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Asian American History

March 2021

Presented by Winnie Fong and Andri Tai-Ward (Estolano Advisors)

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Recent headlines have shed light on rising surge of Anti-Asian violence across the nation…

On Tuesday March 16^th, 8 people (incl. 6 Asian women) were targeted and killed by a white gunman in Atlanta

This is not an isolated incident, it’s part of a wave of Anti-Asian violence sweeping across the US

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Unfortunately, Anti-Asian discrimination is nothing new in the US and has long historical roots…

1800s

1900s – 2000s

Today

Beginning of the trope of “Asians are here to take our jobs”

Asian Americans targeted and blamed for their “foreign-ness”

Asian Americans blamed for “causing” the coronavirus

People v. Hall in 1854: �California Supreme Court rules that people of Asian descent could not testify against a white person in court�
Chinese Massacre of 1871: �500 rioters attack LA’s small Chinese community lynching 19 Chinese men and boys. No one was ever punished�
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: �Banned Chinese immigration until 1943, the first legislation restricting immigration targeting a specific race

Japanese internment during WWII: �The US government forces 117,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps, seizing property and assets.�
Murder of Vincent Chin (1982): �Chinese American Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two white men in Detroit, blamed for “the Japanese” taking their jobs. The men were given probation and a $3,000 fine. �
9/11-inspired Islamophobia: �In one instance, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American gas station owner, was murdered for wearing a turban, mistaken for a Muslim

“Kung Flu” and “China Virus”: �President Trump repeatedly calls the coronavirus, “Kung Flu” and “China Virus” on national news outlets�
AAPI communities are raising alarms:�AAPI communities are testifying before Congress on the rise of AAPI violence.

Public figures and corporations are starting to speak out in support too:�President Biden, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Nike, and many more organizations have begun raising their voices in support

Credit: Jason Zhou

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Perpetual Foreigner “Yellow Peril”

LIFE Magazine, 1941

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Asian Americans - A Political Movement

Many young people began to actualize their identity as Americans and speak out as an organized group with multi-ethnic roots. The 1960s were also a time of legislative change for Asian Americans, during which the government finally eased laws restricting immigration and opened its doors to new Asian immigrants.

Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) ended quotas limiting Asian immigration and provided for the active recruitment of professionals and students from East Asia. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the United States resettled more than half a million refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and further diversified the communities established by Japanese and Chinese families that had come generations earlier.
Inspired by the Black Power movement, students of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean heritage who had previously thought of themselves as distinct communities imagined a pan-ethnic collective defined from within.

“Asian American” was coined around 1968, and developed over a long decade of art, community work, struggle, and study. The Asian American Movement was made up of many movements and struggles: sharpening the protests against the War in Vietnam, offering social services to Asian communities, fighting evictions and displacement, agitating for a communist revolution, analyzing the intersections of gender, race, and class, and more.

While first generation Asian American immigrants had fought for the right to naturalize and the right to own property—essentially, the right to be Americans—this generation began to fight for their rights as Americans.

Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at UC Berkeley / SFSU

Third World LIberation Front (1968) was a coalition between Latino, Black, Native, and Asian student groups at San Francisco State University and took part in the longest student strike in U.S. history. As a result, the university established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S. The movement inspired a second strike at UC Berkeley. In 1969, UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center was founded. Asian American studies departments continued to form at universities throughout the U.S., further institutionalizing the term.

Serve the People - inspired and motivated by the community building work of the Black Panthers and Young Lords, Asian-led community based organizations began to multiply efforts serving low-income and immigrant communities and building solidarity with other minority groups

Housing, healthcare, gentrification, workers rights, intergenerational issues
NY Chinatown Health Clinic (1971) - Corky Lee and radical leftist, social workers, and community organizations set up a clinic for testing TB, lead poisoning, diabetes, venereal diseases
I-Hotel (1968-77) - low-income SRO that housed many Chinese and Filipino residents in SF’s Manilatown / Chinatown. In late 60s, real estate corporations proposed plans for “urban renewal” of SF Downtown which would demolish the hotel and displace all of the I-Hotel's elderly tenants. In response, housing activists, students, community members, and tenants united to protest and resist eviction. After a standoff with riot police, all 104 tenants were evicted on August 4, 1977 and the hotel was demolished in 1981.

