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For more on her story see this book: https://lithub.com/the-life-of-afong-moy-the-first-chinese-woman-in-america/

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Our Own People [Profile of Yuri Kochiyama] - NPR

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Our Own People [Profile of Yuri Kochiyama] - NPR

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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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PBS LearningMedia: Asian Americans documentary series

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PBS LearningMedia: Asian Americans documentary series

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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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"Illustrating Chinese Exclusion" Thomas Nast Cartoons

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"Illustrating Chinese Exclusion" Thomas Nast Cartoons

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Thomas Nast (1840-1902), was an illustrator and cartoonist for Harper's Weekly from 1857 (1862 full time) to 1887. In his 30-year career with the magazine, Nast drew approximately 2,250 cartoons.

When Nast died in 1902, New York Times eulogized him as the "Father of American Political Cartoon," an honorific bestowed in no small part for Nast's scathing political caricatures of William M. Tweed who ran New York City's Democratic political machine at Tammany Hall.

Nast is widely credited for exposing Tweed's corruption and Nast's Tweed cartoons comprise the vast majority of scholarship about the artist and his work. It is from this visually enriched, scandal-ridden time period that journalism historian Thomas Leonard described as an era of "visual thinking." Beyond the printed word, in cartoons, readers could see facts, suggested truths, and form opinions.

During the Tweed era, Nast began the first of 46 cartoons about Chinese immigrants, Chinese Americans, and China-U.S. relations as subjects or themes for his cartoons.

Seen as a whole, Nast's 46 Chinese drawings align with Harper's Weekly editorial position of inclusion and tolerance for all immigrants. Most historians, including Nast scholars, Morton Keller, John Adler, and Fiona Deans Halloran, among many, have defined Nast as a pro-minority and therefore a pro-Chinese artist. Few disagree that Nast contributed a rare, positive voice for Chinese American immigrants - setting him apart from the work of his peers. Consider, for example, the works of George F. Keller, cartoonist for The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, an illustrated weekly magazine of "commentary and satire" (West). Keller often took cruel aim at the Chinese by exaggerating physical and cultural differences.

Very little academic scrutiny focuses on Nast's Chinese cartoons. The most comprehensive thus far, albeit a brief 15-page examination, is offered by historian John Kuo Wei Tchen, who concedes Nast's overall sympathetic treatment of the Chinese in America. But Tchen correctly points out some grave inconsistencies where Nast lapses into negative Chinese stereotype. Tchen speculates that "Nast's exposure to living and breathing Chinese and other racial groups was probably quite limited" (211). It is unknown if Nast ever met or associated with a Chinese person in New York. Reportedly only 200 Chinese were in New York in 1870 - or how he felt about them. Tchen suggests Nast represented what he knew or was told about the Chinese, rather from direct personal knowledge.

Indeed, this would explain some of Nast's unflattering images of the Chinese. From 1868 to 1886, Nast's positive imagery toward the Chinese Americans ebbs and flows. What is apparent, is that Nast relished having a good villain to caricature, and where oppression and persecution of Chinese Americans were concerned, the ire in his ink easily pointed its nib to the Irish.

Was Nast was more motivated against those who attacked the Chinese, e.g., the Irish, (and politician James G. Blaine), than he was for presenting a case on behalf of the Chinese American as individuals? There is considerable evidence to assume that is the case. Given his progressive, Radical Republican philosophy, many of Nast's artistic choices are indeed confusing.

For example, Nast, a passionate abolitionist, offered the public a stirring portrayal of African Americans with " Emancipation of Negroes " drawn to shine the spotlight on the normalcy and assimilation of newly freed African Americans. A Chinese equivalent does not exist. Regarding the visual treatment of the Chinese in America, Nast did better than most in his profession. But, it is fair to ask why Nast did not more strongly advocate for the Chinese and refuse to repeat stereotypes. But as a nationally prominent cartoonist, his cutting, visual contributions, however flawed, succeeded in drawing national attention to post-Civil War anti-Chinese attitudes emerging as a political and moral issue.

The paths of the Irish and Chinese immigrants in America often intersected. Nast paid attention to the significant conflicts between the two ethnic groups. When evaluating Nast's treatment of the Chinese, a close examination of Nast and Irish Americans is warranted. Nast clearly saw the commonalities between the Irish and Chinese and their less-than-enthusiastic reception in America. In fact, Nast's cause de célèbre exposed unfair oppression among all ethnicities and immigrants. When it came to unveiling the root of anti-Chinese sentiment, Nast identified the Irish as the lead oppressors.

Thomas Nast turned his attention toward the "The Chinese Question" both as a cartoon title and for the common title of a much larger national discussion that surrounded labor competition. When Nast could link local anti-Chinese sentiment to Tweed and the Irish and their identity as Democrats, Nast was an effective advocate.

Chinese Americans arrived at the Pacific coast of the U.S. in response to the Gold Rush of 1848. "Nearly all the immigrants who came to America were from the province of Canton." The promise of riches propelled the Chinese to leave grim conditions in China that were both natural and man-made (Sorti 3). Like other immigrants, they came to America for a better life or the promise of economic opportunities.

Resistance to the Chinese presence by white miners, many of whom were immigrants, was immediate. They initiated a string of local laws aimed to delegitimize Chinese miners and undermine any success the Chinese newcomers might seek to gain in America. Despite these hurdles and acts of violence to drive the Chinese out of western communities, the Chinese continued to arrive, encouraged by employment opportunities in agriculture and railroad construction, and compelled to flee from poor economic conditions in their homeland.

Lenore Metrick-Chen described the conditions in China at the time as "dire" resulting from famine and poverty and decades of war with the West-in particular the Opium War with Great Britain (6). Demonizing the Chinese through visual art became an effective means of setting them apart from other immigrant groups, effectively defining the Chinese as alien, transient sojourners or as "others."

The official campaign to exclude the Chinese as a race accelerated in the 1870s when an economic recession in the United States heightened labor competition, culminating in acts of violence by white laborers in western states demanding that "The Chinese Must Go." Cartoons helped make the argument to deny naturalization to the Chinese.

A battery of specialized laws targeting Chinese immigrants quickly evolved. For a post-Civil War nation emerging from a culture of African American slavery, Chinese laborers in America quickly became suspect and incorrectly classified as forced labor - referred to as " coolies " and temporary visitors known as "sojourners" with no desire to assimilate.

A national discussion percolated. "The Chinese Question," which began and proliferated along the West Coast and eventually spanned across the U.S., asked Americans, in part, if the Chinese belonged.

Anti-Chinese activists, the most well known of whom was the Irish-born American immigrant Denis Kearney, repeatedly stoked Sinophobic attitudes and organized white labor against the Chinese. His Sand Lot chants were reinforced with news coverage and imagery which depicted the Chinese as a people who endangered an American way of life.

Defined as coolie slave laborers, carriers of diseases, and non-Christian "heathens," Kearney and his followers warned that Chinese culture included opium smoking, rat eating and an inherent refusal to assimilate to American culture. In 1882, America answered the Chinese Question. The Chinese Exclusion Act, introduced several times in the late 1870s, finally became law, the only U.S. immigration legislation in existence that banned a race of people from coming to America.

Nast paid attention to the proposed legislation and as talk of exclusion gained traction, Nast responded with some of his most passionate cartoons. Echoing his zeal against Tweed, Nast fixated on Republican James G. Blaine, a charismatic leader of his party and presidential hopeful. Courting the California vote, Blaine sided against the Chinese, and Nast relished his role to remind the public of Blaine's hypocrisy.

Fully aware of Nast's leadership role in Tweed's downfall, Blaine appealed to the artist and his editor at Harper's, George Curtis to cease producing the cartoons. Nast's pen would not be silenced. His cartoons played a role in Blaine's unsuccessful presidential bids in 1876, 1880 and 1884. Blaine's last attempt went as far as earning the Republican nomination. Blaine's 1884 campaign, two years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, propelled both Nast and Harper's Weekly General Editor George W. Curtis, to endorse the Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland. It was a startling departure from Nast's beloved Party of Lincoln. Although Nast's excoriation of Blaine cost the politician the presidency, Nast's move to the Democratic side, albeit on moral grounds, significantly contributed to the artist's loss of favor with his Republican base and marked the start of his downward trajectory at Harper's Weekly.

By 1892, 110,000 Chinese were in the United States (Pfaelzer). Nast expressed many views through his art. His attitudes on immigration and racial politics contributed to a larger discussion of "belonging" among America's newest residents and how they were included in the national narrative. How did his status as a German immigrant factor in his depiction of other immigrants and minorities? Can his use of symbols and stereotypes be justified within the genre of cartoon satire? Did the technological limitations of his craft influence the repetition of these stereotypes?

Nast and Harper's Weekly

Nast began his professional career at the age of 15. He apprenticed at several publications, honing both his artistic talent and a growing acceptance of Protestant doctrine.

In a weekly news magazine format, the current news could be delivered and accompanied with images. Photographs, however, could not be reproduced quickly as they can today- the week between publishing dates did allow photographs to be converted to steel plates for engraving (West). With multiple images, weekly illustrated magazines, unlike dailies, grew in popularity and complemented text-bound breaking news.

At Harper's Weekly, illustrations and cartoons, including Nast's, were often drawn directly on woodblock (usually boxwood) or transferred from paper to a cross-cut section of woodblock, carved by engravers and set together with movable type on a printing press. Illustrations were drawn to scale, in reverse (known as relief printing). In relief printing, the areas not receiving ink - the white areas -meticulously carved out by a staff of engravers, leaving only the black lines in relief to press against the page.

Watch a MOMA expert describe woodcut engraving. * See end note.

In New York City, the most notable weeklies were Frank Leslie's Illustrated News, the New York Illustrated News, and Harper's Weekly, the latter being the most respected and prominent. In covering events "disastrous, tragic, or splendid, the visual element could substantially enhance the power of the written word" (Halloran 22). Nast had worked for them all - and in that order - but happily achieved his goal to work full time at Harper's Weekly in 1862 (Paine 28).

Harper's Weekly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, (or Harper's Monthly) were part of a much larger publishing empire known as Harper and Brothers, owned and managed by four brothers, James, John, Joseph Wesley and Fletcher Harper. Harper's Weekly fell under the supervision of Fletcher Harper. As a publishing entity, the family empire "published books from American and European authors on a regular basis"(Halloran21) as well as school textbooks.

Harper and Brothers enjoyed a national reach and the highest influence among New York City's publishers. Among the city's plethora of competitive weekly periodicals, Harper's Weekly soon took the lead in feeding an "increasing appetite of Americans for news, entertainment, and literature" (Halloran 21). Harper's Weekly tagline was "The Journal of Civilization" and its breadth of topics included local and national news, editorials, book excerpts, depictions of Civil War battles, arrivals of immigrants, politics, religion, biographies, political opinion, travel arts and culture both foreign and domestic.

As a freshman illustrator, Nast covered harbor arrivals and fires in New York City. Assigned to cover the Civil War, Nast's art matured and his popularity grew. He passionately advocated for abolition and the emancipation of African Americans and emerged as a stalwart defender of Abraham Lincoln's Radical Republican policies.

During the mid-1860s Nast's illustrations were allegorical and lushly sentimental. After the Civil War, Nast ventured into political caricature and focused on the failed Reconstruction policies of Andrew Johnson, and in this genre of caricature Nast found his true calling. Henceforth, he rarely took his eye off of local and national politics, lampooning and exposing hypocrisy, corruption or fraud from anyone whom he viewed as antithetical of progressive Republicanism.

In local politics, Nast implicated the Irish and Catholics as key enablers of Tweed's corruption. Nast took particular exception to the Tweed-Irish-Catholic trio joining forces to interfere with the allocation of public funds in support of Catholic schools at the expense of public schools. Nast's conviction that Tweed was corrupt, the Catholic Church was greedy and power hungry, and the perception of the Irish's propensity for mob violence gave noble purpose to his cruel caricatures. Nast's cartoons were brutal but powerfully delivered. His images of Tweed and the Irish and Roman Catholic Church in America are the most well known and studied cartoons of Thomas Nast's oeuvre.

Today, many seeking to explain Nast's images, particularly those with an Irish-Catholic ancestry, often examine his cartoons out of their historical context and through a modern prism of political correctness and intolerance of stereotype. The interpretations of these images have changed as our collective refusal to tolerate stereotype has evolved.

On the Internet, an abundance of public commentary exists-a collection of online voices who weigh in regarding Nast's cartoons, images plucked from their historical context and presented as evidence of Nast's strong bias against Irish Americans in particular, or on Nast's inconsistent attitudes toward other minority groups in general.

It is important to view Nast's progression on this issue. The historical timeline of his cartoons and Nast's biography must be considered when evaluating his views on race. Ansel Adams observed, "A photograph is often looked at, seldom looked into." The same can be said for any art form, including Nast's cartoons. Nast's caricatures and illustrations contain multiple layers and experientially-formed opinions. These layers need to be examined.

Nast loaded his cartoons with visual clues; contemporary newsmakers, literary figures, symbolism, and quite often, compelling narrative in the form of posters or placards framing his main subject. To properly analyze a completed Nast cartoon, one must peel back the many ingredients Nast purposefully included. They are clues that are often overlooked. Understanding these components illuminates the reasons for the ire in Nast's ink.

* I recommend clicking on the top right option to view the whole video. Don't let the 8 hours scare you! Advance to the 17:00-minute mark to hear an excellent explanation of how Nast's cartoons were carved. (A Nast engraving of the Tammany tiger is shown on the wall).

Sources (Please refer to a complete list of cited resources here):

Halloran, Fiona Deans. Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012

Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Random House, New York. 2007. Print.

Tchen, John Kuo Wei. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776-1882. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 1999.

Storti, Craig. Incident at Bitter Creek: The Story of the Rock Springs Chinese Massacre. Iowa State Press. Ames. Iowa. 1991.

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Thomas Nast (1840-1902), was an illustrator and cartoonist for Harper's Weekly from 1857 (1862 full time) to 1887. In his 30-year career with the magazine, Nast drew approximately 2,250 cartoons. When Nast died in 1902, New York Times eulogized him as the "Father of American Political Cartoon," an honorific bestowed in no small part for...

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This book by Erika Lee shows a comprehensive history of Asian Americans

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A "comprehensive...fascinating" (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject.

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. "In her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States" ( Huffington Post).

The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both "despised minorities" and "model minorities," revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country.

Published fifty years after the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these "powerful Asian American stories...are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue" ( Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an "epic and eye-opening" ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.

The Making of Asian America 1 Los Chinos in New Spain and Asians in Early America
Long before Asians came to the United States, they went to Latin America. The earliest came as part of Spain's Pacific empire stretching from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in New Spain (present-day Mexico)-an empire that had been built on Christopher Columbus' accidental "discovery" of America while searching for Asia.

Europeans, dating as far back as ancient Greece, had long been fascinated with Asia-including the Middle East and Far East-its people, its civilizations, and its fabled riches. 1 In the European imagination, Asia was Europe's polar opposite, its Other. Asia and Asians differed in "every respect" from Europe and Europeans, as the Greek physician and recognized father of medicine Hippocrates explained in the fourth or fifth century BCE. 2 For centuries this difference between East and West was the subject of endless speculation, informing a Western-held understanding of a masculine, conquering Europe and a feminized Asia ripe for conquest. 3 This worldview helped direct the West's search for Asia and influenced its presence there. It was also a significant factor in propelling Asian peoples to the Americas.

