were incarcerated in camps, Black folks from the Jim Crow South migrated West to Los Angeles and settled in spaces that were previously occupied by Japanese Americans. After being released from internment camps, Japanese Americans found themselves having to integrate with their Black counterparts. Fearing being put back into camps, they tried to prove themselves worthy of earning back their constitutional rights by working hard. As policing and white fearmongering intensified in these communities, Japanese Americans were further invoked as a "model minority" for being able to rise up economically after their internment.

But that status didn't necessarily translate into divides between Japanese American and Black communities themselves. Kurashige cites stories of an African American elder who delivered care packages and letters to his Japanese friends when they were first put into temporary assembly centers before they were interned, and another story of a Black woman who sent high school yearbook copies to her Japanese American classmates who had been put in camps. When politicians and media stoked fears of "race riots" upon Japanese Americans being released from internment, one Black activist told the media, "I have nothing against the return of the Japanese."

"A friend who was a waitress at this cherished, now demolished, bowling alley in Crenshaw in Los Angeles said she would serve udon noodles to African American customers who were having lunch with their Japanese American friends eating grits," Kurashige said. "You can find solidarity moments like this all over the place when we shift the framework. We can still be concerned about racism and white supremacy, but we don't have to center whiteness and white ideologies all the time."

Movements of solidarity between both communities are even more widespread and out in the opentoday. Like many Americans this summer, Asian Americans ralliedaround Black Lives Matter protests and vowed to interrogate anti-Blackness within their communities. "I'm tired of the Asian community being quiet or missing in action when it's time to side with our Black brothers and sisters," one Asian American activist who joined the Black Lives Matter protests in Austin, Texas, told Vox last June. And now Black activists have joined the fight at recent rallies in New York and California, calling attention to the resurgence of anti-Asian violence. Heartwarming videos circulated on social media showing Black people chanting things like, "We are on these streets fighting for Asian lives."

Healing is happening at the community level, too. Last May, Pastor Chang led an effort to bring Black and Asian communities together by hosting a three-part panel series titled " Interconnected," in which they discussed racial biases and the deep-rooted history of Black and Asian American conflicts. And in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, Ray brought together two churches a mile apart from each other - an African American church and an Asian American church - to lead a historic solidarity march for Black lives in Chicago.

"If you take a holistic look at our history, I truly believe that Asian Americans have more in common with the African American community than with the white community in America," Pastor Chang said. "The fact that many people don't know that shows how historically malnourished we are and how fragmented our understanding of history is."

In addition to understanding this history, Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and principal of Black Futures Lab, said it's important to continue fostering these interracial relationships. Without these interracial relations and solidarity movements, she said, white nationalist groups will end up benefiting if Black and Asian communities are seen at conflict with each other instead of addressing the overall problem of systemic racism and white supremacy head on.

"We need to make sure that we're not falling into the wedges and the traps that get set for us," Garza said. "There is a long history of solidarity in Black communities and Asian communities - and those relationships are needed more than ever."

In this moment of racial reckoning, Garza, Pastor Chang, Choi, and others say it's imperative to have difficult and uncomfortable yet meaningful conversations across all racial groups to understand one another's collective struggles.

"We have to enter into the stories of other people and understand how their communities have been shaped and formed, and why they are the way they are," Pastor Chang said. "That comes through learning, unlearning and relearning, because there's a lot of misconception and misunderstanding around how we actually got to where we are today."

Ultimately, the pandemic has exposed the cracks in America's society, bringing forth the layers of systemic racism and legacies of injustice that many Americans have chosen not to pay attention to until now. And it's not only up to Black and Asian American communities to do the work of building solidarity - it's the responsibility of all Americans to understand the role that white supremacy has played in creating these rifts that are exploited again and again.

"The crisis for me is not that there's this intractable clash of cultures between Black and Asian Americans," Kurashige said. "The crisis is systemic: It is Covid-19, the persistence of white nationalism, police brutality, and these really anti-human discourses and practices that are at the center of so much of what's wrong in our country's history."

"We need dramatic change," he added. "Radical solutions never come from the top down. They start off with groups at the grassroots level breaking through the status quo."

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The history of tensions - and solidarity - between Black and Asian American communities, explained

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After a recent surge in anti-Asian attacks, the narrative quickly turned to hostilities between Black and Asian American communities. But that's too convenient of a scapegoat.

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How a Shared Goal to Dismantle White Supremacy Is Fueling Black-Asian Solidarity

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How a Shared Goal to Dismantle White Supremacy Is Fueling Black-Asian Solidarity

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Moon, Kat. "How a Shared Goal to Dismantle White Supremacy Is Fueling Black-Asian Solidarity." Time. (March 25, 2021).