New I-Hotel opened its doors on August 26, 2005, providing 104 units of low-income housing. The new I-Hotel exists today as a secure, reasonably priced and well-maintained building that serves the needs of low-income elderly tenants.

Soundtrack of Asian America - Free the Land / Grain of Sand (Chris Ijima, Nobuko Miyamoto, "Charlie" Chin) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln3URCypISU

Infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques
They sought a connection to their cultural heritage; to claim their historical presence in the United States; to resist their marginalization; and to mobilize solidarity across class, ethnic, racial, and national differences.

Asian American Movement shifted in the late 1970s when America withdrew its forces from Vietnam and the tenants of the International Hotel in San Francisco were evicted after a multi-year battle—a real and symbolic loss of home for the Movement.

In the 80s, President Reagan oversaw the decimation of funding to social services, which many Movement organizations depended upon. The American political climate was hostile to revolutionary politics, and most of the far-left groups either merged or disbanded.
Since that time, immigration from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands has remade the face of “Asian America.” Asian America today is more diverse, fluid, and expansive than anyone could have imagined

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Yuri Kochiyama

Richard Aoki

Trailblazers: Asian x Black Solidarity

Yuri Kochiyama is a Japanese American political activist in the 60s and was a strong ally of the Malcolm X in promoting civic and human rights. Yuri was famously photographed cradling Malcolm X's head at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom the night he was assassinated in February 1965, has died. She moved on to lead the reparations movement to push for a formal apology from the govt for the internment camps. Article on the bond between Yuri and Malcolm X. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/19/209258986/the-japanese-american-internee-who-met-malcolm-x

Richard Aoki went to college in Oakland with the founders Bobby Seale Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party. When they asked him to join the party, he said “What? Are you colorblind? You know I’m not black” in which Huey replied “I know you’re not black, but I’m asking you to join because the struggle for freedom justice and equality transcends racial and ethnic barriers.”

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Grace Lee Boggs

Trailblazers: Social Activists + Organizers

Ibrahim Chowdry

Fred Korematsu

Fred Korematsu

Fred was born in Oakland in 1919 and was the third of four sons to Japanese immigrant parents. During WWII, he attempted to enlist and National Guard and Coast Guard but was turned away because of his Japanese ancestry. He trained to be a shipyard welder at the Oakland docks and rose the ranks to foreman, but was suddenly fired due to his ancestry.
In 1942, at the age of 23, he refused to be sent to internment camps for Japanese Americans and was arrested and convicted and placed on a 5-year probation. He and his family were sent to the Topaz, UT camp.
He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court, but in 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against him, arguing that the incarceration was justified due to military necessity. Korematsu maintained his innocence, but the conviction had a lasting impact on his basic rights and affected his ability to obtain employment
In 1983, a legal historian discovered key documents that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court in 1944. The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, a pro-bono legal team re-opened Korematsu’s 40-year-old case on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco.
Korematsu remained an activist throughout his life. After his conviction was overturned, Korematsu became an active member of the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations and helped lobby for the passage of the bill in 1988 which granted an official apology from the U.S. government and a token compensation of $20,000 for each surviving Japanese American that was incarcerated.
After 9/11, Korematsu continued to speak out. In 2003, he filed a “Friend of the Court” amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court for two cases appealed before the Supreme Court of the United States, on behalf of Muslim inmates being held at Guantanamo Bay. In the brief, he warned that the government’s extreme national security measures were reminiscent of the past