During the Roman Empire, trading networks were established that eventually stretched from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent. European pilgrims, merchants, and others shared their first impressions of Asia through sporadic travel writings. Crusaders rediscovered Asia when they set off for the Middle East on their quest to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1095. Lasting almost 200 years, the Crusades gave generations of western Europeans firsthand knowledge of the Middle East and some idea of the vastness and richness of the rest of Asia. European travelers described the bizarre creatures, alien plants, and strange customs of the "East" and helped to define Asia as an "other world" that stood in opposition to Europe. 4

Sustained long-distance travel and trade between Europe and Asia followed the establishment of the Mongol Empire that stretched across Asia to the eastern fringes of Europe in the early thirteenth century. The so-called Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries brought Asia and Europe closer together as both Asians and Europeans ventured far from their homelands. Asian goods and Asia itself came within reach of more and more Europeans. During this period travelers could journey eastward and back in relative safety and those who returned found ready audiences for their tales of exotic lands and abundant riches. 5

Among the most well known in western Europe was the story of Marco Polo, a young Italian merchant who journeyed 15,000 miles throughout the Middle East and Asia over a twenty-four-year period at the end of the thirteenth century. The Travels of Marco Polo contained accounts of fantastical unicorns, exotic sexual customs, and mountain streams flowing with diamonds. Marco described the court of the Mongol leader Kublai Khan as having "so many vessels of gold and silver that none without seeing could possibly believe it." 6

Published in 1356, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville also told incredible tales of the East, becoming a highly popular and influential book among a large audience of Europeans interested in understanding the larger world and the place of both Asia and Europe in it. Written under a pseudonym and allegedly the autobiography of an English knight, it described the Holy Land, Egypt, Arabia, and China as a region filled with cannibals and headless beasts as well as tantalizing spices, gems, and abundant quantities of gold and silver. 7

By the dawn of the European age of exploration and conquest in the fifteenth century, wealthy Europeans had developed a growing taste for Asian imports such as spices, silks, and sugar, and they demanded more. Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama relied upon an Indian navigator to become the first European to sail directly to Asia from Europe in 1497. His route took him around the Cape of Good Hope along the Atlantic coast of present-day South Africa to the legendary spice routes of India. When he returned to Portugal two years later, his spice-laden cargo yielded a 600 percent profit, paved the way for Portugal's colonial empire in Asia, and spurred further European exploration of Asia that would last through the twentieth century. Profit was far from the only motivation. As England's Sir Walter Raleigh predicted in 1615, "whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself." 8

Technological advances in shipbuilding and navigation as well as breakthroughs in astronomy and geography made Europe's oceangoing exploration possible. Spanish seafarers used the latest oceanic sailing ships to explore the Pacific and followed the Polynesian voyagers who preceded them. By the late fifteenth century, the ocean sea was no longer a barrier and soon became a passageway to the other side of the world. 9

Inspired by Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus dreamed of Asia. His well-worn copy of Marco's Travels contained numerous comments in the margins; it was through these adventures that Columbus formed his impressions of the Christian converts and fabulous riches that Asia promised. When he and his crew first spotted land in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492, Columbus imagined that he would soon be viewing Asia's rich spice markets and gold-roofed houses. When he and his landing party rowed to the beach the next morning in the Santa María's launch, however, nothing matched the men's expectations.

Nevertheless, Columbus explored the surrounding islands over the next few months and returned to Spain in February of 1493 believing that he had accomplished his dream of reaching Asia. His accounts echoed the fantastical descriptions of exotic peoples and fabulous riches that numerous travelers to Asia had told before him. The new lands, he claimed, were full of boundless wealth and populations ripe for conversion to Christianity. Columbus would make three more voyages across the Atlantic to the New World before his death in 1506, forever convinced it was Asia. 10

* * *

Columbus's voyages and subsequent discoveries by other explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci helped Spain dispossess the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and establish its huge land-based American empire, Nueva España. 11 Between 1520 and 1540, the Spanish added over three quarters of a million square miles to their empire in the Americas. In 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés founded the town of Veracruz on the Mexican Atlantic Coast. The Aztec Empire was defeated by 1521, and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas of Peru a decade later. The wars of conquest and dispossession were violent affairs that cost many human lives among the indigenous peoples. But this death toll paled in comparison to the untold millions who perished as a result of the introduction of European diseases like smallpox.

Erika Lee is the granddaughter of Chinese immigrants who entered the United States through both Angel Island and Ellis Island. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches history at the University of Minnesota, where she is also the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center. She is the author of The Making of Asian America, Angel Island (with Judy Yung), and At America's Gates.

**Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature**
**A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015**
**New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice**

"Sweeping . . . Lee's comprehensive history traces the experiences of myriad Asian-American communities, from Chinese laborers in 1850s California to Hmong refugees in 1980s Minnesota. . . . The Making of Asian America shares strong similarities with other broad inclusive Asian-American histories, most obviously Ronald Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, first published in 1989. Lee's book doesn't radically depart from its predecessors so much as provide a useful and important upgrade by broadening the scope and, at times, deepening the investigations. . . . Fascinating. . . . I suspect Erika Lee will soon join [the canon of key Asian-American histories]."

- Oliver Wang, The New York Times Book Review

"In this fascinating retelling of the American creation story, Lee uses incisive scholarship, a wide historic lens and rich detail to fill in the long missing Asian-American pieces. Starting with ancient Greece and the Age of Exploration, from enslavement to modern day challenges, Lee tracks the epic Asian-American journey to North and South Americas, East Indies to West Indies, and in doing so, she breaks new ground and inverts the master narrative."

- Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People

"A fascinating narrative. . . . Deftly weaving together a masterful synthesis of the existing literature with new information culled from hitherto untapped archival sources and with analytical insights on the global currents that have shaped the last five centuries, Erika Lee has created a richly textured tapestry enlivened by vivid stories of hundreds of individuals and groups who played significant, though often unsung, roles in the making of Asian America."

- Sucheng Chan, Professor Emerita of Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Monumental. . . . Lee handles her scholarly materials with grace, never overwhelming the reader with too many facts or incidents. She tells an American story familiar to anyone who has read Walt Whitman, seeking to capture America in all its diversity and difference, while at the same time pleading for America to realize its democratic potential. . . . Powerful Asian American stories . . . are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue."

- LA Times

"A well-written, panoramic view of Asian America from the colonial era to the present that sheds light on how Asian immigrants have sought to make their place in American society and, at the same time, continually changed it."

- Nancy Foner, coauthor of Strangers No More and Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY

"A sweeping study of the fastest growing group in the United States that underscores the shameful racist regard white Americans have long held for Asian immigrants. A historian of immigration whose ancestors hailed from China, Lee (History/Univ. of Minnesota) delineates the specific history of Asians in America-Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hmong, and others-while also lending a general sense of what immigrants have endured: discrimination in work, wages, education, and housing, and even incarceration during World War II. . . . A powerful, timely story told with method and dignity."

- Kirkus (starred review)

"Pokes holes in the 'model minority' myth by pointing out that Asians in the United States are overrepresented at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and that before World War II, the group was frequently portrayed as being incompatible with American society. An impressive work that details how this diverse population has both swayed and been affected by the United States. Highly recommended for readers interested in this important topic."

- Library Journal (starred review)

"Erika Lee's new narrative of Asian American history deserves consideration to complement, if not supplant, celebrated earlier syntheses. Incorporating compelling revisionist approaches, Lee peels back several centuries of time to locate the origins of Chinese in America to the founding of the Spanish empire in America in the sixteenth century. . . . She further insists on the mainstreaming of Asian American history in the United States."

- Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and American Studies, Brown University

"In her sweeping, powerful new book, Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States."

- Huffington Post

"Epic and eye-opening."

- Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"An ambitious, sweeping, and insightful survey."

- Publishers Weekly

"Racism, as Lee shows, was the unifying factor in the Asian-American experience, bringing together twenty-three distinct immigrant groups, from very different parts of the world. . . . In the eyes of some, Asians in America are, Lee writes, 'perpetual foreigners at worst, or probationary Americans at best.' If Asians sometimes remain silent in the face of racism, and if some seem to work unusually hard in the face of this difficult history, it is not because they want to be part of a 'model minority,' but because they have often had no other choice."

- The New Yorker

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A "comprehensive...fascinating" (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States.

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"With years of experience in civil rights advocacy, Deepa Iyer's book is an important contribution to the work of building a stronger and more inclusive democracy."

-Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-CA)

"With strong research and individual accounts, Deepa Iyer's We Too Sing America fills an unfortunate gap in knowledge of the effects of post-9/11 bigotry and violence on South Asian, Arab, and Muslim communities. It is personal, political, and powerful."

-Hari Kondabolu, comedian and writer

"Iyer's personal journey organizing around racially charged events post-9/11 defines a new movement in America that is centered on the desire to reclaim our country. Her account of the policies, rhetoric, and actions that marginalize, demonize, and criminalize brown people because of their identities, their names, and their faiths provides a call to action for all of us."

-Rashida Tlaib, former Michigan state representative and the second Muslim woman to serve in a state legislature

"In smooth and fluid prose, Iyer provides us with a wealth of detail on the struggles faced by South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh youth, women, and men who refuse to be excluded from full membership in the United States."

-Rajini Srikanth, author of Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law and The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America

"A fascinating read! Iyer is never shy to share her strong opinions; she has written passionately, tying well-researched sections on policy together with emotional accounts of national events. Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with the narrative, this book is a rare opportunity to read about a perspective on the intersection of community, governance, policy, family, and law."

-Kal Penn, author and public servant

"At a time when Black and Brown communities from Murfreesboro to Ferguson are under attack, Deepa Iyer reminds us in this timely and moving book that building meaningful and lasting allegiances, shaped by young people, is the urgent task ahead of us."

-Vincent Warren, Center for Constitutional Rights

"In an era of heightened racial anxiety and contradictory state policies, Iyer challenges us to imagine and aspire toward a truly equitable and inclusive multiracial society."

-Michael Omi, associate professor of Asian American studies, University of California, Berkeley

"Deepa Iyer brings the head of a lawyer and the heart of a community activist to bear on her remarkable book We Too Sing America. It is a window into the struggles of the margins that allow the mainstream to remain humane."

-Vijay Prashad, author of Uncle Swami: Being South Asian in America

" We Too Sing America is a necessary, important, and passionate work that records the hymns, blues, and joyous songs of a post-9/11 America, featuring diverse voices of American communities often excluded from the choir. But Iyer's book aims higher: it reflects hope for America's pluralistic future where these 'others' ultimately emerge as the protagonists of not only their own narratives but of a new, vibrant America as well."

-Wajahat Ali, author of The Domestic Crusaders

"A critical history of the specific race and faith discrimination South Asian and Arab communities struggled through and are still reconciling in our post-9/11 era. . . . Thank you, Deepa Iyer, for your courage-and for this book."

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In the lead-up to the recent presidential elections, Donald Trump called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, surveillance of mosques, and a database for all Muslims living in the country, tapping into anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria to a degree little seen since the targeting of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh people in the wake of 9/11.

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America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United State

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America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United State

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The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences to the broadest audience possible.

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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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Highlights the murder of Vincent Chin, his legal cases, and the development of the nationwide Asian American movement to win justice for Chin

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g

BUY THE BOOK

$18.00

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 9780374527365
368 Pages

The fascinating story of the rise of Asian Americans as a politically and socially influential racial group

This groundbreaking book is about the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society. It explores the junctures that shocked Asian Americans into motion and shaped a new consciousness, including the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, by two white autoworkers who believed he was Japanese; the apartheid-like working conditions of Filipinos in the Alaska canneries; the boycott of Korean American greengrocers in Brooklyn; the Los Angeles riots; and the casting of non-Asians in the Broadway musical Miss Saigon. The book also examines the rampant stereotypes of Asian Americans.

Helen Zia, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, was born in the 1950s when there were only 150,000 Chinese Americans in the entire country, and she writes as a personal witness to the dramatic changes involving Asian Americans.

Written for both Asian Americans-the fastest-growing population in the United States-and non-Asians, Asian American Dreams argues that America can no longer afford to ignore these emergent, vital, and singular American people.

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Reviews

Praise for Asian American Dreams

"An ambitious blend of personal and cultural history, a primer on Asian America that covers everything from the history of Asian immigration to the turbulence of the past three decades as the community has gone from silent majority to demanding its place in American society." -Ferdinand M. de Leon, The Seattle Times

"An important book because it seeks to answer a question that few other popular works pose: What does it take for people like the author to become fully American?" -Somini Sengupta, The New York Times Book Review

"Written with journalistic clarity Asian American Dreams offers a way out of the cycle of racial prejudice, discrimination and violence. Its examples of individuals and communities that have spanned cultural antipathies to fight for a cause serve as beacons of hope." -Roger Yim, San Francisco Chronicle

"Helen Zia has produced what many of us were waiting for--an honest, scholarly, yet intensely personal book about the transformation of Asian America. She deftly interweaves the remarkable history of a people with her own unique journey as a pioneer activist and writer. The result--Asian American Dreams--is a fresh and incisive narrative, epic in its sweep, thrilling in its verve and clarity." -Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking

"A rich chronicle of personal and national history involving Asian Americans that examines issues ranging from immigration patterns to stereotypes in entertainment." -Dinah Eng, Gannett News

"Dreams... More...

"An ambitious blend of personal and cultural history, a primer on Asian America that covers everything from the history of Asian immigration to the turbulence of the past three decades as the community has gone from silent majority to demanding its place in American society." -Ferdinand M. de Leon, The Seattle Times

"An important book because it seeks to answer a question that few other popular works pose: What does it take for people like the author to become fully American?" -Somini Sengupta, The New York Times Book Review

"Written with journalistic clarity Asian American Dreams offers a way out of the cycle of racial prejudice, discrimination and violence. Its examples of individuals and communities that have spanned cultural antipathies to fight for a cause serve as beacons of hope." -Roger Yim, San Francisco Chronicle

"Helen Zia has produced what many of us were waiting for--an honest, scholarly, yet intensely personal book about the transformation of Asian America. She deftly interweaves the remarkable history of a people with her own unique journey as a pioneer activist and writer. The result--Asian American Dreams--is a fresh and incisive narrative, epic in its sweep, thrilling in its verve and clarity." -Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking

"A rich chronicle of personal and national history involving Asian Americans that examines issues ranging from immigration patterns to stereotypes in entertainment." -Dinah Eng, Gannett News

"Dreams is a wonderful, sophisticated, lively sociohistorical biography of Asian Pacific Americans fighting back to broaden the human rights of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. Herein Helen Zia emerges as the foremost activist-chronicler of the eighties and nineties." -John Kuo Wei Tchen, professor, New York University, author of New York Before Chinatown

"Serves not only as an invaluable record of a movement but also as a moving and often funny personal memoir." -David Henry Hwang

- Less...