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How Black-Asian Solidarity Is Taking on White Supremacy

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In the wake of the violence in Atlanta, Black and Asian communities are coming together to stand against racism

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The History Of Solidarity Between Asian And Black Americans

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The History Of Solidarity Between Asian And Black Americans

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Chang, Ailsa. "The History Of Solidarity Between Asian And Black Americans." NPR. (April 2, 2021).

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NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with author Kim Tran about the history of solidarity between Asian and Black Americans and how their movements interact.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The mass shooting in Atlanta last month and the surge of anti-Asian attacks across the country over the last year have intensified the rallying cry to end violence against Asian Americans. That crescendo comes less than a year after the wave of protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. For years, Black Lives Matter has demanded an end to police brutality and racially motivated attacks against Black people. And now, with heightened calls for solidarity between the Black and Asian American communities, we wanted to look at the relationship between them and how their civil rights movements have interacted. Joining us now is anti-racist author and consultant Kim Tran. Her research focuses on Asian American solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Welcome.

KIM TRAN: Thanks so much for having me.

CHANG: So I'm just wondering, Kim, as you've been listening to the calls for solidarity between Asian Americans and Black Americans right now, how much of this moment feels reminiscent to you of other times in the past - like, say, after the L.A. riots in 1992?

TRAN: So the first thing I want people to know is that solidarity is there. It's been there. You know, we can trace the historical roots of Asian-Black solidarity back to 1955 with the Bandung Conference, where representatives of people from the Asian continent and folks on the African continent came together to talk about what decolonization was going to look like for both of us. Fast forward to things like the relationship between Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. King, and then all the way to, you know, the fight against the Klan in New Orleans in the '80s with Vietnamese fishermen.

So within the American imaginary, we are interested in racial antagonism between Black and Asian folks. However, what we see time and time again is that we also work in concert against racial injustice. And the most recent iteration of what that looks like is the formation of Asians For Black Lives in 2014, 2015, after the call for solidarity from Black Lives Matter.

CHANG: Well, as you say, there has been tension between these two communities - Black Americans and Asian Americans. And even though the common goal of these two movements is to address colonization and to dismantle white supremacy, white supremacy has harmed Black Americans in a very different way than it has harmed Asian Americans. Like, Asians in this country have never felt what it's like to be enslaved in this country, to be mass incarcerated, right?

TRAN: Yeah, that's true. And this is the moment where I ask us to walk and chew gum at the same time, right? If I'm being really honest, I think one of the things that would be the most productive move for American racial discourse is to be able to hold racial difference and racial injustice in their own specific and unique lived experiences. They're not equivalent, and we should not rank them. What we have to do is have a conversation about the ways in which the Asian American experience is unique and different from the Black American experience and vice versa.

CHANG: But given that experiences within the Asian American community are different from experiences within the Black American community, can you talk about how those differences have played out in terms of tension between the two movements?

TRAN: So one of the tensions is we're actually talking across each other, even within our own racial group. There are Asian Americans who are abolitionists who don't want to increase funding for police, who don't believe in locking folks up. And then there are other Asian Americans who say, let's persecute and prosecute these people who are perpetuating the hate crimes. That's a tough conversation, and it's a really good example of the deeper seeded kind of chasms that exist within the greater racial injustice discourse.

So BLM was a very crystallizing moment in that it forced us to reckon with the specificity of anti-Blackness. And now, as we're seeing Asian Americans come into this conversation a bit more on a wider scale, on a grander scale, what we're seeing is the capacity of Asian Americans to say, OK, Black Lives Matter is this thing, the fight against anti-Asian violence is this thing. We are ajoint in some ways, we are unique in others, but we're going to show up together. And that is extremely exciting.

CHANG: Well, where can Asian Americans start to better show up? Because at some level, it seems that there has to be some acknowledgement that they do enjoy greater privilege in this society than Black Americans do and therefore might be able to exert leverage if they were to fuse their movement with Black Americans.

TRAN: Let's start by being honest. As a Southeast Asian woman who is light-skinned, when I walk down the street, I am not worried that a police officer is going to pull me over and kill me just for existing on the sidewalk. On the other side, as a queer Vietnamese woman, I am extremely afraid in this moment that walking down the street, I might encounter someone who wants to do something really violent toward me because they don't think I belong in this country and because they think I brought the pandemic that we're currently experiencing.

CHANG: Yeah.

TRAN: This is a kind of nuance that activists are really good at. It, however, is not a skill that American racial discourse has developed on a wider scale. And as Asian Americans, I'm really asking that we push ourselves to hold that kind of complexity. It's hard. There are very few models for it, but it's what we need to do in order to get to where we have to go.

CHANG: Kim Tran is an anti-racist consultant and author. Thank you so much for joining our show today.

TRAN: Thanks so much for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF PUNCH BROTHERS' "CLARA")

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The History Of Solidarity Between Asian And Black Americans

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NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with author Kim Tran about the history of solidarity between Asian and Black Americans and how their movements interact.

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