Grace Lee Boggs

Grace was born in Providence, RI to Chinese immigrants in 1915 who owned a Chinese restaurant.
She received a scholarship to attend Barnard College and Bryn Mawr studying philosophy of Hegel, Kant, and Marx
In the early 1940s, she worked at the U Chicago library and began organizing protests against slum housing and immersed herself in radical politics, joined the Workers Party and other socialist groups, and wrote for leftist publications associated with CLR James and other Marxists
In the 50s, she met and married James Boggs, a Black autoworker, writer, and activist, and moved to Detroit where the couple became two of the city’s most noted activists, tackling issues related to labor and civil rights, feminism, Black Power, Asian Americans, and the environment
Her personal philosophy was one of constant questioning about who we are as individuals and how we relate to our community, country, other countries, and to the local and global environment. She founded food coops and community groups to support the elderly, organize unemployed workers, fight utility shut-offs, devised tactics to combat crime and became a prominent symbol of resistance to the spreading blight in Detroit’s inner city.
Detroit Summer (1992) - engage multicultural youth in community-building activities: planting community gardens, recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. Encouraging them to exercise their Soul Power would get their cognitive juices flowing.

Ibrahim Chowdry

Community organizer in New York, who worked across racial and religious lines to build coalitions between Bangladeshi immigrants and Puerto Rican and Black communities
Escaped a British crackdown over his political activities in East Bengal and is the first documented Bangladeshi man to settle in New York City, arriving in the 1920s, during a time when immigration laws closed the US to Asians/South Asians
He and his fellow East Bengalis initiated numerous community organizations and pooled their money to help open restaurants and small businesses. They started organizations to empower their communities and offered social support for new immigrants who moved in.
Neighbors with Malcolm X and other Nation of Islam followers in Harlem and would often debate each other over religious practices. Dedication to Muslim community expanded beyond Harlem and involved in coalition-buildling efforts with African American Muslims and Middle-Eastern Muslims and created interfaith groups with Christians and Jews.
They arrived in America where Jim Crow laws were in full effect and interracial marriages were banned outright. This climate pushed these early immigrants to build coalitions and rely on multicultural communities. It prompted these Bangladeshi men to see Puerto Ricans and Blacks as their neighbors and political allies who shared working class struggles and intercultural unity.
Stories of resistance and migration collected in Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America between 1917-1965

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Larry Itliong

Ai-Jen Poo

Trailblazers: Labor Movement + Immigrant Worker Rights

May Chen

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Corky Lee

Trailblazers: Descendants Of Chinese Laborers Reclaim Railroad's History

Corky Lee is a photographer who created the largest repository of photographic history of Asian Americans in the past half century. As a junior high school student, he pored over the the original photo commemorating the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 and noticed that it did not include Chinese laborers. More than 12,000 workers from southern China were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad and they made up the overwhelming majority of its workforce. So, in 2002, Lee gathered a group of Chinese-Americans at that same location in northern Utah to re-create the historic shot, and he did it again on Saturday with some descendants of those Chinese laborers.
Corky passed away earlier this year from COVID. Watch this beautiful and emotional tribute to Corky https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=search&v=850053799059272&external_log_id=791d2f45-9234-4bd1-9125-6c6d7381dff3&q=corky%20lee

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Tereza Lee

Jose Antonio Vargas

Trailblazers: DREAM Act

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How are we showing up now?

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Solidarity

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Model Minority MYTH

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Model Minority MYTH

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Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans - Claire Jean Kim (1999)

http://www.lawrenceblum.net/uploads/2/7/5/8/27583233/clairekim.pdf

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We Are Not a Monolith

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Take a moment to educate yourself
Bystander intervention training
Raise awareness via social media (#StopAsianHate)
National Day of Action and Healing (https://www.asianamericandayofaction.com)
Donate

Call to Action

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Building Collective Power

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Streaming Now

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Resources

Resource Lists

Asian American Resource List - Project by Project
Resources for Non-Black Asians on Anti-Blackness
Asian American Feminist Collective

Movies/Documentaries

Asian Americans on PBS – Available to stream again for free now
Amend on Netflix
In Search of Bengali Harlem
Gook (2017) - Justin Chon
Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) - Justin Lin
Saving Face (2005) - Alice Wu
The Half of It (2020) - Alice Wu

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