Reviews from Goodreads

Helen Zia

Helen Zia, a graduate of Princeton University's first co-educational class, is an award-winning journalist who has covered Asian American communities and political movements for twenty years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Helen Zia

From the Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

g

$18.00

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 9780374527365
368 Pages

Reviews

"An ambitious blend of personal and cultural history, a primer on Asian America that covers everything from the history of Asian immigration to the turbulence of the past three decades as the community has gone from silent majority to demanding its place in American society." -Ferdinand M. de Leon, The Seattle Times

"An important book because it seeks to answer a question that few other popular works pose: What does it take for people like the author to become fully American?" -Somini Sengupta, The New York Times Book Review

"Written with journalistic clarity Asian American Dreams offers a way out of the cycle of racial prejudice, discrimination and violence. Its examples of individuals and communities that have spanned cultural antipathies to fight for a cause serve as beacons of hope." -Roger Yim, San Francisco Chronicle

"Helen Zia has produced what many of us were waiting for--an honest, scholarly, yet intensely personal book about the transformation of Asian America. She deftly interweaves the remarkable history of a people with her own unique journey as a pioneer activist and writer. The result--Asian American Dreams--is a fresh and incisive narrative, epic in its sweep, thrilling in its verve and clarity." -Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking

"A rich chronicle of personal and national history involving Asian Americans that examines issues ranging from immigration patterns to stereotypes in entertainment." -Dinah Eng, Gannett News

"Dreams... More...

"An ambitious blend of personal and cultural history, a primer on Asian America that covers everything from the history of Asian immigration to the turbulence of the past three decades as the community has gone from silent majority to demanding its place in American society." -Ferdinand M. de Leon, The Seattle Times

"An important book because it seeks to answer a question that few other popular works pose: What does it take for people like the author to become fully American?" -Somini Sengupta, The New York Times Book Review

"Written with journalistic clarity Asian American Dreams offers a way out of the cycle of racial prejudice, discrimination and violence. Its examples of individuals and communities that have spanned cultural antipathies to fight for a cause serve as beacons of hope." -Roger Yim, San Francisco Chronicle

"Helen Zia has produced what many of us were waiting for--an honest, scholarly, yet intensely personal book about the transformation of Asian America. She deftly interweaves the remarkable history of a people with her own unique journey as a pioneer activist and writer. The result--Asian American Dreams--is a fresh and incisive narrative, epic in its sweep, thrilling in its verve and clarity." -Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking

"A rich chronicle of personal and national history involving Asian Americans that examines issues ranging from immigration patterns to stereotypes in entertainment." -Dinah Eng, Gannett News

"Dreams is a wonderful, sophisticated, lively sociohistorical biography of Asian Pacific Americans fighting back to broaden the human rights of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. Herein Helen Zia emerges as the foremost activist-chronicler of the eighties and nineties." -John Kuo Wei Tchen, professor, New York University, author of New York Before Chinatown

"Serves not only as an invaluable record of a movement but also as a moving and often funny personal memoir." -David Henry Hwang

- Less...

From the Publisher

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Asian American Dreams | Helen Zia | Macmillan

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g $18.00 Farrar, Straus and Giroux Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 9780374527365 368 Pages The fascinating story of the rise of Asian Americans as a politically and socially influential racial group This groundbreaking book is about the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society.

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PBS LearningMedia: Unladylike/Anna May Wong

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PBS LearningMedia: Unladylike/Anna May Wong

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American Masters
Anna May Wong, the first Asian American woman movie star, had a long and varied career spanning silent and sound film, stage, radio, and television, while resisting racism and typecasting in Hollywood, and the practice of having white actors in yellow face play the roles of Asian characters.

Aired: 04/08/20

Rating: NR

The full episode is no longer available for online streaming. Why?

Please continue to enjoy extra(s) from this episode.

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American Masters | Anna May Wong: The first Asian American Movie Star | Season 34

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American Masters Anna May Wong, the first Asian American woman movie star, had a long and varied career spanning silent and sound film, stage, radio, and television, while resisting racism and typecasting in Hollywood, and the practice of having white actors in yellow face play the roles of Asian characters.

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Race in America: History Matters with Erika Lee & Helen Zia

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Race in America: History Matters with Erika Lee & Helen Zia

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Historian Erika Lee & activist Helen Zia join Washington Post Live on Monday, March 8 (The Washington Post)

During the coronavirus pandemic, Asian Americans have experienced a sharp increase in racist verbal abuse and physical attacks. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the World War II internment of Japanese residents, to the 1982 killing of Chinese American Vincent Chin, anti-Asian racism has taken different forms over the course of our history. On Monday, March 8 at 3:00pm ET, national reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee speaks with author and historian Erika Lee, together with author and activist Helen Zia, about how the past can help inform our understanding of where we are today.

Click here for transcript

Highlights

Author and historian Erika Lee says immigrant communities have been historically singled out during public health crises. "There was a specific spark in 2020 and 2021, and that was the divisive political rhetoric of many of our leaders who insisted on calling the coronavirus the China virus, etc...This allowed what had been a certainly again a deep-rooted sentiment and stereotype about Asians and Chinese people, in particular, to justify the violence we have seen this past year." (Washington Post Live)

Asian Americans have experienced a sharp increase in racist verbal abuse and physical attacks during the coronavirus pandemic. Author and activist Helen Zia says she fears it will only get worse. "Learning from history, we know that it's not going to end today. Sadly, it's going to continue and will probably get worse, and I hate saying that but that's what history shows us." (Washington Post Live)

Activist Helen Zia says Asians Americans have to know the history they've been deprived of in the fight to end racial injustice. "We have a role to play, and it's not just an Asian American thing, but all Americans who care about the future of this country and this world really should understand this history too." (Washington Post Live)

Author and historian Erika Lee shares the story of Wong Kim Ark and the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case that guaranteed birthright citizenship, regardless of a parent's immigration status. "This is a landmark decision. It matters to all of us. It's not just something that applies to the rights of Asian Americans." (Washington Post Live)

One of the nation's leading immigration and Asian American historians, Erika Lee teaches American history at the University of Minnesota, where she is a Regents Professor and Director of the Immigration History Research Center. The granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, Lee grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she is a frequent commentator in the media and the author of four award-winning books including The Making of Asian America: A History and America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. Called "unflinching and powerful" by Carol Anderson (author of White Rage) and "essential reading" by Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist), America for Americans won the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and was highlighted in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New York Public Libraryas one of the most important books illuminating the Trump era and informing essential issues in the 2020 election.

Helen Zia is a writer, activist and Fulbright Scholar. She is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, about the contemporary civil rights struggles of Asian Americans; her latest book, Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Fled Mao's Revolution, was an NPR best book of 2019 and shortlisted for a 2020 national PEN AMERICA award. An award-winning magazine journalist, she was the Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine, where her reporting on neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations sparked new thinking on the relationship between race and gender in hate violence.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen has been outspoken on issues ranging from human rights to countering hate violence and homophobia. Her leadership in the landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence in the 1982 hate killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit has been documented in the Oscar-nominated film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" Helen has honorary doctorates from the University of San Francisco and the City University of New York Law School. She attended Princeton University on a full scholarship and was a member of its first graduating class of women. Helen quit medical school to work as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, until she discovered her life's work as a journalist and writer.

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Race in America: History Matters with Erika Lee & Helen Zia

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During the coronavirus pandemic, Asian Americans have experienced a sharp increase in racist verbal abuse and physical attacks. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the World War II internment of Japanese residents, to the 1982 killing of Chinese American Vincent Chin, anti-Asian racism has taken different forms over the course of our history.

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The Roots of Anti-Asian Hate in America | Past Forward

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Asian American Movement: The Movement and the Moment

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Asian American Movement: The Movement and the Moment

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Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies

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Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies

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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.

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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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In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of “Asian American” to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad.

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A welcome corrective to the caricatures of ethnic studies as identity politics, civil rights, or multiculturalism, Chains of Babylon shows, instead, that 'Asian America' was conceived in struggle against racism and imperialism-a Third World project of liberation, self-determination, and decolonization. Importantly, this realization enables solidarities across the created and imposed divides of race, nation, and empire.

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A welcome corrective to the caricatures of ethnic studies as identity politics, civil rights, or multiculturalism, Chains of Babylon shows, instead, that 'Asian America' was conceived in struggle against racism and imperialism-a Third World project of liberation, self-determination, and decolonization. Importantly, this realization enables solidarities across the created and imposed divides of race, nation, and empire.

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Heartbeat of Struggle - Bio of Yuri Kochiyama

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Heartbeat of Struggle - Bio of Yuri Kochiyama

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Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of Yuri Kochiyama, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with Kochiyama's family, friends, and the subject herself, Diane C. Fujino traces Kochiyama's life from an “all-American” childhood to her accomplishments as a tireless defender of—and fighter for—human rights.

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On February 21, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama cradled Malcolm X in her arms as he died, but her role as a public servant and activist had begun much earlier than this pivotal public moment. Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of this courageous woman, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with Kochiyama's family, friends, and the subject herself, Diane C. Fujino traces Kochiyama's life from an "all-American" childhood to her accomplishments as a tireless defender of-and fighter for-human rights.

Growing up in a Japanese immigrant family in California during the 1920s and 1930s, Kochiyama was active in sports, school, and church. She was both unquestioningly patriotic and largely unconscious of race and racism in the United States. After Pearl Harbor, however, Kochiyama's family was among the thousands of Japanese Americans forcibly removed to internment camps for the duration of the war, a traumatic experience that opened her eyes to the existence of social injustice.

After the war, Kochiyama moved to New York. She began her activist career in the vibrant civil rights movement in Harlem in the 1960s, where she met Malcolm X, who inspired her radical political development and the ensuing four decades of incessant work for Black liberation, Asian American equality, Puerto Rican independence, and political prisoner defense. Kochiyama is widely respected for her work in forging unity among diverse communities, especially between Asian and African Americans.

Fujino, a scholar and activist, offers an in-depth examination of Kochiyama's political awakening, rich life, and impressive achievements with particular attention to how her public role so often defied gender, racial, and cultural norms. Heartbeat of Struggle is a source of inspiration and guidance for anyone committed to social change.

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On February 21, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama cradled Malcolm X in her arms as he died, but her role as a public servant and activist had begun much earlier than this pivotal public moment. Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of this courageous woman, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s.

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American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs [documentary film]

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American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs [documentary film]

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Grace Lee Boggs, 99, is a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be. Rooted for 75 years in the labor, civil rights and Black Power movements, she challenges a new generation to throw off old assumptions, think creatively and redefine revolution for our times.

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Season 27 Episode 2 | 1h 22m 21s |

Grace Lee Boggs, 99, is a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be. Rooted for 75 years in the labor, civil rights and Black Power movements, she challenges a new generation to throw off old assumptions, think creatively and redefine revolution for our times.

Aired: 06/30/14

Expires: 09/30/20

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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POV | American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs | Season 27 | Episode 2

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Season 27 Episode 2 | 1h 22m 21s | Grace Lee Boggs, 99, is a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be.

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Since 1982, Eastwind Books of Berkeley has been a major source for Asian American literature, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies, Language Learning, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Martial Arts books.

They support and promote various authors at their book events and have been involved in the publication of select titles.

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Since 1982, Eastwind Books of Berkeley has been a major source for Asian American literature, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies, Language Learning, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Martial Arts books.

We support and promote various authors at our book events and have been involved in the publication of select titles. For a list of our publications, please see Distributed by Eastwind.

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Since 1982, Eastwind Books of Berkeley has been a major source for Asian American literature, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies, Language Learning, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Martial Arts books. We support and promote various authors at our book events and have been involved in the publication of select titles.

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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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Dr. Seuss - depictions of Japanese Americans during WWII era

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Dr. Seuss - depictions of Japanese Americans during WWII era

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Abstract: This two-part article reconsiders the legacy of Dr. Seuss as presented in the new Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, against the author's little known wartime cartoon representations of the Japanese. It represents important questions about the representation of writers, heroes, even the beloved, in their finest and least memorable moments.

Keywords: Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss Museum, PM newspaper, World War II propaganda, cartoons, wartime representations of the "Japs".

Dr. Seuss, 1940-47, and 2017

Richard H. Minear

The opening of the new Dr. Seuss museum in Springfield-rather, the rededication of one of four buildings in the Museum Quadrangle to Dr. Seuss-has drawn as much attention for what isn't there as for what is. What isn't there? Dr. Seuss's World War II editorial cartoons in the New York newspaper PM, ¹ his work with Frank Capra on the Why We Fight series, the film Our Job in Japan (1945-6) that was intended to prepare U. S. soldiers for their role in the Occupation of Japan, and his two Oscar-winning documentaries shortly after the war-one on Germany, one on Japan (Design for Death, 1947). Particularly in the editorial cartoons but also in the documentary on Japan, Dr. Seuss descends to racist characterization and analysis.

Most notorious is his cartoon of February 13, 1942. It is titled "Waiting for the Signal From Home...," and it depicts a mass of stereotyped "Japs" marching from Washington and Oregon and California to pick up blocks of TNT from a structure labeled "Honorable 5th Column." On the roof another "Jap" with a telescope peers out across the ocean.

Unlike Dr. Seuss's Hitler, the "Jap" stereotype that appears, cookie-cutter style, on all these faces was not based on a historical figure-it isn't Tōjō or the emperor. It may owe as much to Gilbert and Sullivan as to the 1930s. This cartoon appeared days before the Roosevelt administration issued the order to round up all "Japanese" living on the west coast. Many people in audiences to whom I have showed this cartoon start out hoping that it is tongue-in-cheek, but by the time they've seen Dr. Seuss's other cartoons dealing with Japan, most have accepted that this cartoon is what it appears to be.

I mention other cartoons. Consider this cartoon of December 9, 1941, just days after Pearl Harbor.

Or consider this cartoon of October 23, 1942.

Here Dr. Seuss's stereotyped "Jap" has arms that end in claws and feet that end in paws. The immediate stimulus was Japan's execution of three of the airmen it captured from Doolittle's 1942 bombing raid on Japan.

Why does the new museum omit all this? Reporters noticed at once. Here is one account: "Examples of Geisel's early advertising work and World War II-era propaganda and political illustrations, many of which critics consider racist, are conspicuously absent, but that's because the museum is aimed primarily at children, said Kay Simpson, president of the Springfield Museums complex." ² But here is what Dr. Seuss himself said about his intended audience for the Butter Battle Book, and by extension for all his books: "Practically all my books have been written for every age. Outside of my beginner books, I never write for children. I write for people." ³ What better explanation of the enduring appeal of the books? And of the narrowness of the museum's focus on children? A second reason, presumably, is that the PM cartoons and the documentaries complicate the loveable narrative of Dr. Seuss.

Why not show that material and invite viewers-people of all ages, including children-to deal with the fact that a man as forward-looking as Dr. Seuss could also have these feet of clay? Forward-looking he was. During the war he took on issues like Black-White racism, and later on he addressed the environment ( The Lorax), the Cold War ( The Butter Battle Book), commercialism ( How the Grinch Stole Christmas), reading for children ( The Cat in the Hat, et al.). Even Horton Hears a Who is an allegory on the U. S. Occupation of Japan (Horton=the U.S., Vlad Vladikoff=the Soviet Union, Whoville=Japan) that treats the Japanese with a good deal more sympathy than did the wartime cartoons (much of the condescension, however, remains). But racist against Japanese and Japanese Americans he also was.

Dr. Seuss rarely stepped out from behind his easel to address such issues. But he did so on two occasions that bear on our present concern. One was in early 1942. On January 13 he published the fourth in a series of heavily ironic "War Monuments." It showed a statue dedicated to John Haynes Holmes "who spoke the beautiful words 'The unhappy people of Japan are our brothers.'" Dr. Seuss's stereotyped "Jap" has a fake halo and holds in his right hand a wicked-looking knife and the severed head of a victim. (John Haynes Holmes was a prominent Protestant pacifist minister.)

Readers of PM wrote in to protest-more the treatment of Holmes than of Japan. Wrote one: "I protest the Dr. Seuss cartoon on John Haynes Holmes.... Beyond the sheer bad taste is something even deeper. That is, the implied rejection of the basic Christian principle of the universal brotherhood of man." Another wrote of " PM 's grotesque incitement to hatred. It's OK to remember Pearl Harbor; why not remember our war aims, too?"

On January 21 Dr. Seuss responded in his own letter to the editor, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

In response to the letters defending John Haynes Holmes...sure, I believe in love, brotherhood and a cooing white pigeon on every man's roof. I even think it's nice to have pacifists and strawberry festivals...in between wars.

But right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble "Brothers!" It is a rather flabby battlecry.

If we want to win, we've got to kill Japs, whether it depressed John Haynes Holmes or not. We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left.

--Dr. Seuss

Contrast that blast with a hand-written follow-up to an interview for the Dartmouth alumni magazine 34 years later, in 1976 (Dr. Seuss was a Dartmouth alumnus). It didn't become public until an exhibit I organized in the early 2000s at the same building that is now the Dr. Seuss Museum. (Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.)

This is Dr. Seuss's sole late reference to the PM cartoons. He died in 1991. It was only later in that decade that I began to look into the PM cartoons; my Dr. Seuss Goes to War was published in 1999. So I never had the opportunity to ask him specifically about his wartime depictions of Japan and Japanese Americans.

At the Dr. Seuss Museum: Oh, the Places They Don't Go!

Sopan Deb

An exhibition inside the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum, which just opened. Credit: Tony Luong for The New York Times

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - Through the front door of the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, Mass., the mind of the beloved children's book author Theodor Seuss Geisel springs to life. The new three-floor museum is lush with murals, including one with a proo, a nerkle, a nerd and a seersucker, too. Around one corner, visitors will find an immense sculpture of Horton the Elephant from "Horton Hears a Who!"

But the museum, which opened on June 3, displays a bit of amnesia about the formative experiences that led to Mr. Geisel's best-known body of work. It completely overlooks Mr. Geisel's anti-Japanese cartoons from World War II, which he later regretted.

Far from the whimsy of "Fox in Socks" (1965), Mr. Geisel drew hundreds of political cartoons for a liberal newspaper, "PM," from 1941 to 1943, a little-known but pivotal chapter of his career before he became a giant of children's literature. Many of the cartoons were critical of some of history's most reviled figures, such as Hitler and Mussolini.

But others are now considered blatantly racist. Shortly before the forced mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans, Mr. Geisel drew cartoons that were harshly anti-Japanese and anti-Japanese-American, using offensive stereotypes to caricature them.

While President Franklin D. Roosevelt's library has put his role in Japanese internment on full display, this museum glosses over Mr. Geisel's early work as a prolific political cartoonist, opting instead for crowd-pleasing sculptures of the Cat in the Hat and other characters, and a replica of the Geisel family bakery.

But scholars and those who were close to Mr. Geisel note that this work was essential to understanding Dr. Seuss, and the museum is now grappling with criticism that it doesn't paint a full picture of an author whose work permeates American culture, from the ubiquitous holiday Grinch to Supreme Court opinions (Justice Elena Kagan once cited "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish").

"I think it's irresponsible," said Philip Nel, a children's literature scholar at Kansas State University and the author of "Dr. Seuss: American Icon." "I think to understand Seuss fully, you need to understand the complexity of his career. You need to understand that he's involved in both anti-racism and racism, and I don't think you get that if you omit the political work."

One cartoon from October 1941, which resurfaced during the most recent presidential campaign, depicts a woman wearing an "America First" shirt reading "Adolf the Wolf" to horrified children with the caption, "... and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones ... but those were Foreign Children and it didn't really matter." The cartoon was a warning against isolationism, which was juxtaposed with Donald J. Trump, a candidate at the time, using the phrase as a rallying cry.

In another cartoon, from October 1942, Emperor Hirohito, the leader of Japan during World War II, is depicted as having squinted eyes and a goofy smile. Mr. Geisel's caption reads, "Wipe That Sneer Off His Face!"

Perhaps the most controversial is from February 1942, when he drew a crowd of Japanese-Americans waiting in line to buy explosives with the caption, "Waiting for the Signal From Home ..." Six days later, Mr. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the roundup of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans.

Mia Wenjen, a third-generation Japanese-American who runs a children's literary blog called PragmaticMom, has written critically of Mr. Geisel's cartoons and blasted the museum for leaving them out.

"Dr. Seuss owes it to Japanese-Americans and to the American people to acknowledge the role that his racist political cartoons played, so that this atrocity doesn't happen to minority groups again," Ms. Wenjen wrote in an email.

An exhibition inside the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum, which just opened. Credit: Tony Luong for The New York Times

One of Mr. Geisel's own family members, who helped curate an exhibit for the museum, said that Mr. Geisel would agree.

"I think he would find it a legitimate criticism, because I remember talking to him about it at least once and him saying that things were done a certain way back then," said Ted Owens, a great-nephew of Mr. Geisel. "Characterizations were done, and he was a cartoonist and he tended to adopt those. And I know later in his life he was not proud of those at all."

Mr. Geisel suggested this himself decades after the war. In a 1976 interview, he said of his "PM" cartoons: "When I look at them now, they're hurriedly and embarrassingly badly drawn. And they're full of snap judgments that every political cartoonist has to make."

He also tried to make amends - in his own way.

"Horton Hears a Who!," from 1954, is widely seen as an apology of sorts from Mr. Geisel, attempting to promote equal treatment with the famous line "A person's a person no matter how small."

At the museum, located amid a complex of other museums in Springfield, where Mr. Geisel grew up, the first floor is geared toward young children. Aside from the murals, there are mock-ups of Springfield landmarks that inspired Mr. Geisel's illustrations, such as the castle-like Howard Street Armory. The top floor features artifacts like letters, sketches, the desk at which Mr. Geisel drew and the bifocals he wore.

Kay Simpson, president of Springfield Museums, who runs the complex, and her husband, John, the museum's project director of exhibitions, defended the decision to leave out the cartoons, saying that the museum was primarily designed for children.

"We really wanted to make it a children's experience on the first floor, and we're showcasing the family collections on the second floor," Ms. Simpson said. She said Mr. Geisel's questionable work would fit better in one of the adjacent history museums, where it has been displayed before.

Susan Brandt, the president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which oversees Mr. Geisel's brand (a brand he resisted commercializing), argued that the museum's critical distinction is between Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel.

Asked why the cartoons aren't included, Ms. Brandt, who consulted with Ms. Simpson on the museum, replied: "Those cartoons are a product of their time. They reflect a way of thinking during that time period. And that's history. We would never edit history. But the reason why is that this is a Dr. Seuss museum." She added, "Those are Ted Geisel, the man, which we are separating for this museum only."

The museum does, however, have references to some of Mr. Geisel's early professional work. There is a serving tray on display that Mr. Geisel designed for the Narragansett Brewing Company in 1941 from his days in advertising, for example, and sculptures from the 1930s.

Soon after the opening, the museum expressed a willingness to display the cartoons, perhaps sensitive to criticism that it was presenting a one-sided version of Mr. Geisel, who died in 1991. It invited Mr. Nel to a symposium this fall to discuss Mr. Geisel's political ideology and Ms. Wenjen to the museum for a visit, something she skeptically referred to as "damage control."

After all, contrary to Ms. Brandt's view, the critics argue that it was the work of Mr. Geisel - the man and the political cartoonist - that inspired Dr. Seuss.

"That is the work that made him an activist children's writer," Mr. Nel said.

This article, slightly adapted here, appeared in the New York Ti mes on June 21, 2017.

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The Dr. Seuss Museum and His Wartime Cartoons about Japan and Japanese Americans

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Abstract: This two-part article reconsiders the legacy of Dr. Seuss as presented in the new Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, against the author's little known wartime cartoon representations of the Japanese. It represents important questions about the representation of writers, heroes, even the beloved, in their finest and least memorable moments.

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Mission US Prisoner in My Homeland - Educational Video Game

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Mission US Prisoner in My Homeland - Educational Video Game

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Prisoner in My Homeland follows the experiences of teenager Henry Tanaka, whose family is forced to leave their home on Bainbridge Island, WA, for a prison camp in Manzanar, CA. Players grapple with the choices and challenges faced by more than 120,000 Japanese Americans as they coped with their unjust incarceration during World War II.

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It’s 1941. You are 16-year-old Henry Tanaka. When your family is imprisoned and your loyalty questioned, how will you respond?

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Historical Examples of Black-Asian Solidarity

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Historical Examples of Black-Asian Solidarity

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opinion: black-asian solidarity has a long and storied history in america - cnn

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Opinion: Black-Asian solidarity has a long and storied history in America

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Van Jones writes that Black solidarity with the Asian American community is no surprise to those who know the long history of America's struggle for racial equality. It builds on a centuries-long tradition of Black and Asian American solidarity when it has mattered the most.

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Key Legal Cases and Government Acts in Early Asian American History

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Key Legal Cases and Government Acts in Early Asian American History

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These are the texts of some of the primary documents which have shaped or described early Asian American history, including key legal cases, government acts, reports and more. Most of these are linked from within the ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS program descriptions for context. We plan to expand this collection over time.

VIEW ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY TIMELINE
WITH LINKS TO DOCUMENTS
A detailed timeline by author and scholar Sucheng Chan

or
VIEW DOCUMENTS DIRECTLY BELOW

DOCUMENTS
1854 - People V. Hall
California Supreme Court ruling that a Chinese man was "inferior" to Whites and therefore could not testify in court against a White man charged with murder.

1862 - Chinese Police Tax Law
A California law taxing businesses that hired Chinese labor

1875 - Page Act
Congressional law against the importation of Asian women, ostensibly to discourage prostitution.

1882 - Chinese Exclusion Act The Congressional Act which prohibited virtually all Chinese immigration for over 60 years.

1886 - Yick Wo vs. Hopkins
U.S. Supreme Court decision that declares a law with unequal impact on different groups is discriminatory.

1898 - U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark
Landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming Chinese born in this country were U.S. citizens, per the14th Amendment.

1904 - Extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act Extended Chinese Exclusion Act indefinitely.

1910 - 1940 - Angel Island Poetry
Poetry written by Chinese on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station.

1942 - Executive Order 9066: Japanese Internment Act
The Presidential order that established WWII internment camps for Japanese Americans and others.

1943 - Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act
Repealed the 1882 Exclusion Act, but still severely limited Asian immigration.
Special thanks to Asian American Studies, UC Berkeley.
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Ancestors in the Americas: Historical Documents

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These are the texts of some of the primary documents which have shaped or described early Asian American history, including key legal cases, government acts, reports and more. Most of these are linked from within the ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS program descriptions for context. We plan to expand this collection over time.

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Itliong was a farmworker leader

This children’s book, written by historian Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Ph.D. and Gayle Romasanta, and richly illustrated by Andre Sibayan, tells the story of often forgotten United Farm Workers Union cofounder, Larry Itliong, his migration to the United States, and his lifelong fight for a farmworkers union. This is the first nonfiction illustrated children’s book about Filipino American history and the first book written about Larry Itliong.

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Description. This children's book, written by historian Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Ph.D. and Gayle Romasanta, and richly illustrated by Andre Sibayan, tells the story of often forgotten United Farm Workers Union cofounder, Larry Itliong, his migration to the United States, and his lifelong fight for a farmworkers union. This is the first nonfiction illustrated children's book about Filipino American history and the first book written about Larry Itliong.

Author Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, PhD, is a third-generation Pinay (Filipina American) born and raised in Stockton, California, and the descendant of farmworkers and teachers. She received a BA in history and an MA in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a doctorate degree in American history from Stanford University. Before her untimely passing on August 10, 2018, she was a professor in the department of history at San Francisco State University, a co-founder of Little Manila Rising in Stockton and a board member and National Scholar of the Filipino American National Historical Society. She is the author of several articles, essays, poems, and books, including "Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipino American Community in Stockton, California" (Duke University Press, 2013) and the first book about Larry Itliong, "Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong" (Bridge and Delta Publishing, 2018).

Author Gayle Romasanta was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in Stockton, California. She is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts writing program at California College of the Arts. Her work as a writer and editor has spanned over 20 years, with her work published in newspapers, literary journals, magazines, and books. She founded Kappa Psi Epsilon sorority, a Filipino culture-based organization, over 20 years ago with chapters statewide at UCLA, UC Davis, CSU Long Beach, CSU Sacramento, and San Francisco State University. She is also the author of the English and Tagalog children's book, "Beautiful Eyes" (Meritage Press, 2012). Currently she is the publisher/owner of Bridge and Delta Publishing, an independent publishing house focused on Filipino American storytelling.

​ Illustrator Andre Sibayan: Andre Sibayan is an illustrator and designer, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been featured in major national and international magazines, retail brands, kids apparel, and various food, beverage, and hospitality branding projects. Growing up on comics, anime, and Saturday morning cartoons has given him an affinity for creating art for the young and the young at heart.

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Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong

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Description. This children's book, written by historian Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Ph.D. and Gayle Romasanta, and richly illustrated by Andre Sibayan, tells the story of often forgotten United Farm Workers Union cofounder, Larry Itliong, his migration to the United States, and his lifelong fight for a farmworkers union.

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A report by 87 AAPI high school students, including workshop participant Ananya Modi, on incidents of anti-Asian discrimination against AAPI youth during the pandemic. Featuring key findings, history and contextualization of anti-Asian racism, key recommendations, and more.

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Reviving the history of radical Black-Asian internationalism

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Reviving the history of radical Black-Asian internationalism

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Sax Rohmer's 1913 novel, The Mystery of Fu Manchu, captivated readers with its distillation of centuries of Western desire, fear and fascination of "the East" into a single antagonist: Dr. Fu Manchu, "the yellow peril incarnate." Equipped with both the "cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race" and mastery of the Western sciences, the devious Chinaman thrilled and terrified readers with his spectacular exploits.

A criminal mastermind, mad scientist and master chemist, one prick of his hypodermic needle enough to drive even the strongest-willed leading man mad. In Fu Manchu, Rohmer adeptly crystallized Western associations of Eastern disease, invasion, corruption and enslavement into a monstrous man to be feared, reviled and, ultimately, vanquished.

The racialization of COVID-19 - as the "Chinese virus" or "kung flu" - revives this deeply embedded cultural touchstone. Despite emerging evidence that suggests the virus was circulating for years prior to the first documented outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, the scapegoat narrative that the virus derives from the Chinese city's "wet markets" or even escaped from a high-security Chinese virology lab has firmly settled in popular imagination, highlighting the lasting rhetorical uses of the yellow peril trope.

As the new Oriental invasion, COVID-19 became a convenient external enemy, necessitating national unity in a time of social upheaval, never mind the grossly disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities. Like the "Chinese Must Go!" labor movements, lynchings and vigilante violence of the 1870s, recent anti-Asian violence - from a Texas grocery store stabbing to a Brooklyn acid attack - serves to preserve national, economic and bodily health by violently excising the "alien in our midst."

Yet, as the isolation of social distancing gave way to mass Black Lives Matter mobilizations in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, another version of yellow peril has been revived. Protest signs wielding the slogan "Yellow Peril supports Black Power" allude to the oppositional politics of the Asian American movement of the "long sixties": one in which the nightmare of Oriental invasion is subverted into a call for anti-colonial revolt. Embedded in this slogan is the spirit of Black-Asian internationalist critiques of global empire and white supremacy which defined the "Third World" idea.

The overlapping social upheavals of a pandemic racialized as "Oriental" and Black uprisings against white supremacist policing require an analysis that sutures the discourses of antiblackness and Orientalism, not as equivalent but constitutive components of global racial capitalism. Amidst the contradictions between an intensifying military "pivot to Asia" and a Black abolitionist vision to divest from carceral institutions, the revolutionary internationalist tradition of Black and Asian anti-imperialists provides a road map for envisioning and building a different world.

Yellow peril - an imperial discourse - functions by creating an entity to fear and extinguish; an external enemy around which the idea of the West coheres. In the 1932 Mask of Fu Manchu, one of the many film adaptations of Rohmer's novels, a yellow-faced Boris Karloff hatches a plot to uncover the lost mask of Genghis Khan. With the legendary conqueror's mask, he can pronounce himself the Khan's heir and lead the peoples of Asia and the Middle East into a war to "kill the white man and take his women!"

The yellow peril genre foregrounds the imagery of Oriental hordes and senseless violence - what John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats call a "transhistorical fantasized tradition of Eastern antagonism against the West." Any subtext of anti-colonial insurrection is excised in favor of a feigned Western innocence in need of manly defense from the terroristic East.

The colonial domination of Asia was itself framed as a preemptive measure against the threat of yellow peril. In 1895, as European imperialist powers carved Asia into a series of colonial administrations and concessions, the divine vision of colonial conquest was visualized by a lithograph commissioned by German Emperor Wilhelm II. A glowing Buddha floats ominously in the East, as the nations of Europe - personified as angelic Hellenistic warriors - are warned: "Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions." In 1905, when Japan shocked the Western world by defeating a European power in the Russo-Japanese war, Wilhelm's nightmare of an anti-imperial race war seemed imminent.

Yet for some on the other side of the Atlantic, Japan's resounding victory struck a very different chord. Pan-African socialist and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois heralded what he saw as "the awakening of the yellow race," an event which made all but inevitable the "black and brown" races to follow. "This," Du Bois wrote, "is the problem of the yellow peril and of the color line, and it is the problem of the American Negro."

Du Bois' color line thesis identified the global nature of white supremacy and clarified the power of the world's Black, brown and yellow majority to undermine imperialism and capitalism. Where the Western powers saw a threat to global white supremacy, Du Bois saw the yellow peril as a beacon of potential for peoples of color to transgress the color line once and for all

And while history would prove that Japanese military might would not challenge but in fact entrench the forces of global imperialism, Du Bois' radical interpretation of the Japanese victory demonstrates that yellow peril has had two uses: both as a tool of empire and as a call to arms against it.

In 1968, when the young members of Berkeley's Asian American Political Alliance showed up to a San Francisco protest to free imprisoned Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, they did so carrying signs emblazoned with the now-iconic slogan: "Yellow Peril supports Black Power."

In Du Boisian fashion, their repurposing of the imperial discourse of yellow peril became shorthand for a praxis of shared rebellion against racism, imperialism and capitalism.

For Asian American radicals in the midst of the Black Power movement and an imperialist Vietnam war against an "invisible" Oriental enemy, the trope that damned Asians in the US as perpetual foreigners and " enemy aliens " became the very discourse to inhabit foreignness as a critique of US empire. It clarified a commitment to a revolutionary internationalist order that could undermine the logics of white supremacy, imperialism and the United States itself.

In the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, "Yellow Peril supports Black Power" has reemerged as a clarion call for Asian American solidarity. While some have lodged complaints against the "Yellow Peril" slogan on the grounds that it decenters Black struggles, we would be remiss to forget that it was the leaders of the Black liberation movement themselves who encouraged early Asian American activists to go global in their orientation.

For instance, when Black Panther Party member David Hilliard told the Red Guards, "If you can't relate to China then you can't relate to the Panthers," he was insisting that Asian communist and anti-imperialist movements were crucial complements to the Panthers' struggle against antiblackness and white supremacy. To stand with the Panthers, then, Asian Americans had to look beyond assimilationist claims to US belonging and instead towards the rising tide of Third World revolution in the East.

Calls for Black-Asian internationalist solidarity ebbed and flowed throughout radical movements of the 20th century. In 1943, poet and activist Langston Hughes penned the anti-colonial poem "Roar, China!" which called to "smash the revolving doors of the Jim Crow Y.M.C.A." - linking Jim Crow segregation in the US South to white-only businesses in Shanghai's imperialist concessions. In 1964, Malcolm X declared Vietnam "the struggle of the whole Third World."

And then, in 1979, the Anti-Imperialist Delegation - headed by Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver - led a "people's diplomacy" tour of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Vietnam and the People's Republic of China. This multiracial delegation itself was a critique of the so-called West. Looking East for revolutionary tactics to adapt to the belly of the beast, Cleaver called for "the oppressed and revolutionary peoples of the world [to] follow the example of the heroic Korean people."

Empire was at the heart of this delegation's critiques, noting the ways that racialization was mapped onto the world. As symbols of the Third World idea, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung represented a different kind of leadership and political philosophy, one that could free the masses from capitalist exploitation and colonial trauma. Identifying with the project of the Third World, diasporic communities - including Black and Asian American radicals - forged solidarities based not on equivalence, but on the alliances and coalitions necessary to create a non-aligned world order in an era of decolonization.

These internationalist, anti-imperial alliances contested the global color line, which Du Bois famously argued was the defining problem of the 20th century. Our current crises demonstrate both the longevity of this global arrangement of power, as well as its flexibility.

The linear color scheme of the era of de jure segregation, partitions and colonial rule has been largely retooled into a discourse of multicultural inclusion that tolerates or even celebrates "difference" while retaining the structures that produce race-based vulnerabilities. The capacity of the color line to adapt is paradigmatic to contemporary racism, as multiculturalism and racial liberalism have emerged as the dominant narrative of US politics, obscuring the ongoing racism and imperialism in an ostensibly "post-racial" era.

In the mid-20th century, a new script emerged to incorporate Asian racial difference into the project of empire: the myth of the "model minority." In contrast to Black Americans agitating for racial equality and Third World anti-colonial, communist national liberation movements, Asian Americans were framed as apolitical, upwardly mobile and, therefore, proof of the benevolence of US capitalist liberal democracy.

Where the yellow peril demarcated the global color line through the imagined threat of transgression, the model minority myth upholds the post-racial fantasy of the color line's supposed irrelevance. The model minority narrative domesticates the internationalist spirit of Asian America's radical origins, foreclosing possibilities for oppositional, anti-imperialist politics so necessary in our current moment.

The renewed appeal of "Yellow Peril supports Black Power" stems from its rejection of the model minority narrative, which presupposes Asian American apoliticism, antiblackness and an assimilationist embrace of American social norms. The slogan has long been a refusal of what Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan called a white "racist love" for Asian Americans in service of "racist hate" against Black Americans.

The emergence of the model minority myth as a tool to admonish Black-led demands for racial justice in the 1960s has been well-documented. William Petersen's 1966 article "Success Story: Japanese American Style," which heralded Japanese American family values, educational achievement and a culture of diligence amidst racial discrimination, is emblematic of the myth's utility in contrasting Asian American "success" with the supposed Black cultural pathology popularized by the Moynihan Report.

Certainly, the touting of Asian American achievement as "proof" of US meritocracy and racial liberalism is central to the model minority discourse, often explicitly wielded to admonish Black Americans for failing to do the same. In this sense, the model minority myth functions as a counterrevolutionary discourse: defanging Black-led calls for an antiracist redistribution and reconstruction of a fundamentally racist US society by pointing to Asian American "success stories" as evidence of US equal opportunity.

What this model minority "origin story" often misses is the myth's other counterrevolutionary function: as imperial propaganda in a Cold War context in which US racism risked derailing the geopolitical project of winning "hearts and minds" across the Third World. Where yellow peril wields the specter of Oriental aggression and poses US settler colonialism and imperialism as the shining knights of Western civilization, the model minority subsumes the very existence of US imperialism under a veneer of multicultural harmony.

This is visible in the case of multiple US occupations in the Pacific. Dean Saranillio has written that the representation of Hawaiian statehood as an Asian American civil rights victory provided liberal cover for what in fact was the entrenchment of settler colonialism over Kanaka Maoli land in service of Hawai'i's strategic positioning in the US military's Pacific front. In 1952, propagandist Edward Bernays cited Hawai'i's strategic position as a "melting pot" of "Oriental assimilation" which would make the island archipelago "invaluable as a psychological rampart in the national defense of the United States" against "communist charges" of US racism and imperialism.

Likewise, the postwar US occupation of Japan and its molding into a junior partner of the US Cold War agenda in Asia necessitated the racial rehabilitation of Japanese people from their WWII image as "kamikaze" aggressors to that of, as historian Naoko Shibusawa argues, a feminized, docile position as "international model minorities."

Like the model minority's evocation of a "problem" minority, the valorization of model geopolitical allies exists in productive tension with "enemy nations." Through this lens, corporate media's recent portrayal of international pandemic responses could be productively read as a neo-Cold War geography of US agendas in Asia. Where South Korea, Taiwan and Japan were heralded as models of Asian public health done "the right way," spurious claims about falsified numbers, mass graves, and other markers of "authoritarianism" were weaponized against the governments of China, the DPRK and Iran.

Where the yellow peril paints an isolated and sanctions-starved Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a belligerent nuclear threat to the American people and justifies US military presence from South Korea to Okinawa, Guam, Hawai'i and the Philippines as a righteous crusade to "contain" China, the internationalization of the model minority poses Japan, South Korea and others as "success stories" of Western capitalist modernity and vindication of US hegemony in Asia in the name of anticommunist containment and capitalist integration.

Demarcating Asian "success stories" from "enemy nations," the yellow peril and model minority narratives continue to work in tandem to legitimize US geopolitical supremacy.

The complementary counterrevolutionary functions of the yellow peril and model minority tropes make it difficult to refute one without reifying the other. The pandemic-prompted rise of anti-Asian violence, for instance, has inspired some Asian Americans to attempt to evade the imperial discourse of yellow peril through claims of US imperial citizenship. Most notoriously, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang embodied this model minority impulse in his call for Asian Americans to "show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country."

Despite widespread critique from the Asian American mainstream, Yang's argument was not too different from the claims that many Asian Americans have long made about safety, inclusion and belonging. Prominent Asian American writers wrote statements and organized daylong workshops like "United Against Hate: A Day of Solidarity." Scholars have ignited critical conversations about Asian and Asian American experiences on campus. Commentators - even celebrities like John Cho - remarked on the ease with which the comfortable, if invisibilizing, position of the model minority could give way to the racialized visibility and scrutiny of yellow peril.

Many of these responses to Orientalist rhetoric and violence called for broader civics, combatting tropes of invasion with ones about citizenship and belonging. These claims to model minority status dismissed a deeper critique of the US, instead seeking safety from the state discourse of yellow peril in the arms of the state itself. Many have turned to hate crime legislation and police enforcement, legitimizing the role of carceral violence as a salve for rising anti-Asian hate violence.

For instance, in May, New York City launched a $100,000 effort to combat anti-Asian discrimination through public outreach, including signs that read: "Discrimination and harassment due to COVID-19 are illegal in New York City." Similarly, the Japanese American Citizens' League resource guide on anti-Asian violence implores witnesses and victims of hate violence to "cooperate fully with the police." These calls for safety through an embrace of the carceral state are part of a longer history of co-opting anti-Asian violence to bolster federal hate crimes legislation - dismissing an anti-imperialist stance that identifies the US itself as the world's "greatest purveyor of violence."

If assimilation has historically mediated the relationship between yellow peril and model minority, then claims of Americanness inevitably swaps the imperial nightmare of anti-colonial "race war" for the legitimizing imperial fantasy of "post-racial" harmony. Instead of resisting the imperial logics of yellow peril, Asian American claims to belonging often function as a simple redirection of imperialist violence. T-shirts proudly stating "I'm Asian but I'm not Chinese" demonstrate this most literally.

Meanwhile, the Asian American Journalists Association called on media to avoid "generic images of Chinatown" in their COVID-19 coverage, warning that it could "reinforce stereotypes and create a sense of 'otherness.'" While surely well-intentioned, such responses naturalize imperial violence in Asia, taking issue primarily with its misapplication to "innocent" Asian Americans. Rather than inhabiting foreignness as a critique which destabilizes the valorization of all things American, claiming the US entrenches imperial violence. Merely advocating for expanded parameters to define the American "us" implicitly reifies the dichotomy between "us" and "them."

Interestingly, despite its ostensible invocation of the specter of Oriental anti-colonial revolt, the revival of the "Yellow Peril supports Black Power" slogan largely obscures this internationalist context in favor of a domesticated version of Asian American solidarity modeled on a template of white allyship.

Counterintuitively, the meme-ification of "Yellow Peril supports Black Power" occurs alongside a brand of Asian American discourse which presumes Asianness is antithetical to the values of social justice on which Asian American support for Black lives is presumably predicated. For instance, the recent "talk to your Asian parents about antiblackness" genre poses second-generation, mostly college-educated Asian Americans as the necessary bridges to shepherd their parents into the milieu of recognizing privilege, unpacking colorism and debunking the model minority myth.

Despite their intent, this genre associates Asianness with ignorance and racism and Asian Americanness with progressivism and solidarity - an assumption which risks excising the anti-colonial, anti-imperial and communist struggles which many of our parents and grandparents lived through as somehow irrelevant to the task of engaging in struggles against antiblackness and white supremacy. Where Asian American allyship is delimited to the same terrain of liberalism and multiculturalism which construct the facade of US post-racialism, a return to internationalism enables a fundamental critique of Americanness motivated not by charity or empathy, but an analysis of the intertwined systems of antiblackness, Orientalism and global white supremacy.

In spite of the theses that claimed that COVID-19 pulled back the curtain of the model minority to reveal yellow peril, it may be more accurate to say that the pandemic has clarified how instrumental the coexistence of both discourses is to their coherence. In an attempt to reclaim "yellow peril," these efforts unwittingly recreate a new model minority, defanging the radical internationalism at the crux of Asian American identity formation in favor of a model subject of US progressivism and racial liberalism.

As historian Vijay Prashad urges, "The Third World awaits...resurrection, not as nostalgia but as a project that matches our contemporary dilemmas." Indeed, the spirit of Third World internationalism is alive and well - if overlooked - in today's Black Lives Matter movement.

The stunning 2016 policy platform Vision for Black Lives directly implicated US militarism in its call to divest from carceral structures and invest in Black communities. Citing the "increasing militarization of Africa" under US military programs such as AFRICOM, the document denounced US imperialism as a "direct threat to global Black liberation" and identified demilitarization as a prerequisite for investment in Black communities.

Others have identified international police exchanges and the sale of military supplies to police departments as further evidence of the conjoined carceral functions of domestic police occupation and international military hegemony which necessitates an interlinked abolitionist and anti-imperialist movement.

Black Lives Matter's critical connections to anti-imperialist struggle have been largely silenced in mainstream discussions. This speaks to a historical truth: Black liberation movements have always posed a particular problem for the maintenance of US empire. State Departments have complained that the brutal repression of protesters undermines the "moral authority" of the US to projects to advance its geopolitical agenda. Meanwhile, the US embassy of Seoul ostentatiously displayed a Black Lives Matter banner as the US military continues its 70 year occupation of the Korean peninsula.

Where Black internationalists have sought to exploit the connections of the Third World by forging strategic alliances with the colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America and beyond, US political elites have instead co-opted civil rights progress as "proof" of US democratic values on the world stage. The beneficiaries of today's global color line have a vested interest in domesticating struggles for racial justice, cordoning off domestic rebellions into the same narrative of US progressive exceptionalism that necessitates US global leadership.

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted an affective crisis for Asian Americans caught between the comfortable invisibility of the model minority and the racialized scrutiny of the yellow peril. Yet in the context of a renewed Black Lives Matter rebellion, the productive contradictions of this emotional turmoil have been largely buried under important but limiting framings of Asian American privilege, allyship and solidarity.

They provide an opportunity to understand the crude Orientalism of the "Chinese virus" and the endemic antiblackness of our carceral institutions as complementary, constitutive elements of global white supremacy.

The intertwined abolitionist and internationalist traditions offer an alternative to imperial hegemony: to center a politics of refusal and commit to dismantle, undo, unlearn, deny, defund and abolish US imperial rule through internationalist solidarities. As the foundational abolitionist organization Critical Resistance declared in their pandemic policy platform, "This pandemic is not bound by borders. As such, our solidarity and response must be international."

Amidst both a global pandemic and a global uprising, the history of Black-Asian internationalism - encapsulated in the slogan "Yellow Peril supports Black Power" - operates as a critical framework to deconstruct the systems of antiblackness and Orientalism, policing and perpetual war, necessary to transform this oppressive world order.

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Reviving the history of radical Black-Asian internationalism

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Sax Rohmer's 1913 novel, The Mystery of Fu Manchu , captivated readers with its distillation of centuries of Western desire, fear and fascination of "the East" into a single antagonist: Dr. Fu Manchu, "the yellow peril incarnate."

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How Black-Asian Solidarity is Taking on White Supremacy Today

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How Black-Asian Solidarity is Taking on White Supremacy Today

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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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Ignoring the History of Anti-Asian Racism Is Another Form of Violence 

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Ignoring the History of Anti-Asian Racism Is Another Form of Violence 

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By Dr. Connie Wun, co-founder of AAPI Women Lead.

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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a significant uptick in violence against Asians and Asian Americans. The organization Stop AAPI Hate collected more than 2,800 reports of verbal abuse, harassment, and physical assaults against Asians in the United States from March to December 2020. These reports depict a disturbing reality, especially for Asian women, who experienced violence nearly 2.5 times more than their male counterparts. However, the numbers do not tell the full story: They don't include many of the unreported and increasingly normalized incidents of violence that started as soon as the Trump administration began to unapologetically characterize the global pandemic as the "Chinese virus." Since then, Asians and Asian Americans have shared countless accounts with one another, privately describing the challenges of everyday life in the U.S.

As an example, early last March, my aunt came home from the grocery store visibly upset. She explained that she had been chased out of a local Bay Area supermarket by another shopper because he insisted that she was carrying the virus. My uncle then suggested that perhaps dying his hair blonde could save him from the anti-Asian harassment.

These stories are painful, but they are also part of a larger, and often dismissed, history of violence. In addition to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the assaults against Filipino farmworkers in the 1930s by white mobs, and the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s, there's a longstanding history of racialized colonial wars that shaped our communities' histories before we even arrived to the United States.

As a Vietnamese woman born in Oakland, California, I was never taught about the effects of the Viet Nam War or how, in the aftermath, refugees and immigrants spent indefinite amounts of time in various camps across the globe. I didn't know about the estimated two million civilians and more than one million Vietnamese soldiers who were killed. I did not understand the enduring impacts of the chemical Agent Orange, which U.S. troops used during the war, until I visited my mother's homeland in the early 2000s. And it wasn't until later that I learned about the massacres or the racist characterizations of Vietnamese people used to legitimize millions of deaths. It was then that I also learned about the anti-war protests across the globe, including those led by Black civil rights leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali. These leaders also fought hard for our rights as new immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.

Fortunately, I've been able to seek out knowledge and learn directly from Asian American leaders, including Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese internment camp survivor who was friends with civil rights leader Malcolm X. She spent much of her life highlighting the issues impacting Asians and Asian Americans and in racial solidarity to end police violence and systemic racism against Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.

The myth that we have not been impacted by white supremacy also ignores our diverse communities' experiences with Islamophobia and anti-South Asian violence, especially post-9/11. It dismisses the lived realities of and and Asian Americans, as well as our . And it often fails to account for the experiences of our Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander counterparts, whose stories are often conflated with that of Asians in the category of API, Asian Pacific Islanders. Yet, with all of these ongoing needs, less than one percent of philanthropicfunding goes to our communities.

But instead of this support, Asian communities are being scapegoated for the virus.

I've asked community ambassadors and organizers in Oakland, who know our neighborhoods intimately, what they think about the recent incidents of assault and harassment. They shared that the violence is much more systemic than what's on the news: It's about poverty, the impacts of gentrification, including displacement and houselessness, racial profiling, mental health needs, limited health care, and other social services. But instead of this support, Asian communities are being scapegoated for the virus.

We've been hurting for a long time, and we've been working to create solutions for just as long. Now, finally, our stories are getting some attention. Hopefully, resources will come next.

Regardless, this moment is a reminder to build together, to continue to share our stories, to provide resources, to help one another address immediate needs and create long-lasting change. Our lives depend on it-and each other.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

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Ignoring the History of Anti-Asian Racism Is Another Form of Violence

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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a significant uptick in violence against Asians and Asian Americans. The organization Stop AAPI Hate collected more than 2,800 reports of verbal abuse, harassment, and physical assaults against Asians in the United States from March to December 2020.

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Timeline of Events Impacting Asian America

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Timeline of Events Impacting Asian America

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A timeline of national/international events, events in ethnic America, and untold civil rights events impacting the lives of Asian Americans from the mid-19th century to now. Created by Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles and UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

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Timeline covering nearly 600 years of Asian American history in the broader context of race, colonialism, and capitalism.

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All racial identities are interrelated. This timeline places Asian American history in the context of race, colonialism, and capitalism. Starting in 1441, time periods are marked by major historical shifts, and events are organized by overlapping struggles over land, labor, and empire.

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Why Asian American History is Missing From U.S. Classrooms

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Why Asian American History is Missing From U.S. Classrooms

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Why the Asian-American Story Is Missing From U.S. Classrooms

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Educators tell TIME that anti-Asian racism is directly linked to how the AAPI community is often depicted in U.S. history lessons

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The Revival of the Yellow Peril: Culture and Scapegoating During COVID-19

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The Revival of the Yellow Peril: Culture and Scapegoating During COVID-19

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This piece is part of our Spark series: Unmasked - Anti-Asian Violence amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
In his March 19, 2020 daily press briefing,U.S.President Trump called COVID-19 the "Chinese virus," and in the days that followed adamantly defended this epithet by stating that " it comes from China." Such rhetoric from the nation's highest government official was one among many instances of the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic, and directly counteracted the World Health Organization's guideline that geographic location not be included in devising names for new human infectious diseases so as to avoid the stigma that naming practices can foment. The uptick of violence against Chinese in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the dire consequences of such stigma. Advocacy organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice has documented a dramatic rise in anti-Asian hate, from verbal to physical assaults.

Model Minority or Yellow Peril?

Both Trump's rhetoric and the rise in violence against Chinese and other Asians in the United States reflect persistent ideas of the " Yellow Peril," a negative image of Asians following their immigration in large numbers during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Chinese had been courted for their labor during the Gold Rush, working in mining and, later, industries like railroads, agriculture, manufacturing, and laundries. Whites soon turned from welcoming Chinese - albeit as temporary sojourners from what they thought of as a mysterious " Orient" - to viewing them as labor competition and a threat to Euro-Christian cultural norms and whites' social power. They maligned Chinese as immoral, dirty, and diseased, and white violence erupted in towns all over the Pacific Northwestin an attempt to drive Chinese out of them. White hostility culminated in a series of discriminatory acts to curtail Chinese immigration, the most notable being the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barring Chinese laborers. These race- and class-based immigration restrictions were the first of their kind, and would be followed by immigration laws excluding other Asians and other ethnic groups unwanted by white society.

Attitudes towards Chinese changed in World War II when the United States sought China as an ally, and the post-war period saw the birth of the model minority myth. The image of Chinese- and other Asian-Americans as good, assimilable minorities served to counter the aims of civil rights movements and black power dissent - whites propped up Asian-Americans as proof that racial inequality had been overcome. But the Yellow Peril image never disappeared - at times lying dormant, at times joining together with the model minority myth (I can remember myself as a teenager in the late 80s subject to my peers' racial taunts about my dirtiness, at the same time teachers blithely treated me as naturally hardworking and without need of support).

What Vijay Prashad calls "Western fantasies of Chinese domination" began in the 1980s, and U.S. fears only increased with China's continued rise in economic and military power. When a novel pathogen - SARS-CoV - was identified in Guangdong province, China, in November 2002, later appearing in the United States in March 2003, U.S. discourse focused on China as a disease threat. The resulting resurgence of racialized disease tropes mirror what we see in today's COVID-19 pandemic context, ever since its identification in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China. From U.S. government officials' rhetoric to mass media, Chinese are depicted as disease vectors, and Chinese culture as consisting of "exotic" cuisine and unhygienic markets.

Offering current knowledge of how infectious diseases arise and spread can help counter these uninformed ideas about China and Chinese culture in relation to disease.

Dispelling Myths about China and Disease

Animals are not to blame: Human patterns of agriculture, food consumption, and land use drive disease emergence. Research suggests that zoonotic species (viruses and other pathogens that spread between humans and non-human animals) are the source of about 60% of pathogens infecting humans - and about 75% of emerging (i.e. new, re-emerged, or newly spread) infections. The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes COVID-19 shares a genetic profile similar to one of the many coronaviruses found in bats,hardyhostswho tend to not get sick from these viruses (similar to how humans largely coexist with seasonal influenza while maintaining general health). But when zoonotic pathogens infect new hosts, these new hosts typically cannot handle them with the same ease. Such is the case with the 2020 novel coronavirus and its infection of humans.

Whether SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through direct contact with bats or through an intermediate host is still unknown (and may never be definitively known). But disease ecologists have demonstrated that it is the interactions between species that are the main factor in new disease emergence. Moreover, the factors driving zoonotic outbreaks in humans are largely human-made. The 2003 monkeypox outbreak in the United States arose when a Texas distributor imported small mammals (which turned out to be suffering from monkeypox) from Ghana to an Illinois facility housing prairie dogs for sale as pets - infecting the latter and their human handlers. Human encroachment into wildlife habitats via agriculture expansion, deforestation, and other forms of land development account for much of the conditions that put multiple species into new and intensified relationship. The 1998-99 Nipah outbreak in Malaysia resulted from a combination of deforestation and the migration of fruit-eating bats carrying Nipah virus to cultivated orchards and pig farms - and eventually their human handlers.

Industrialized factory farms and urban expansion produce large, susceptible populations of human and non-human animals. The first known COVID-19 outbreak was in a live market in Wuhan. But the first known case occurred weeks earlier, totally outside of the market - suggesting that the market was simply a place where one infected human came into contact with other humans. Live markets, as well as small backyard farms, have been met with international scrutiny as a source of zoonotic disease outbreaks. However, studies show that it is factory farms that are primarily responsible for the large-scale spread of these diseases. Our most recent preceding pandemic, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic first identified in the southwestern United States and in Mexico, stemmed from the increased contact between wild birds (hardy hosts who are asymptomatic carriers) with highly susceptible populations of poultry and pigs on industrialized (i.e. densely packed, low genetic diversity) farms. The proximity of the farms to densely populated human centers was the final condition for the disease to jump into and spread widely among humans.

Thus, it is not China's cuisine (or any culture's food preferences), its small markets, or its small farms that produce significant disease outbreaks among domesticated livestock; it is the enormous swaths of domesticated livestock in factory farms. Indeed, it is China's role as a major producer of the world's meat that makes it a hot spot for livestock industry outbreaks; as are the United States and Mexico per the H1N1 flu pandemic. But it is too easy to blame these locales - and there are many more - when they are merely sites in a global chain of industrialized meat production. The world's consumers of meat also bear responsibility - their dependence on this industry drives this enormous scale of production.

No one nation is solely responsible for a pandemic's spread; but some can serve as a model. The initial outbreak(s) of a pandemic is an important site of intervention. However, if an emerging pathogen is contagious enough, as SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be, it is extremely challenging to contain its spread. What will matter more is the combined containment efforts of governments around the world.

Many of the containment efforts directed at COVID-19 derive from studies of what worked during the 1918 flu that ravaged millions around the world. Yet no epidemiologist would deny the uncertainty entailed in striking the right balance of public health measures and the timing of their implementation - particularly for an unknown disease such as COVID-19. But we can look to some relatively successful containment efforts thus far. China, site of the first known outbreak, put into effect a variety of measures, from intensive contact tracing and quarantine to social distancing and personal protection and prevention. China's response, along with those of South Korea and Vietnam among others, can serve as a model for countries like the U.S. that continue to struggle to contain the pandemic.

The United States is the wealthiest country in the world but the health status of its populations is distributed unevenly: for instance, black and native folks have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Marginalized groups not only have more existing health conditions, but are more concentrated among job types with greater risks of exposure, reflecting a long history of systemic inequality and inadequate health care access. A nation - and the globe - is only as healthy as its most vulnerable.

We Should Rely on Epidemiology and Disease Ecology Sciences, Not Racist Stereotypes

The current anti-Chinese/anti-Asian sentiment in the United States reflects an attempt - from the nation's president on down to the individual - to deflect from U.S. participation in global patterns of consumption and land use on the one hand, and U.S. government's efficacy (or lack thereof) in containment and provision of health resources. As we continue to meet the challenges of COVID-19, we must contest the distracting ruse of the Yellow Peril and instead keep sight of current knowledge of how and why disease spreads - what disease ecologists and epidemiologists tell us about the factors driving infectious disease emergence and spread, as well as the social conditions that promote health care and well-being equitably.

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National Center for Institutional Diversity

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The Revival of the Yellow Peril: Culture and Scapegoating During COVID-19

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This piece is part of our Spark series: Unmasked - Anti-Asian Violence amid the COVID-19 Pandemic In his March 19, 2020 daily press briefing,U.S.President Trump called COVID-19 the "Chinese virus," and in the days that followed adamantly defended this epithet by stating that " it comes from China."

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Schools Need to Teach the Hard History of Asian Americans

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Schools Need to Teach the Hard History of Asian Americans

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Wing Yi Chan, Ph.D. is the P-12 Research Director at the Education Trust. She leads Ed Trust's research on identifying best practices and policies to eliminate opportunity gaps and supports high academic achievement for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. Full profile →

Like so many Asian Americans, I was not surprised when I heard the news that the mass shooting in Atlanta targeted six Asian American women. I was angry-angry that we have to be gunned down to get the attention of this country. We have been calling for help since the former president started referring to COVID-19 as the "China Virus," but few people believed us and even fewer cared to stand with us.

Every day for the past year, my community has lived in fear of falling victim to either the virus or an angry white person. Our invisibility is carefully designed to support the myth of meritocracy and white supremacy in this country. Model minority sounds like a compliment, but it's not, because we are not being accepted as Americans. At best, Asian Americans can be the more tolerable target of hate.

The media did not initially cover anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic because Asian Americans are not expected to experience racism. I mean, we are the model minority. Often, we hear things like, "Your English is very good," "Where are you from?" and "You must be good at math." These are not harmless jokes or misunderstandings. These are products of anti-Asian racism. Racism doesn't need to be overt; it doesn't need to be physical. The most painful effect of racism is that it questions whether you belong. Asian American students report these types of racist incidents at school often. A recent report from Stop AAPI Hate found that 8 out of 10 Asian American youth reported being bullied or verbally harassed during the pandemic.

As school leaders start to welcome students back to school buildings, our nation cannot go back to the pre-pandemic "normal," because, like Black and Latino students, "normal" education excludes the experience of Asian American students. Advocates for justice demand that students that look like me be seen and heard. We want our history and story to be reflected throughout the curriculum beyond the occasional performative gesture of Chinese New Year.

If the hard and critical history of Asian Americans is taught to all students, then this country would know that the scapegoating of Asian American women in the Atlanta killing is not new. Chinese women were prohibited from immigrating to the U.S. in the late 1800s because their sexuality was considered a great danger to white men. Our story is a story of exclusion and resistance. In the 1960s, Asian American student activists worked with Black and Latino activists to establish ethnic studies programs in California. It's time for Asian American students to learn that our contribution to this country goes beyond fortune cookies and General Tso's chicken.

Pre-pandemic "normal" education ignored inequities in Asian American student academic achievement. Although Asian Americans as a whole have performed well academically, there are significant within group differences. Southeast Asian American students, for example, experience significant inequities in education. According to AAPI Data, 34.3% of Laotian Americans, 38.5% of Cambodian Americans, and 39.6% of Hmong Americans do not have a high school diploma. Without disaggregated data, schools cannot identify Asian American students who need additional resources and support. The inability to identify gaps and needs in Asian American students perpetuates the model minority stereotype, which continues the vicious cycle of inequities.

The recent physical assault against our elders is particularly painful for us because elders hold a sacred place in many of our communities. Asian Americans are most likely to live in multigenerational homes. Our family often includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and sometimes family friends. School leaders and educators have an opportunity to improve their family engagement strategies by expanding the reach to include more than parents and by including culturally and linguistically relevant practices. School leaders and educators should welcome grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins as well. School leaders and educators should also ask Asian American family members about their linguistic preferences because some Asian American family members may feel less comfortable using English. It's time for school leaders and educators to decenter white norms around nuclear family structure and welcome multigenerational and multilingual families in our schools.

When Asian American students return to school buildings, they can wear a mask to be safe from the pandemic, but there is nothing they can put on that keep them safe from racism if school leaders do not take active steps now to build a more inclusive and just learning environment.

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Schools Need to Teach the Hard History of Asian Americans

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Wing Yi Chan, Ph.D. is the P-12 Research Director at the Education Trust. She leads Ed Trust's research on identifying best practices and policies to eliminate opportunity gaps and supports high academic achievement for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.

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The History of Anti-Asian Violence In America

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The History of Anti-Asian Violence In America

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"From the first immigration of Chinese to this country in the 1850s, to the present, you've seen an ebb and flow of such violence."

"The psychological trauma for Japanese Americans has really not been looked into as much," said Marge Taniwaki, an activist and producer of the KGNU radio show, La Lucha Sigue (The Struggle Continues).

"What happened in Georgia is simply a continuation of the issue...the same kind of white supremacy has happened ever since colonists landed on the shores of this particular continent."

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The History of Anti-Asian Violence In America

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"From the first immigration of Chinese to this country in the 1850s, to the present, you've seen an ebb and flow of such violence." "The psychological trauma for Japanese Americans has really not been looked into as much," said Marge Taniwaki, an activist and producer of the KGNU radio show, La Lucha Sigue (The Struggle Continues).

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Personal stories from the AAPI community to offer perspective, solidarity, and healing

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Personal stories from the AAPI community to offer perspective, solidarity, and healing

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A collection of personal stories to offer perspective on the Asian American Pacific Islander experience.

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The Unsettling Surveillance of Anti-Asian Racism

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The Unsettling Surveillance of Anti-Asian Racism

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The video opens on a sunny Oakland street corner, where two men are walking down the sidewalk. The way they move, the composition of their bodies, suggests they don't know each other. Their stances will feel familiar to anyone used to sharing city streets with strangers. The man in front appears older, walking with deliberate caution, when the other approaches quickly from behind and gives him one vigorous shove. The motion is swift, dispassionate. As the older man falls to the ground, the assailant bounds back with inverse force, releasing his hands above his head in what could be a display of triumph - or merely a reflex - before strolling out of the frame. The clip ends at five seconds, the old man lying still on the concrete.

The whole thing is abrupt and sudden. Maybe you've seen it, autoplayed on loop, almost like a GIF, as it moves through your timelines. It was first shared by ABC7 San Francisco reporter Dion Lim on February 4th on Instagram, Twitter, and an article titled "Shocking video shows 91-year-old man senselessly pushed to ground in Oakland's Chinatown."

In under 24 hours, Lim's video was retweeted by actor Daniel Dae Kim, who condemned the "skyrocketing number of hate crimes against Asian Americans" and offered a $25,000 reward "for information leading to the arrest and conviction of this man and his accomplices." The next day, at a press conference held by the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, Mayor Libby Schaaf used the recent attacks on Asian Americans as a political gambit, criticizing efforts to reduce the police budget. "I have not forgotten that this last summer," she said, when local officials "brought a proposal to cut $25 million from the Oakland police department as a political statement, not because of operational or financial need."

"We're under attack and this is reality."

The video came at a timely moment: for over a year, "China virus" rhetoric had fueled anti-Asian street harassment and violent attacks that went largely ignored by mass media and the general public. Finally, Asian American activists, community leaders, and journalists were getting national attention on the issue. Four days later, the assailant was apprehended by the police. Because of his court records and history with " significant mental health issues," he was not charged with a hate crime.

The victim, it later turned out, wasn't Asian, but a Latino man named Gilbert Diaz.

The man who sent the footage of the attack to Lim was Carl Chan, who represents the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. Chan, who has spent the past 30 years trying to give a voice to his community, is currently working on installing even more surveillance cameras to deter further assaults. "We're under attack and this is reality," he tells The Verge. "It didn't happen yesterday. It's been happening for so many years, but we just caught the national attention [now]."

That attention from the videos, Chan hopes, will justify demands for more policing to combat anti-Asian violence - a sentiment shared by many Oakland Chinatown residents and which, as Kim's $25,000 bounty suggests, is not isolated to the Bay Area. But calls for increased police presence are in direct opposition to last summer's Black Lives Matter protests that sought to raise awareness of the over-policing of Black people. The conflict is troubling: increased surveillance and policing may appear to keep one community safer, while putting others in greater peril.

Even evidence of racism toward Asians falls into stereotypes: distant, anonymous, dehumanized

Violent footage from surveillance cameras has been effective in attracting national coverage of the rise of anti-Asian racism. And the viral reception of the videos has also flattened the conversation from one about decades of ongoing racial suffering to one centered on increasing policing, instead of how to effectively protect communities. And it appears the police know it.

Recordings of robberies and attacks are sent to the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce on a daily basis, Chan says. But when asked who sent him the video of Diaz's attack, Chan demurred, growing defensive that I might not be here to report on the "real issues" but rather to make it an "anti-police story."

He would not confirm where the video came from.

Just days before the video of Gilbert Diaz's attack went viral on Twitter, a similar one capturing the killing of an 84-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee outside his San Francisco apartment made national headlines. Both were caught on surveillance cameras, and both show what appears to be one man coming up behind another and shoving them before rushing away. Never mind the fact of Diaz's race. These two videos continue to be widely circulated as proof of the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, even though neither of them led to hate crime charges.

"They were saying that 'we don't see it.' So with these videos, people are finally seeing that it's actually happening," Chan said to CBSN Bay Area. "The videos are doing justice."

These videos have come to exemplify what we might call a new genre of the anti-Asian hate crime media. They're often sudden and impersonal - frequently taken from surveillance footage that often shows no other bodies around besides the assailant and the victim. These images stand in contrast to the many videos of police brutality against Black bodies, almost always filmed on phone cameras. The footage that captured the killings of Eric Garner and George Floyd follow an arc that's familiar partly because we've seen it too many times - recordings that unfold with slow dread as we watch a Black man victimized by a racist police officer.

Every hate crime story is a policing story

The videos of assaults on Asian Americans present a different horror: you're witness to a scene of brutal violence that is so swift as to appear almost random, meaningless. Watching these attacks, it's often impossible to tell the race of any of the bodies involved. The sound is often garbled, if there is any sound to be heard at all. Even evidence of racism toward Asians falls into stereotypes: distant, anonymous, dehumanized.

The most recent viral video capturing the attack of a 65-year-old Asian woman represents an escalation of this genre. The violence is even more brutal, but just as harrowing is the reluctance of building staff to intervene. One finally responds by shutting the door on the woman. (The building managers quickly responded in a public statement by condemning and firing these workers.)

The NYPD is investigating whether the assault was a targeted hate crime.

Every hate crime story is a policing story. After all, "hate crime" (sometimes known as "bias crime") emerged as a new legal category in the 1980s to charge felons motivated by prejudice. Yet the term reflects an oversimplification of the phenomenon it seeks to describe, given that law enforcement hinges on whether they can "prove" the perpetrator's "hate" toward a target group.

This was recently made explicit when a gunman attacked three Asian spas in the Atlanta, Georgia, area, killing six Asian women in addition to two other victims, and it spurred international debates over whether the act was a hate crime. Captain Jay Baker, speaking on behalf of the Cherokee County Sheriff's office, explained that the shooter was "not racially motivated" but by "a temptation... he wanted to eliminate." Baker's implication that a crime, particularly one targeting three different Asian massage spas, could not entail both racial and gendered bias prompted immediate backlash.

"In Atlanta, you have the police," University of Texas Austin history professor Eric Tang tells me, "these investigators who have known nothing about racism, known nothing about misogyny, known nothing about Asian Americans, getting to determine and interpret what happened." Which is all to say, as Tang puts it somberly, "that we're not in a very good position, three decades down the line." To that point, Baker was soon revealed to have posted images of T-shirts that read "Covid 19: imported virus from Chy-na" on social media and has since been removed from the case.

"The majority of crimes that are happening throughout the city are because people are desperate"

Hate crimes present problems of legibility. Notoriously difficult to convict, hate crime cases often backfire - causing further harm in their disavowal of prejudice. Failures in hate crime convictions can "really just reinforce that designation," explains Lu-in Wang, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, "that there are certain groups that are acceptable targets for violence... because people don't care as much about them," which only further licenses the hate crime.

Even while the Cherokee County Sheriff's office dismissed racial bias in the Atlanta shooting, local authorities did not hesitate in the immediate aftermath to send emergency patrols specifically to Asian neighborhoods, while police departments as far as Chicago and New York City also stepped up patrolling. Just as opportunistic was Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who used the pretext of rising Chinatown attacks to take a swing at her political opponents and perhaps shift the reputational burden of policy. (Critics have repeatedly pointed out that the cuts to the police department decried by Schaaf came from her own administration.) Law enforcement and politicians alike are now banding together to weaponize attacks on Asian Americans Pacific Islanders (AAPI) to their own ends, often through highly spectacularized media events.

Chaney Turner, a Black organizer who has lived in Oakland her entire life, sees the root cause of what is happening in her hometown as an issue of poverty. "Yes, there are some targeted crimes of people because of their race," Turner explains, "but the majority of crimes that are happening throughout the city are because people are desperate. People are dealing with economic and mental health issues, and these are issues that we were experiencing before Covid."

Despite rising crime throughout Oakland during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Turner's neighborhood in East Oakland, the mayor has focused on select communities like Oakland Chinatown. Some organizers like Chan are grateful for the attention: the policing of hate crimes offers the possibility of legitimizing the ongoing suffering and fear faced by many Asian Americans. Yet the punitive demands after anti-Asian attacks also go directly against the work of so many grassroots decriminalization efforts, some of which are AAPI-based like APEN and Asians 4 Abolition, among many others.

"If you only focus on hate crimes enforcement, then you're only getting at a small slice of what's happening out there."

As history and research have exhaustively shown, more policing will inevitably result in greater harm to Black and Latinx communities. Take, for example, New York City's quota-driven stop-and-frisk program, which resulted in increasing risks to vulnerable populations of anxiety, depression, struggles in school, and community engagement in civic life, without being particularly helpful in fighting crime. Faced with growing terror and limited options, however, some Asian communities now feel that they must choose to protect their own by turning to the police.

Yet this false binary - between choosing or not choosing the police - is not a failure of the Asian community's desire for safety, but a failure of policing. James Burch, policy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project, tells me about alternate models, unexplored by Schaaf, such as an ambassadorship program that provides "presence of safety" to communities. The choice, to him, doesn't have to be how few or many police officers are deployed.

As with other Oakland organizers like Turner, Burch is also frustrated with how Schaaf has used the violence against Asians as a photo op. "What I can't allow is our current mayor weaponizing the situation to divide Black and Asian communities at a time when we are and have been working so hard to unite them," he says.

If proving anti-Asian racism has hinged on the hate crime, maybe the answer is to simply move away from the term and make a new one.

Founded in 1991, Asian Americans Advancing Justice launched the #StandAgainstHate platform in early 2017 in an effort to track "hate incidents," as they're called, against AAPI and Muslim communities that surged in the wake of Donald Trump's election. Though it's been the newer Stop AAPI Hate, formed last March, that has garnered more recent media attention, with its rising record of hate incidents (the latest report counted 3,795) frequently cited across articles. Instead of hate crimes, Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Russell Jeung tells me, the broader category of hate incidents captures a range of events from online bullying to physical attacks that may not be criminally prosecutable but can still be traumatizing.

Almost 90 percent of the reports Stop AAPI Hate receives are incidents rather than crimes - in other words, forms of verbal harassment or shunning that are often overlooked when it comes to accounting for anti-Asian racism. "Unless you understand the comprehensive nature of racism in all its forms," Jeung says, "you can't really address it well. If you only focus on hate crimes enforcement, then you're only getting at a small slice of what's happening out there." One of the questions Jeung wants to ask, however, is whether simply reporting the hate incident - calling it what it is - might help reduce harm, even minimally. In contrast to hate crime data, Jeung hopes to develop "a collective voice" that expresses a different type of racial trauma - one Stop AAPI Hate plans to study by working with the Asian American Psychological Association in the future.

Even surveillance footage can ultimately obscure more than elucidate

Yet because the accounting of this data remains unofficial and broadly defined, there is also always the problem, as sociologist Tamara K. Nopper recently pointed out in a talk, of media literacy. Looking at Stop AAPI Hate's data, which ranges from physical violence to shunning, Nopper asks, "What does it mean that the term hate encompasses all of these activities? And that hate is often being used interchangeably with violence?" As Stop AAPI Hate's data keeps getting cited in news reports, Nopper warns, "this data source, as well as the hashtag, are part of what is kind of mobilizing this hate crime statistic collection; but also the passage for tougher legislation."

While the vast majority of anti-Asian hate incidents have been documented in writing, it has been videos of explicit physical violence that have come to dominate and drive awareness of the phenomenon. In a culture where anti-Asian racism remains difficult to represent, footage promises something like incontrovertible evidence. Though, as the video of Diaz's attack suggests, even surveillance footage can ultimately obscure more than elucidate.

A month after the video of Diaz's attack was released, I went down to Oakland Chinatown to try to see if I could find the specific surveillance camera on which it was captured. I did. It wasn't hard. The camera was hidden in plain sight outside an unassuming Chinese tailor shop. Though when I went inside to ask whether they owned the camera, I was redirected to the Asian Resource Center next door, where a security guard told me that all of the cameras around the building belonged to the Oakland police.

The Oakland Police Department denied a records request for the video. After several emails with the department's media office, a spokesperson responded but was unable to provide details of where the exact footage of Diaz's attack came from. Instead, they informed me that the department does not technically own any cameras in Chinatown and that they were typically maintained by commercial or residential property owners.

With this new information, I returned to Chinatown in hopes of clarifying who exactly did own the surveillance camera. Back at the Asian Resource Center, a different security guard told me that, while he had no idea who managed the security system around the building, he was pretty sure the police had access. As to who owned the surveillance cameras? This security guard wasn't sure about that either, but he suggested I try property management. I'd put in a call to building management a month ago, and they also would not confirm if the footage had been given to anyone.

No one would claim responsibility for the footage, and yet, just last week, it played during a Fox News interview with Schaaf, cited alongside Ratanapakdee's attack as examples of why Oakland needs to restore "desperately needed police services."

"Asians are seen as inoffensive, weak, vulnerable, and therefore, can be picked on."

Toward the end of The Verge's interview with Chan, he apologized for his earlier defensiveness around questions about the provenance of the footage. Moving away from the individual video of Diaz, Chan started talking about all of the other videos he'd received that he was unable to forward to the media. Oftentimes, it's because the subjects involved want to protect their privacy. "I guess that's why I'm actually sensitive about videos," Chan admits. "I'm having trouble trying not to remember all these images... before I go to sleep, I try not to remember what I saw because I really couldn't go to sleep every time I imagine, I'm thinking, My God, how could our seniors be attacked? "

For Chan, the desire for more patrols and cameras in Oakland Chinatown stems from a sense of desperate urgency - a desire to keep his community safe from what feels like endless injury with little relief in sight.

Even those who disagree with Chan carry with them the history of unacknowledged pain. Earlier that day, I'd spoken with Gordon Chang, a professor of Asian American history at Stanford. We'd spoken about the violence, and though he disagreed with increased policing, he was sympathetic to Chan's despair.

"Asians are seen as inoffensive, weak, vulnerable, and therefore, can be picked on. We all know that the Asians get picked on," he'd put it bluntly. "This is our lot in life."

I'll admit, something rings true about this sentiment - many anti-Asian hate crimes are also crimes of opportunism, targeting those who are socially viewed as unlikely to fight back or speak up. But it was a sunny day when I went in search of the surveillance camera that had caught Diaz's attack. A year of the pandemic had heightened not just racial but also economic suffering. Walking around Chinatown, I observed restaurants and shops opening - some, but not all - as people shuffled on with their day, just outside the frame of that original video.
Correction: A previous version of the article misstated that a press conference was held by Mayor Libby Schaaf. She spoke at the event, but it was hosted by the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. We regret the error.

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The unsettling surveillance of anti-Asian racism

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The video opens on a sunny Oakland street corner, where two men are walking down the sidewalk. The way they move, the composition of their bodies, suggests they don't know each other. Their stances will feel familiar to anyone used to sharing city streets with strangers.

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The Answer to Anti-Asian Racism Is Not More Policing

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The Answer to Anti-Asian Racism Is Not More Policing

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Editor's Note: On Tuesday, a white gunman attacked three massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The attack left eight people dead, including six Asian American women. In this moment, as lawmakers and the public turn renewed attention once again to racist violence, we wanted to lift up this analysis from , which discusses alternatives to the policing-oriented "hate crimes" framework that so often gains traction in moments like these.

This past year of the pandemic has seen a horrifying uptick in anti-Asian violence and hate crimes in the U.S., many targeting the elderly. From Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year old Thai man who was knocked to the ground, to Noel Quintana, a 61-year old Filipino man who was slashed in the face, many Asian elders have been assaulted and attacked since the pandemic's onset. Asian people, especially Chinese folks have been subjected to verbal and physical violence - much of which has been fueled by Trump's anti-Asian rhetoric pertaining to COVID-19's origins. Racial epithets such as "kung flu" and "Chinese virus" have only exacerbated the situation. While some people have donated or raised awareness, others have expressed their grief by calling on more policing as a means for justice. The problem is that more policing rarely results in justice for anyone, and only puts Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color (BIPOC), including Asian people, at risk for more violence.

From 1977 to 2017, state and local spending on policing increased from $42 billion to $115 billion. Policing is not only problematic, but would further negatively impact the health, well-being, safety, and livelihood of BIPOC and other marginalized people. Research has shown that police brutality has ramifications on Black health, underscoring the importance of reallocating police funds to community-based interventions. It's linked to death and excess morbidity including fatal injuries, adverse physiological responses, racist reactions that exacerbate stress, arrests and incarceration, and systematic disempowerment.

Policing is a system deeply rooted in upholding white supremacy and anti-Blackness, while enabling racist systems to inflict harm on communities of color. The origins of policing have been linked to slave patrols that date back to the 1700swho chased down runaway slaves and prevented rebellions from occurring. We see the legacy of this policing today in the mass killing of unarmed and innocent Black people from Trayvon Martinto Eric Garner.

Additionally, more policing only catalyzes racial tensions between Asian and Black communities - a racial divide that has persisted in large part due to the model minority myth. The stereotype ahistorically and dangerously portrays Asian people as "successful" and able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps even in the face of racism and systemic oppression. It's used as a weapon to pit Asian people against Black communities by implying that anti-Blackness and white supremacist systems - like policing - benefit Asian people.

This is a lie. Far from protecting us, policing has also harmed and taken the lives of Asian Americans, such as Angelo Quinto, a 30-year old Filipino American man who was knelt on and killed by Antioch Police, and Fong Lee, a 19-year old Hmong man who was killed in 2006 by the Minneapolis police - the same institution and system that would kill George Floyd, a 46-year old Black man, 15 years later. Policing is a harmful and inequitable system of justice and advocating for more policing in our communities does not mean we will see more justice or less crime. It would only call for more violence against BIPOC communities, especially police brutality and unfair treatmenton Black and brown lives, violence that Asian Americans have taken part in as police officers themselves.

Instead of calling on more policing, we need Asian solidarity with Black and brown communities as a catalyst for tackling white supremacy and the systems that continuously uphold and enable racism. Dismantling these divides requires unlearning the "scarcity mindset," a belief that tells us that there are not enough resources for everyone's needs. In Audre Lorde'sSister Outsider, Lorde highlights "the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us ... So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie."

Scarcity mindset underpins the lie that we should fight solely for Asian liberation at the expense of others, and ignores an existing history of alliance and successful collaboration between Asian Americans and Black and brown communities. For example, Jesse Jackson, a Black political activist, called for justice for the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman who was beaten to death by two white men. Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American civil rights activist and Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American social activist advocated alongside the civil rights and social justice movements for Black liberation-which served as inspiration that was used to advance Asian American liberation. So much of Asian American rights that we see today are in large thanks to Black activists and their fight and struggle for freedom. Further, the Delano Grape Strike, one of the most important economic movements in U.S. history, resulted from the collaboration of Filipino and Mexican farmworkers, led by Larry Itliong, César Chávez, and Dolores Huerta. Sadly, much of this history is erased and ignored while conflicts between Asian American communities and other BIPOC, particularly Black communities, are amplified to the benefit of the white supremacist systems that oppress us all.

While the fight for racial justice is a collective effort, working in solidarity does not mean that we should expect Black communities to do or lead the work. Asian Americans must talk directly with family and friends who believe that "police keep us safe," giving family members the opportunity to share how they feel before speaking, because family members are more likely to listen when you hear them out first. We must remind our communities of the many examples of America's racist history toward Asians,such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the colonization and denigration of Filipinos, and Executive Order 9066-which incarcerated a disproportionate amount of Japanese people who were "under suspicion as enemies" during WWII, and how this was a prelude to more recent hate crimes such as the murder of Vincent Chin, the targeting of South Asians since 9/11, and prominent Asian Americans like Jeremy Lin speaking about the racist harassmenthe's experienced on the NBA courts. You can learn more about having these conversations by following organizations such as AAPI Women Leadand South Asians for Black Lives, both of which have created and shared informative content about speaking with elders or loved ones who might not speak English about breaking anti-Black stereotypes in the household.

Another way to engage is by learning how to stop xenophobia and harassment targeting Asians in America through bystander training. In collaboration with Hollaback, Asian Americans Advancing Justice offers free bystander and de-escalation training to learn how to intervene when anti-Asian hate and harassment occurs.

White supremacist systems like policing thrive on the dissonance between BIPOC communities. Asian lives cannot afford to have hate and racism win. Instead of looking to more policing as a solution, we must redirect our grief toward positive healing in the form of solidarity. We must organize together, mobilize together, and stand alongside one another in all spaces, and not just in performative ways. There is a long history of Asian American communities working in collaboration with Black and other communities of color that offers far richer and more beneficial pathways to justice than more police, and as we've seen time and again, we're stronger and safer when we work together for our mutual liberation.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

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The Answer to Anti-Asian Racism Is Not More Policing

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Editor's Note: On Tuesday, a white gunman attacked three massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The attack left eight people dead, including six Asian American women. In this moment, as lawmakers and the public turn renewed attention once again to racist violence, we wanted to lift up this analysis from , which discusses alternatives to the policing-oriented "hate crimes" framework that so often gains traction in moments like these.

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A Google Doc with an extensive collection of multimedia resources (articles, books, podcasts, social media, ...) on Asian American history, oppression, and resistance.

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Presentation by Dr. Jennifer Ho, president of the Association for Asian American Studies and professor of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Jennifer Ho is professor of ethnic studies and director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, and president of the Association for Asian American Studies.
This outline of anti-Asian racism is adapted from a slide deck that was developed to help educate people about anti-Asian racism that has emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic. I have focused on racism in the US, but anti-Asian racism is a global phenomenon. Feel free to share widely and to add your own slides. Click here to download the slide deck in pdf form.

Racism is a system where one racial group dominates/has power over others-the Dismantling Racism site has a useful definition

Racism is institutional - it is power plus prejudice

Racism is not the same as talking about race

Racism in the U.S. has taken the form of

Anti-Chinese sentiment became part of the Yellow Peril language

Yellow Peril refers to a general fear, mistrust, and hatred of, first, Chinese in the U.S., and then these negative sentiments were transferred to other Asian-ethnic immigrant groups: Japanese, Korean and Indian

Yellow Peril sentiment fueled many anti-Asian U.S. initiatives, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the Gentleman's Agreement, and the Cable Act

The most important thing to note is that Yellow Peril sentiment reduces Asians to always being foreign, never considered American

released early March 2020

The Centers for Disease Control recently announced that the Novel Coronavirus/COVID-19 may spread in the United States. As people take precautions to manage their health (the two biggest precautions are frequent handwashing and staying home if you are sick), the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) wants to also acknowledge the rise of anti-Asian (especially anti-Chinese) harassment that many Asian Americans (particularly those who look East Asian) are experiencing. As an organization dedicated to the study of Asian Americans, we want to be very clear that xenophobia has no place in our communities or workplaces and that harassment of Asians due to fears of the coronavirus are not only unwarranted but sadly part of a longer history of stereotypes associating Asians, especially Chinese, with disease. We stand firm in rejecting anti-Asian bigotry in the guise of people expressing fear of Novel Coronavirus/COVID-19. We also urge people to find resources that will educate them about how to manage their health as well as why their prejudices/biases in assuming all Asians have the virus are rooted in a history of Yellow Peril rhetoric, xenophobia, ableism, and anti-Asian racism. Please encourage your colleagues and friends to explore this open-source syllabus that addresses anti-Asian bias associated with the coronavirus. And please remember: frequent handwashing, not anti-Asian stereotypes/harassment, is your best means of preventing the spread of coronavirus.

Anti-Black Racism & Black Lives Matter

Anti-Black/Anti-Asian Racism & White Supremacy

The current rise of anti-Asian racism feels new, but is not new -- the ferocity/violence is a resurgence of anti-Asian racism that emerges when the US is under "threat" (ex: WWII, Cold War, Viet Nam, 9/11)

Anti-Asian racism is is not the same as anti-Black racism; however, what both forms of racism share are

They are both subject to and are in service of White supremacy

They are both systemic - it's not about individual people being racist - it's about the systems and institutions in the US that create conditions where Asians are seen as foreign and Black people are not granted basic humanity and rights.

If you are learning about anti-Asian racism for the first time, and especially if you identify as Asian American, then you must recognize the ways in which being against anti-Asian racism means you must also fight anti-Black racism

AAAS Solidarity Statement

The Association for Asian American Studies(AAAS) unites in solidarity with our Black family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and co-workers to call for an immediate end to anti-Black racism and the killing of Black people. We are an organization committed to social justice, intersectional analysis, and global human rights. Our fight against anti-Asian pandemic racism is rooted in a common struggle against White supremacy. The recent murders of AhmaudArbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd propel us to state, clearly and definitively, that Black lives matter and that we must abolish the militarized police state in which anti-Black racism is embedded. To end global anti-Black racism, we must fight racism in our local communities and educate ourselves and others about the rich history of Black Americans and support, validate, and value Black lives now and always.

The Association for Asian American Studies Board of Directors

Further reading

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Jennifer Ho is professor of ethnic studies and director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, and president of the Association for Asian American Studies. This outline of anti-Asian racism is adapted from a slide deck that was developed to help educate people about anti-Asian racism that has emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic.