On March 16, 2021, a white gunman murdered eight woman at three spa and massage businesses in the Atlanta area. Six of those killed were Asian/Asian American (text below from the New York Times):

Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33 and Paul Andre Michels, 54 were the two non-Asian victims. As more details emerge, the gunman claimed that he suffered from “sex addiction” and that he felt compelled to “eliminate” “sexual temptations.” At this point, what he says is irrelevant and so is the question of whether sex work occurred at any of the spa and massage businesses that were targeted. What is of utmost importance, is that Asian American women were specifically targeted and murdered. These tragic deaths are the latest example of how Asian Americans have experienced countless incidents of harassment, bullying, verbal assault, and violence since the start of the COVID pandemic, including increased attacks, particularly against elderly Asian Americans who are perceived as foreigners and easy targets, just since the start of 2021.

Beyond highlighting how Asian Americans continue to be seen as the Yellow Peril, or some kind of political, economic, cultural, and/or public threat to U.S. society and specifically to the white population, these murders also specifically illustrate the misogyny and fetishization of Asian American women and how these are fueled by toxic masculinity. Mainstream media and popular culture further racialize and sexualize Asian women, heightening their vulnerabilities to interpersonal and institutional violence. My colleagues Jennifer Ho, Hye-Kyung Kang, and Nancy Wang Yuen have written excellent articles that detail, on the personal and structural levels, the challenges Asian Americans face on an everyday basis that are centered on the intersections of their identity as Asian American women, along with Kimberly Kay Hoang’s excellent article about how perceived connections between Asian American women and sex work ramp up suspicions even more and further dehumanizes Asian American women.

In addition to data that shows that hate crimes against Asian Americans have increased 149% from 2019 to 2020 while overall hate crimes declined by 7%, StopAAPIHate data also shows that women report hate incidents 2.3 times more than men. These hateful acts have forced Asians and Asian Americans into a constant state of hyper-awareness and vigilance when they are in public, taking a huge emotional toll. My heart and deepest condolences go out to all those who have been affected by these acts of anti-Asian hate and I join them in collective grief, sadness, and anger. As an Asian American myself, and someone who has both a young Asian American adult daughter and elderly Asian parents, I have never been more afraid than any other time in my life that I, and people who look like me, will encounter some form of racism or xenophobia on a daily basis. It is a really scary time right now to be an Asian American in the U.S.

Where do we go from here? How can we as a society respond? What actions can we take? Here are some ways to support the Asian American community right now. For Asian Americans, we need to come together and recognize that our Asian American identity makes us vulnerable for discrimination. From there, the solution is not to run away or dissociate yourself from being Asian American, try to embrace whiteness and the model minority image as much as possible, and hope that those who have hateful intentions just leave you alone. Instead, we need to unite with each other, recognize our shared experiences and how those experiences make us vulnerable at this particular moment, and to help each other as much as possible — emotionally, physically, and politically. With that in mind, here are some resources to help those affected by anti-Asian hate.

For our political, community, and institutional leaders, they need to take our concerns and demands for equality and justice seriously, rather than systematically ignoring us, continuing to blame us for the pandemic or any number of other social problems taking place right now, and/or focus on trying to humanize the perpetrators of hate and violence against us (for example, by saying that the Atlanta killer “was having a bad day”). And for the rest of U.S. society, the first thing they should do is to become active bystanders and to challenge the everyday forms of anti-Asian hate that take place around them, from biased and offensive comments in one-on-one conversations, to acts of microaggression in the workplace as another example, to incidents of violence in public spaces. Other ways to respond and steps that people can take are:

The time for talk is long past. We need a commitment to change the status quo and we need concrete, meaningful actions.

Last year, I wrote about the spike in incidents of anti-Asian harassment, verbal abuse, bullying, and violence since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the level of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia seemed to have declined, but since the start of 2021, there seems to be a new wave of attacks aimed against Asian Americans and especially against older members of Asian American community. With this in mind, within the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program at UMass Amherst that I direct, we recently created Student Advisory Board and Program Ambassador group of 10 amazing undergraduate students who support the Certificate Program through outreach and programming aimed at undergraduate students at UMass Amherst. They recently released the public statement Titled “Working Towards Anti-Racism and Dismantling White Supremacy” about this resurgence in anti-Asian racism and xenophobia and its connections to anti-Blackness, and I am very proud to reprint it here:

To the UMass Asian American Community & Beyond,

Since the start of 2020, racist and xenophobic incidents against Asians and Asian Americans have spiked, with the website StopAAPIHate reporting over 2,800 incidents of harassment, bullying, verbal assault, and violence since mid-March, and with many, many more going unreported. In recent weeks, there have also been numerous public examples of attacks on Asian Americans, including the death of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco and the police shooting of 19-year-old Christian Hall in Monroe County, PA.

These incidents are linked to historical constructions of Asian Americans as the Yellow Peril — an imagined political, economic, or public health threat to U.S. society. In many of these incidents, bystanders failed to offer any assistance to the Asian Americans who were targeted, which also illustrates how Asian Americans continue to be seen as perpetual foreigners and as undeserving outsiders, unworthy of any help or sympathy.

While many other people have rightfully condemned these attacks and expressed support and solidarity with Asian Americans, some have focused almost exclusively on the racial identity of some of the perpetrators of these incidents and specifically, have resorted to using blatantly racist stereotypes against Black people and feeding into anti-Blackness. This rhetoric is not only problematic but also is unproductive in the fight for racial justice. These instances of violence against Asian Americans should not be seen as just a result of individual action, but rather as enabled by systematic violence inherent in white supremacy. As such, we need to continue to center anti-racism discourse and organizing around actively combating anti-Blackness because Black liberation will enable liberation for all other groups.

Hence, it is important that Asian Americans do not contribute to the over-criminalization of communities, particularly communities that are already disadvantaged, marginalized, and underserved. Asian Americans need to reject the ways we have been used as a wedge by white society to further perpetuate violence against Black and Brown communities. We need to focus on the root causes of systemic inequality, rather than resorting to stereotypes that demonize people and contribute to more policing, criminalization, and incarceration of already vulnerable groups. Instead, we call on our political, economic, and community leaders to develop community-based solutions that address root causes of alienation and powerlessness. In addition, our communities need comprehensive assistance for the victims and for the businesses that have been hurt by the pandemic. We need to combat the ways systems of oppression have long deprived all communities of color of the resources and support we need to thrive in America. We as Asian Americans must reject any attempt to weaponize our pain as a tool for white supremacy.

Cross-racial collaboration and solidarity are essential to move forward together and to fight together for justice and equality. With this in mind, we call on Asian Americans to:

• Educate yourself on issues faced by underrepresented communities within the Asian Diaspora and beyond, such as the South Asian, Southeast Asian community, LGBTQ+ community, the Pacific Islander community, and the Black & Brown and Indigenous communities
• Actively learn the history of white supremacy across the world and its relation to the domestic & global exploitation of the BIPOC communities
• Actively confront the ways anti-Blackness shows up in the Asian community and do the work needed to unlearn and dismantle these behaviors and stereotypes so we can better show up for the Black community
• Educate yourself on the history of students of color activism at UMass Amherst and take part in efforts to fight against racism here on campus
• Take Ethnic Studies courses to learn the history and experiences of various racial and ethnic groups
• Support reparations for Black Americans. Contact your elected officials and tell them to support HR 40, a federal bill that will establish a commission to make recommendations for reparations for Black people. It is important that this bill includes a comprehensive reparations plan, so support calls from activists to have bill sponsors make the necessary changes needed to fulfill their demands

We also call on our allies to:

• Learn about the issues faced by various groups under the Asian American & Pacific Islander umbrella and learn about the differences in our experiences and histories
• Learn about the ways white colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism have exploited Asian countries and Pacific Islands
• Learn the origins of the Model Minority Myth & Orientalism and the ways it has been used to make Asians invisible
• Actively dismantle stereotypes that you hold about the Asian community

As the Asian American community we need to actively remember that the root cause of our issues and pain has and always will be the result of whiteness and white supremacy. In order to achieve true racial justice and liberation, we must not lose sight of that.

“We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don’t get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again”. – Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

“You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.” – Grace Lee Boggs

Check out Asian Americans Advancing Justice’s list of Resources for the Asian American Community on Anti-Blackness to learn more about the ways you can learn & take action.

You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was quite an eventful year in many ways, and for good and bad. As we approach the end of the year and the start of 2021, I want to reflect on how the Asian American community fared throughout the year and how different political, economic, and social events throughout the year had positive or negative effects for Asian Americans collectively.

Bad (Very Bad):
The one event that framed the lives of Asian Americans and billions of people all around the world of course, was the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only has the Covid-19 virus resulted in more than 18 million infections and almost 320,000 deaths (both are officially reported numbers, with many more likely unreported) just in the U.S. (with 77 million infections and 1.7 million deaths worldwide, respectively), but it’s also led to thousands of incidents of racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans, with such examples ranging from verbal harassment, cyberbullying, physical assaults, and even attempted murder. Many Asian American-owned small businesses have also been hurt badly by this wave of anti-Asian hate, through physical damage and vandalism to their stores but also through lost revenue and this situation has made many Asian American communities even more vulnerable to gentrification and the real danger of completely disappearing altogether.

These incidents are based on the historical constructions of Asian American as the Yellow Peril, or some kind of political, economic, cultural, or public health threat to the U.S., and of Asian Americans as “perpetual/forever foreigners” who are unworthy of being “real” or “legitimate” Americans. Making the situation even worse, not only did the Trump administration not do anything to address this situation, they actively fanned the flames of hostility and division by repeatedly using inflammatory terms such as the “China virus,” etc. Recently, the first batches of the Covid-19 vaccine started to be administered so it looks encouraging that the Covid-19 virus might be contained in a few months. However, the sociological aftermath and effects of this wave of anti-Asian hate and racism will continue to linger and fester for the foreseeable future.

Good (Out of Very Bad):
After the tragic murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Live Matter movement this spring, many people in the U.S. and around the world were forced to confront the historical legacy and ongoing dynamics of systematic racism against Black people. This included the Asian American community. As I wrote previously, it should be abundantly clear by now why Asian Americans need to unite in solidarity with our Black brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and family and embrace their struggle for racial justice. Hopefully Asian Americans recognize how the racism that we’ve faced involves the same institutional structures of privilege, authority, and power that operates against Black people and other people of color, and that if we want others to stand up in our defense during those situations, we also have to show up and do the same without hesitation when it happens to Black people. Through the Black Lives Matter movement, many Asian Americans have taken steps to have these difficult conversations and to confront the anti-Blackness that has and still exists within our communities and our own families (see this excellent list of resources to promote Black-Asian solidarity).

Good:
Although it was a nail-biter in many ways, the 2020 Presidential election resulted in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being elected as our next President and Vice President, and the upcoming ouster of the worst President in U.S. history. While we progressives are still a little wary of Biden’s more “centrist” positions on several important issues, we certainly need to celebrate this as a major accomplishment and big step forward for racial equality and social justice for people of color, immigrants, and others in vulnerable situations, and common decency for all of us as human beings. These past four years have been literally terrifying in many ways and while there’s still a lot of work to be done, at least we can be thankful that the worst of it is coming to an end.

Speaking of Kamala Harris, we should also recognize the significance of her election as the first woman, Black, and Asian American Vice President in our nation’s history. This is a major accomplishment that is also long overdue. We should also remember that she was one of several Presidential candidates who were Asian American, along with Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard (who is one-quarter Samoan). Of course, the success of a few individual members does not mean that all members of that particular group have successfully overcome all the challenges and barriers that they have historically faced (see the example of Barack Obama). Nonetheless, I hope that this is an encouraging trend in which more Asian Americans feel inspired by the success of Harris, Yang, and Gabbard and can now see themselves vying for positions of power in various areas of life, and second, that more Americans in general are hopefully seeing that Asian Americans can indeed be confident, charismatic, and inspirational leaders and not just be confined to “technical” jobs like an engineer or scientist.

Bad:
While I am very thankful that Biden won the election, it is very sobering to realize that over 74 million Americans still voted for Trump, the most racist, xenophobic, corrupt, and despicable President in U.S. history. On top of that, it appears that, given the defeat of many progressive Democratic candidates around the nation, that large numbers of Americans are still not ready to support much-needed reforms to our political system and the social structure of our society that seek to eliminate the destructive inequalities and divisions that have caused so much damage to the lives of so many vulnerable people. It is really sad — even tragic — that so many Americans have bought into the propaganda that anything labelled as “socialist” or even “racial equality” is somehow “un-American.” On the one hand, I am encouraged that after George Floyd’s death, many White Americans were jolted into taking a close look at their privileged position within the U.S. racial landscape. On the other hand, I am very discouraged that data seems to show that after the initial shock of George Floyd’s death, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has declined among Whites, Asian Americans, and Hispanics in the months leading up to the election. I suppose it’s another example of the adage of “two steps forward, one step back.”

Bad:
Along the same lines, I also bemoan the apparent rise in power of a small but very vocal contingent of conservative Chinese Americans who have gained attention, influence, and support within the Asian American community and U.S. society in general. As I’ve also written about before and as previous research has documented, this group is overwhelmingly comprised of recently-immigrated, older, and affluent Chinese who are unfamiliar with the U.S.’s tragic history of racism and racial injustice (or even completely deny it altogether) and instead, routinely spread disinformation within their WeChat networks that perpetuate racist stereotypes against Blacks, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims to name just a few groups, and have basically internalized that for them to attain success and be accepted as part of the U.S. mainstream, they need to embrace Whiteness and reject Blackness.

These conservative Chinese Americans are the ones behind the organization Asian American Coalition for Education that sued Harvard University, alleging that it systematically discriminates against Asian American applicants. By the way, as a small “good” item, in March and November, two different sets of federal judges ruled against their claim and found that there is no credible evidence that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants. Nonetheless, it’s almost certain that AACE will appeal this case all the way to the Supreme Court and now that it has a solid conservative majority, the future prospects for affirmative action are not positive. Either way, this small but vocal and politically active group of conservative Chinese Americans has shown that they are passionate, committed, willing to stand toe-to-toe with progressive Asian Americans in asserting their position, and will be a force to be reckoned with in years to come.

Good:
2020 was a pretty good year for Asians and Asian Americans in terms of representation and commercial success in mainstream media and entertainment. Who could forget the surprise and excitement when Bong Joon-Ho’s film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture back in March, the first non-English language film to do so? While Parasite wasn’t an Asian American-centered work, I can confidently say that its success was a source of pride for many of us and it showed that Asian cultural products have the same high levels of quality and depth that white-centered cultural products have implicitly enjoyed for decades.



Moreover, several Asian American-focused works were a big hit, especially during the spring and summer when people were generally confined indoors and watching more tv, such as the critically acclaimed PBS documentary series Asian Americans, produced by Renee Tajima-Peña; ESPN’s documentary Be Water that profiled the life and legacy of Bruce Lee and was directed by Bao Nguyen; and Netflix’s charming Never Have I Ever series, produced by Mindy Kahling and The Half of It produced and directed by Alice Wu, to name just a few examples. Other high-profile Asian Americans were recognized for their success and excellence, including professional tennis player Naomi Osaka (who plays for Japan but is also very Americanized) who was named Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsperson of the Year” and the Associated Press’s Female Athlete of the Year for her success on the court including winning the 2020 U.S. Open and just as important, becoming a force off the court with her strong activism in support of Black Lives Matter.

Also in the world of professional sports, Kim Ng made history by becoming the first woman and Asian American general manager of a Major League Baseball team (the Miami Marlins). Younghoe Koo’s ups, downs, and ups culminated in him becoming the top scoring kicker in the National Football League and being named to its Pro Bowl all-star game. In addition, K-Pop superstars BTS was named Time magazine’s Entertainer of the Year for their commercial success and their activism in support of numerous causes including Black Lives Matter, mental health awareness, and LBTQ+ rights. Several Asians and Asian Americans are also part of Time magazine’s annual 100 Most Influential list, including Nathan Law (main organizer of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement), Ali Wong, Yo-Yo Ma, Bong Joon-Ho, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google, joining Satya Nadella CEO of Microsoft who was not part of the list), and Lisa Nishimura (Senior Executive at Netflix).

While we need to be careful and not gloss over the struggles and challenges that many Asian Americans still face on a daily basis, these high-profile examples go a long way to making the life, experiences, and contributions of Asians and Asian Americans visible, especially to young people who are beginning to see others like them in positive ways in the mainstream media, rather than as one-dimensional stereotypes and caricatures. The long march towards justice and equality will have a lot of twists and turns, ups and downs, and the Covid-19 pandemic has had and will continue to have severe negative consequences for the Asian American community in many ways. That said, there were also many positive events for Asian Americans in 2020 that we can build on and to move forward in terms of asserting our rights to cultural citizenship and to continue forging solidarity with other minoritized communities. It certainly helps that we have a new presidential administration coming in with that in mind, let’s keep working on building a better future for ourselves, our families, our community, and our society in 2021!

In my ongoing series of interviews with Asian American scholars and their recently-published books and research that examine diverse aspects related to Asian and Asian American experiences, I am very happy to present an interview with my UMass Amherst colleague, Caroline Yang, Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.   Caroline’s new book is titled, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form and focuses on the relationship between slavery, antiblackness, and Chinese workers in post-Civil War U.S society.   The book’s description:

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in U.S. literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured U.S. cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating U.S. empire after the Civil War.

Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt, Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors’ contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between U.S. literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.

• In your Introduction, you describe how White society differentiated between freed Black people and Chinese laborers during Reconstruction.  Can you summarize why Chinese laborers were seen as the bigger “problem” for White society?
  
  Almost immediately after the first sizable group of Chinese workers arrived in the United States to work on the mines after the discovery of gold in California in 1848, they were compared to enslaved Black people in the South. And the question regarding them was, are they free or not? During slavery, the employment of Chinese workers was justified using the logic that they were free. But during Reconstruction, in the historical moment when the United States was faced with the question of how to rethink race and slavery in the redefinition of citizenship, the Chinese were said to be capable of being neither free nor American. This was because they were now thought to be not only “slaves” – and would usher the United States back to slavery – but also indelibly foreign and antithetical to everything that was American. The logic was contradictory: the Chinese were thought to be “voluntarily servile” but also stubbornly set in their differences (religious, cultural, political, and so forth), and their inability to assimilate was said to be an active choice. Because of this racial thinking, Chinese workers were seen as a threat not just to all American workers – white and Black – but to the entire foundation of the United States, which justified their expulsion.
  
  
• In your last chapter, you describe several examples of Black artists performing in yellowface in the late 1800s/early 1900s.  Were there any differences in terms of the cultural meanings of Black and white performances of yellowface during this time?
  
  Absolutely! The simple answer is that Black and white performers had differing relationships to the history of slavery and the structure of white supremacy. The minstrel form – whether it’s blackface or yellowface – is inseparable from that structure. Blackface minstrelsy originated during slavery, with the earliest staged performances in the early nineteenth century. Even though some scholars have argued that blackface minstrelsy, especially in the earlier days, was not strictly antiblack, it’s hard to deny that it was a cultural form that was inseparable from the racial logic of slavery, which deemed Black people to be commodities. Blackface minstrelsy made possible ownership of commodified Blackness to all white people – as performers and participants – regardless of their class standing. It was wildly popular all across the United States, and it found a footing in California immediately after the gold rush in 1849. The white minstrels incorporated yellowface performances of the Chinese soon thereafter.
  
  As part of blackface shows, these performances extended the logic of rightful white ownership and appropriation of non-whiteness. These shows and theaters were highly segregated, and Black people were prohibited from them until after the Civil War. After emancipation, Black artists formed their own minstrel troupes. They found that blackface minstrelsy was one of the only cultural performance arts open to them, so many of the most famous and celebrated Black performers from the late 1800s/early 1900s got their start as minstrel performers. And some of those artists donned yellowface and performed as Chinese characters. These performances were decidedly different from white people performing in yellowface, which continued the racial logic of slavery. Some Black artists and Black reviewers of them also insisted that the Black yellowface performers were superior in their craft to their white counterparts, driving home not just the idea that the Black and white performers were different but also the validation of Black performers as artists who were putting their talent to use albeit with a form that was inextricable from the inequalities and violence that structured their lives.
  
  
• In hypothetical terms, in the late 1800s, if the Chinese were allowed to become U.S. citizens and if Reconstruction had been expanded, do you think that freed Black people and Chinese workers would have been able to form some kind of minority coalition that would have strengthened both of their efforts at achieving racial equality?
  
  This is such an interesting question. What would the United States look like today if there hadn’t been a Chinese Exclusion Act and if Reconstruction had lasted throughout the late nineteenth century? I’m guessing that the two things would have provoked extreme and violent white resistance, foremost in the West and the South. Would the Chinese and African Americans have banded together in response? Given the nineteenth-century understanding of race as biology and the belief in a racial hierarchy, I think a vigilant practice of a transformative, counter-dominant thinking that resisted the hierarchization of one group over another and formed a coalition would have been difficult, but not impossible.
  
  
• In terms of how Asians and Asian Americans are treated in U.S. society today, what are some ways that anti-Asian and antiblack racisms operate separately, and in conjunction with each other?
  
  The historical notion of Asians as perpetual foreigners persists today, and the outdated way of thinking about race along a black-white binary makes it seem that racist acts toward Asians are not racist at all. Some people may think that the current rampant anti-Asian racism due to the COVID-19 pandemic is simply an isolated reaction because the virus is associated with China, but it’s part of a longer history of anti-Asian racism in the United States (just as the Japanese American internment during WWII was not just wartime hysteria but part of a string of established legal sanctions against Japanese Americans on the West Coast well before the war). The message is that Asians are threats to the “American” (i.e. white people’s) enjoyment of the bounty of the United States because as foreigners, they inherently don’t have the right to access it. This racist idea is different from antiblackness, which stems from slavery and the devaluation of Black lives, which was the law of the land and was not overhauled during Reconstruction. Antiblackness deems that Black people inherently cannot be equals. Asians could be, but as outsiders, they don’t have the right. In this twisted logic, anti-Asian racism is a recognition of humanity. The racist sees the Asian person as an agent capable of action or threat, and there is some sort of assumed agency behind the Asian face (she is spreading the virus, she is loyal to China, etc.), which needs to be eradicated. But antiblackness annihilates Black humanity, as Black people are terrorized and killed simply for being.
  
  
• How do you think blackface minstrelsy and Asian orientalism have evolved through the years and where do they stand today in the 21st century?
  
  My book talks about how blackface minstrelsy was the most popular cultural form in the nineteenth-century United States, and that frenzied white enjoyment and appropriation of Blackness did not die down in the twentieth century but got incorporated into other forms like vaudeville shows, cartoons, movies, sitcoms, and so forth. In fact, we see its afterlife all around us today. There is a legion of white comedians who have donned blackface for “laughs”: Jimmy Fallon, Billy Crystal, Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, and on and on. Politicians have done the same, and not just for humor, either. In these acts, we see how white supremacy is perpetuated through performances that get normalized as supposedly funny or harmless.
  
  Some white people are finally starting to understand that blackface minstrelsy is racist, but I think we still have a long way to go before they see the real terror of donning blackface, which would involve truly understanding what slavery was and what it means to be white in this country. The idea that whiteness gives license to white people to be racist can be seen when it comes to Orientalist ways of thinking as well – that Asians are indelibly foreign and antithetical to anything “Western” or American – which also continue to persist in the twenty-first century United States, often with impunity. A recent example that comes to mind is the portrayal of Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In an overwhelmingly white movie with an obvious allusion to the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America in the title, Lee is depicted as an arrogant blowhard who gets his comeuppance when he is beaten by Brad Pitt’s character. His brief insertion in the film only serves to justify his violent ejection, underscoring the idea that his non-whiteness has no place in an “American” past.
  
  
• What are the chances that the Black and Asian American communities can forge closer ties and deeper racial solidarity going forward?  What are the biggest obstacles standing in the way of achieving this goal?
  
  I think the murder of George Floyd in May of this year, as well as numerous other Black lives that have been lost at the hand of the police and vigilantes, has made people realize the specific nature of antiblackness that is incomparable to other racisms. It’s been heartening to see Asian American activists and writers speaking out against and focusing on antiblackness as an Asian American issue. The deeply structural antiblack racism, which we see in stark numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, deems that Black lives do not matter, and there are those who are only too eager to enforce that racism. Those people ardently believe in the current power structure and think the system is working. But there are also (self-proclaimed) non-racists who also believe the system is working. So I think the challenge is to recognize some of our deeply ingrained ideas about the United States, such as U.S. capitalism and its false tenet of meritocracy and U.S. nationalism that turns a blind eye to the colonialist and imperialist violence committed by the United States at home and abroad.

In my ongoing series of interviews with Asian American scholars that highlight new books and research that examine diverse aspects related to Asian and Asian American experiences, I am very happy to present an interview with my fellow sociologist, Margaret M. Chin, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City College of New York.  Margaret’s new book is titled, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder and focusing on U.S.-born and U.S.-raised Asian Americans, it explores how many of them run into the dreaded “glass ceiling” in which they are no longer able to advance and get promoted into higher-level upper management or executive positions throughout various occupations and industries within the corporate world in the U.S.   The book’s description:

In the classroom, Asian Americans, often singled out as so-called “model minorities,” are expected to be top of the class. Often they are, getting straight As and gaining admission to elite colleges and universities. But the corporate world is a different story. As Margaret M. Chin reveals in this important new book, many Asian Americans get stuck on the corporate ladder, never reaching the top. In Stuck, Chin shows that there is a “bamboo ceiling” in the workplace, describing a corporate world where racial and ethnic inequalities prevent upward mobility.

Drawing on interviews with second-generation Asian Americans, she examines why they fail to advance as fast or as high as their colleagues, showing how they lose out on leadership positions, executive roles, and entry to the coveted boardroom suite over the course of their careers. An unfair lack of trust from their coworkers, absence of role models, sponsors and mentors, and for women, sexual harassment and prejudice especially born at the intersection of race and gender are only a few of the factors that hold Asian American professionals back. Ultimately, Chin sheds light on the experiences of Asian Americans in the workplace, providing insight into and a framework of who is and isn’t granted access into the upper echelons of American society, and why.

• Compared to a generation ago, do you think the pressure for young Asian Americans to attain maximum occupational success has eased, stayed the same, or gotten more intense, and why?
  
  I interviewed three cohorts, college graduates from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Among the interviewees all of them spoke about the pressure to attain maximal occupational success. However, members of the youngest cohort see many more pathways to occupational success in the professional realm. More of them admit that they have the option to go out on their own if traditional routes in large corporations are blocked.
  
  
• In your research, what are some specific successful strategies that corporate America has implemented to become more welcoming and inclusive to Asian Americans and other underrepresented workers as they try to make their way into the “C-Suite” supervisory and executive positions?
  
  Some of the more successful corporate strategies have been to recruit from minority training and mentoring programs. Some of the interviewees were recruited, chosen, nominated from their Affirmative Action-type program – like the SEO, Posse and the Emma Bowen Foundation. From the interviewees’ perspective, these programs (even though outside of the corporation) did well in helping to place people of color — including Asian Americans — in jobs. Within the corporations, programs that helped were those that exposed the employee to different divisional areas and / or executives. Mini assignments trained them broadly, and executives were also given a chance to get to know them. Often individuals were promoted as part of a program to expand the pipeline.
  
  However, interviewees did not mention many programs to move people past mid-level. On the other hand, the majority of my interviewees did not feel unwelcome in corporate America. However, they did list incidents where they have been left out of important conversations or meetings, not invited to afterwork get-togethers, and mistaken for other Asian Americans. Individually, they list these as implicit bias incidents or part of the everyday jockeying for positions in corporate America. But as a whole these are common among many of my interviewees moving on up. It seems that corporate America could do more.
  
  
• There seems to be a growing political divide within the Asian American community between younger, U.S.-born Asian Americans who tend to be more progressive and older recently-arrived Asian immigrants (especially from China) who tend to be more conservative. How do you see this dynamic playing itself out within the Asian American community in the near future in terms of their social, political, or even occupational outlook?
  
  My research shows that there are many older U.S.-born Asian Americans who are progressive. They are outnumbered in their age group by the hyper-selected Asian immigrants who tend to be more conservative. Likewise, there are conservative young U.S.-born Asian Americans too. It’s not a generational divide, but more of a class and ethnic divide. Among all the groups, however, they are recognizing that they all face racism. The anti-Asian violence that has struck the community since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has united many conservatives and progressives. While they may still disagree on a solution (whether to find a systemic solution or proclaim that they as individuals are more accomplished and thus does not deserve to be treated this way), at least they are more likely to recognize that they are in the same boat together.
  
  
• As a researcher and an alum of these schools, what are your thoughts about the controversy and debate about whether specialized public schools like New York City’s Stuyvesant High should or should not expand their admissions criteria and move away from strictly relying on standardized tests in order to improve the representation of Black and Latinx students?
  
  I went to Stuyvesant High School, when the school student body was much more racially diverse. I really felt at the time that I learned among peers. As a researcher, the public schools need to address the question of how to make the schools equitable and to provide a learning environment that reflects the humanity around us. In New York City, that means to have a more racially equitable school system. The three specialized high schools that are mandated by the State of NY to use the SHSAT serve less than 6% of the middle school population. Instead of fighting over using the test in these three schools, New York City needs to improve the education for the rest of the population. For the rest of the high schools in New York City, there is no need to rely strictly on a single test. Holistic criteria can be created. New York City can also create more high schools or high school seats in neighborhoods where there is high demand especially in areas with an increasing population of Asian immigrants.
  
  
• Some people have speculated that in the last few years, more young Asian Americans seem to be changing their worldview in terms of the best strategy for long-term success and happiness for themselves and future generations and as such, are recognizing that rather than trying to fit into the mainstream establishment, they should challenge the mainstream establishment and work to fundamentally change it to make it more inclusive and just. What are your thoughts?
  
  I would agree with your assessment. There is much more opportunity for the younger generation to go out on their own. This is true because corporations do not make long term commitments to employees anymore. Since there is a lack of commitment, younger workers are more willing to strike it out on their own. Many of the older workers I interviewed did not feel this way because the cohorts I interviewed are approaching or are way past mid-career and at least before this recession, were not thinking of striking it out on their own. Younger members who had experiences with start-ups felt different.
  
  
• Beyond what you’ve written so far, what was the most interesting finding or memorable moment that you came across in doing your research for this book?
  
  There has to be more research on first-generation college graduates and how they are doing. Among my interviewees, surprisingly, there were very few first generation college students. Their voices are missing from the research on Asian Americans.

As the protests for racial justice continue around the U.S. and the world, I want to share and amplify two very powerful articles by women of color. The first is written by Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick, Dean in Residence at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and Dean Emeritus of the Howard University School of Education (among her many accomplishments). Recently published in Diverse Issues in Higher Education, her article is titled, “A Brief History Lesson and Open Letter to the Nation’s Schoolchildren and College Students about White Male Power” and provides a very nice historical and contemporary summary of how White Male privilege/power developed into the hegemonic system of exploitation and oppression that it is today. Here are some excerpts:

Did you learn about Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg in your history class? . . . General George Pickett (known as the Lost Cause General of the Confederate South) fought a losing battle on July 3, 1863. Pickett and his all White male brigade were fighting to maintain an apartheid south built on the brutalizing, free labor of enslaved African men, women, and children. . . .

That July afternoon for about an hour, those 12,000 Confederate soldiers ran straight toward Union cannon fire. They were soundly obliterated by 6,500 Union soldiers in a bloody battle. Historians tell us that when Pickett and his soldiers ran into that near mile-long open field, they probably knew their charge was a defeat waiting to happen. After all, Pickett’s compatriot, General Robert E. Lee, had lost his battle the day before.

For a moment, I want you to think about those 12,000 Confederate soldiers as individuals. What was each one fighting for? These rank and file were illiterate. They owned no land. They were not members of the White gentry. They were poor, uneducated, and hungry for food. Most had tattered and torn uniforms barely clinging to their skin. Many were bootless. Their weapons were insufficient. Yet, they ran across that field with the undeterred vigor of bulls all the while knowing a sure death awaited them. What was each fighting for?

Why did they run into those canons knowing that southern apartheid and a slave economy had not and would not promise land, education, or wealth for them as White men? Why? They were fighting for the supremacy of their Whiteness and the silent compact between wealthy and powerful Whites and poor Whites that affirms: The power of White maleness will prevail over all else. If I am White and male, I will forever have some measure of power over those who are not White and male.

I strongly encourage you to read Dr. Fenwick’s article in its entirety but she basically goes on to describe how, based on this foundation of “White maleness,” whenever White Male power and privilege is challenged, it lashes back and becomes even more toxic, as illustrated in many recent events that range from the “Living While Black” incidents that are visible attempts at asserting White supremacy, to more structural-level and perhaps less visible ways of trying to protect White supremacy such as disenfranchising Black voters and other voters of color, to naive and toothless attempts at “police reform,” to the continuing exclusion of Black people in positions of power and authority across our political, educational, and financial institutions, to name just a few.

The second excellent article is by journalist Cady Lang, titled “‘Karen’ and the Violence of White Womanhood, recently published in Time magazine, which examines the social phenomenon of “Karens” — middle-aged White women who are quick to engage in “shameless displays of entitlement, privilege, and racism — and their tendency to call the police when they don’t get what they want,” as Lang writes. “Karen” is probably best personified by the “Central Park Karen,” Amy Cooper, who called police to falsely accuse a Black man of physically threatening her and in the process, invoking the racist stereotype of Black men as inherently violent and criminal, in response to his request that she leash her dog. Lang goes on to elaborate:

Visuals of Karens exploiting their privilege when things don’t go their way have become Internet shorthand of late for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries — following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood. . . . The Central Park video only highlighted the extreme violence — and potentially fatal consequences — of a white woman selfishly calling the cops out of spite and professed fear. . . .

In a larger sense, the mainstreaming of calling out the danger that white women and their tears pose has been building up to this moment. There’s the oft-cited stat that 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, the constant lies of white women like Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in service of the Trump Administration have made it abundantly clear that white women can and are often complicit in oppressive systems.

Similar to Dr. Fenwick’s article, Cady Lang goes on to describe the historical origins of this ‘Karen’ phenomenon in which White women were positioned by White men as the paragon of virtue and innocence, how they needed to be “protected,” how White women leveraged this position of privilege to maintain their “protected” status (very similar to the poor and rural soldiers in the Pickett “lost cause” charge during the Civil War and its implied promise of solidarity with White male supremacy), and how all of this has used countless times over the last few centuries to justify and rationalize systematic violence and brutality against Black men.

Fortunately, both articles also describes how this White Male (and Female) power/privilege can be dismantled. In the case of the “Karens,” Lang writes that, similar to how the internet and communication technology has been leveraged to facilitate collective activism, so too can internet memes be used to promote greater social consciousness:

[By helping Whites to] recognize a pattern of behavior that they don’t want to be a part of it, but might be complicit in and can be an easier way to have a conversation about white fragility, entitlement and privilege; it also holds them accountable for racism. . . . [T]he accounts of the real people who have experienced the racism documented in these memes and the hashtag, #LivingWhileBlack, are helping to demand accountability and are actually helping to push forward legislation, like the Oregon bill that was passed in 2019 that punishes racist 911 callers.”

Similarly, Dr, Fenwick’s article also concludes by presenting a powerful call to action that draws on the energy of today’s young generation:

You, today’s public school and college students, are the nation’s best asset in the fight to realize the nation’s egalitarian ideals and promise. Your multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalitions of  Black, White, LGBTQAI+/Same Gender Loving (SGL), Asian, Latinx, First Nation, and differently-abled people is the antidote to this deadening brand of White male power and the poisonous leadership it spawns. You are our teachers, now.

Each generation seems to be defined by a particular moment in history. For the Boomers, it was the social movements of the 1960s. For Generation X (such as me), it was the advent of the internet and communication technology that was fundamentally transformed our lives. For the young generation of today of Zoomers/Generation Z, I think both Dr. Fenwick and Cady Lang are right when they say that, armed with powerful social media tools that can be used to promote social justice, young people have the passion, energy, tools, and power necessary to lead the way forward in taking down White supremacy, or at the very least, to fracture it enough to start dismantling it. This is something that previous generations, including my own, have not been able to do.

But I hope that I and my fellow educators around the country and the world have at least given the young people of today some useful knowledge and tools to help them fight the battles ahead. I am confident that their charge forward will not end the same way as George Pickett’s.

In the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor, and now Rayshard Brooks, I have been very encouraged to see so many people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds unite in solidarity to protest and fight for racial equality and justice in the U.S. and all around the world. In fact, data shows that in contrast to most mass protests in the past, most of the participants in these recent protests are White. I have also been very heartened to see data that shows that the proportion of White Americans who agree that systemic racism against Blacks exists and is a real problem has not just increased noticeably since April, but actually has been steadily increasing since 2014. While there’s still a whole lot of work that needs to be done and many changes that are still to be implemented, all of these trends are indeed very encouraging and seems to suggest a much more positive outlook on this nation’s ongoing fight for justice and equality across all forms of life.

That said, there are many people out there who are still skeptical or even hostile to this drive for racial justice. As I wrote about earlier, many of these people are Asian Americans. Fortunately, numerous other Asian Americans have written excellent articles and essays about how Asian Americans can talk to members of their own community and their own families about racism against Blacks and the need for us as Asian Americans to unite in solidarity with them. Below is just a small sampling:

I happen to be a big Hasan Minaj fan, so in case you haven’t seen it yet, I want to highlight the 12-minute video he made a couple of weeks ago for his “Patriot Acts” show in which he talks passionately about the need for Asian Americans to unite in solidarity with the Black community to reinforce the bonds that exist between both groups and to fight collectively against systemic racism:

Along with talking to Asian Americans specifically about the need to unite in solidarity with the Black community and despite the positive trends that I mentioned earlier, we also need to keep talking to White Americans about racism and how people of color need them not just to be non-racist, but to be actively anti-racist. Along those lines, here again is a small sampling of articles and essays that give some tips about talking to Whites about racism, how Whites can talk to other Whites about racism, and specific actions Whites can do to be anti-racist:

Lastly, I want to share an example of a recent conversation with one of my White friends in which we talk about the Rayshard Brooks murder, police brutality, and systemic racism. He (let’s call him Thomas) and I have been friends since high school (36 years) and in the first several years of our friendship, he was relatively ignorant of racism and White privilege. After I started studying Sociology and Asian American Studies in college, I began challenging him more about racially insensitive comments or jokes that he (and many of my other White friends) would make. My challenges (many of which were rather angry in nature) initially took him off guard because previously, I would have let them go unchallenged. For a while, we had a somewhat tense friendship over these issues but gradually, we both moderated our positions — I became less angry in describing the ins and outs of racism to him, and he became much more open to learning about the privileges he had as a White person. Eventually, he “came around” and became much more “woke” about the history and ongoing nature of racism, its effects on people of color, and his position as a White person in all of this, and I was very gratified to see this change in him. But every once in a while, I need to “remind” him and give him as “refresher” on these issues, as our conversation below highlights:

In my ongoing series of interviews with Asian American academics that highlight new books and research that illuminate different aspects and details related to the Asian and Asian American experiences, I am very happy to present an interview with my fellow sociologist, Pawan Dhingra, Professor of American Studies at Amherst College.  Pawan’s new book is titled, Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough and it explores how the U.S. educational system has become increasingly intense and pressurized and has led to an “arms race” among families, many of them Asian American, to do everything possible to ensure the educational success of their children using a veritable “arsenal” of programs such as after-school tutoring, academic competitions, and extracurricular “enrichment” activities, to name just a few.   The book’s description:

Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today’s youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. In Hyper Education, Pawan Dhingra uncovers the growing world of high-achievement education and the after-school learning centers, spelling bees, and math competitions that it has spawned. It is a world where immigrant families vie with other Americans to be at the head of the class, putting in hours of studying and testing in order to gain a foothold in the supposed meritocracy of American public education. A world where enrichment centers, like Kumon, have seen 194 percent growth since 2002 and target children as young as three. Even families and teachers who avoid after-school academics are getting swept up.

Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews with teachers, tutors, principals, children, and parents, Dhingra delves into the why people participate in this phenomenon and examines how schools, families, and communities play their part. Moving past “Tiger Mom” stereotypes, he addresses why Asian American and white families practice what he calls “hyper education” and whether or not it makes sense. By taking a behind-the-scenes look at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, other national competitions, and learning centers, Dhingra shows why good schools, good grades, and good behavior are seen as not enough for high-achieving students and their parents and why the education arms race is likely to continue to expand.

• Why has the arena of education become so high-pressured and intensely competitive in recent years? What are some of the major factors from the institutional/ international level down to the individual/family level? Education is increasingly competitive as more individuals have their eyes on a college degree. The United States is an extremely unequal society without much of a safety net, and so families want their children to get a degree in the hopes that they will grow up to be financially stable. For parents who have a college degree, they are committed to their children doing the same. For parents without such a degree, they can see college attainment as a key stepping stone to a more secure future. As more people seek degrees, the status of the university matters more and more. So, families vie for the few slots in elite universities. This puts pressure all the way down the university system. So, competition become more intense.
• Did you find any differences between how Asian international parents/families and U.S.-born Asian American families deal with these pressures and societal expectations in regard to educational attainment?
  
  Asian immigrants often came to this country through their high educational credentials and like all parents they try to instill into their children the same upbringing that they received if they think it was helpful. Since educational achievement was foundational to their mobility, these parents turn to the same tactic for their children. Asian immigrant parents who do not have a high level of education often care about college for their children as well.I spoke to so small business owners, for instance who insisted their children get a college degree even though they themselves didn’t rely on such formal education. Their thinking was similar to other parents, that a college degree helped ensure that the children would have better life chances, even if their career ended up not needing one. For Asian Americans raised in the United States, their thinking overlapped with that of immigrants but differed markedly in how intense they were. U.S.-raised Asian Americans had comparable approaches to U.S.-raised whites who pursued extra education, that they wanted to give their children learning opportunities but did not feel as urgent about it as did immigrants, having grown up in a different educational and labor market environment.
• At the other end of the spectrum, how do you assess the likelihood that the U.S. educational system can be reformed to improve the chances of success for the most vulnerable and underprivileged students across the country?
  
  This is a longstanding concern that shows little sign of large-scale progress. We should be investing in teachers, in the emotional and mental well-being of students, and their physical comfort. Instead, we see governors partner with billionaire philanthropists who have a poor record of progress in education. Federal legislation promotes one-size-fits-all assessments that take control out of teachers’ hands. Parents respond by seeking more educational resources for their children outside of school because they want more individualized learning for their children, thereby widening the gap between their academics and that of most others. With that in mind, the likelihood of equal educational outcomes is dim.
• On a related note, what are your thoughts about the controversy and debate about whether specialized public schools like New York City’s Stuyvesant High should or should not expand their admissions criteria and move away from strictly relying on standardized tests in order to improve the representation of Black and Latinx students?
  
  Steps that can further the representation of Black and Latinx students in elite schools should be taken seriously. The problem has been, however, that the steps taken in the name of supporting disenfranchised minorities end up providing more opportunities to privileged students, namely whites, who feel that their spaces are being taken by Asian Americans. We need to be watchful of reforms to ensure they have the intended effect. Also, it is important to keep in mind that Asian Americans turn to elite schools not out of a sense of privilege or legacy but as a mechanism of upward mobility. Their needs must be attended to if the admissions system changes in ways that limit their numbers.
• How do you think the cultural dynamics will play out between a relatively small but very vocal group of recently-immigrated Chinese who oppose affirmative action and progressive Asian Americans who support affirmative action?
  
  It is not surprising that some Asian Americans have turned against affirmative action in an effort to give their children every possible advantage in college entry. But, even as it is not surprising, it is helpful to remember that they represent a minority of Asian Americans. The one positive outcome of the lawsuit that conservative and progressive Asian Americans can agree on is the shedding of light on the Harvard admissions process and its possible bias against Asian Americans. While the lawsuit fortunately maintained affirmative action, it did not exonerate Harvard fro anti-Asian bias. Conservative and progressive Asian Americans can also agree on the negative impact of legacy admissions. It is also important to keep in mind that while the public attention is on Harvard, most Asian Americans who attend college are not in elite places. We should focus our attention on the admissions process and what ongoing support is available to Asian Americans in universities.
• Beyond what you’ve written so far, what was the most interesting finding or memorable moment that you came across in doing your research for this book? When I asked an Asian immigrant father at a spelling bee why more Americans did not enroll their children in after-school academics, he cupped his hand as if holding a glass and said they are, “busy doing this,” and went on to pretend to drink an alcoholic beverage. A white American mother, when I asked her why she had her son in a once a week after-school math class, replied, “My grandparents worked really hard. They’re Holocaust survivors. My parents worked really hard, and, you know, they never paid for my college, so you have to do it yourself.” She drew a line between surviving the Holocaust and taking extra academics, for it instilled the right work ethic. In other words, parents have deep, moral reasons for why they pursue extra academics, beyond getting better grades. Children, on the other hand, are the ones caught between parental expectations and school expectations. I greatly appreciated talking with many youth who shared with me the pride they had in their work and how they formed a community of like-minded friends.

On the heels of the excellent Asian Americans five-part documentary series (produced by Renee Tajima-Pena) that was recently shown on PBS in May, be sure to tune in starting this Sunday, June 7 from 9pm-11pm to watch Be Water, a feature film about the life and legacy of Bruce Lee. The trailer is below:

As you know, Bruce became a huge media star and popular culture icon starting in the 1960s before his untimely death in 1972. His creation and mastery of Jeet Kune Do popularized the martial arts craze, propelled him into mainstream U.S. society and international stardom, and ultimately, he became synonymous with Asian martial arts. While he was not the first high-profile Asian American male actor in Hollywood (as the excellent The Slanted Screen documentary by Jeff Adachi illustrates, actors such as Sessue Hayawaka and James Shigeta preceded him in that respect), his level of fame surpassed every other Asian American male media/cultural figure and he remains arguable the most famous Asian American man ever.

That is not to say that he, or his legacy, is universally beloved by every Asian American. Specifically, some are not happy that, at least in his first high-profile role of Kato in the TV series The Green Hornet, he played one-dimensional characters, namely the kung fu-fighting sidekick who only acts on the command of his White “master.” This narrowly-constructed role eventually led to the stereotype that all Asian American men knew kung fu (or karate, ju jitsu, taekwondo, or any other form of martial arts), and that even if they did, that was all that they were good at — in other words, while they could fight, they weren’t considered intelligent, charismatic, capable of leading large numbers of people, romantically attractive, etc. Even today, this one-dimensional caricature of Asian American men still persists.

Bruce eventually recognized this limitation and the “glass ceiling” that he was running up against inside the Hollywood establishment and decided to go make movies in Hong Kong, where he would have more control over the creative aspects of the films. After the release of movies such as The Big Boss (1972), The Way of the Dragon (1972), and his masterpiece Enter the Dragon (1973), he became an international superstar and finally demonstrated through his personal and professional initiative that Asian American men had not only physical ability, but also the personal drive, skill, and determination to create their own image and assert their own sense of identity.

In recent decades, this personal and professional sense of ambition, creativity, and expertise has led many Asian Americans to more carefully understand that Bruce’s acting work in the early part of his career was contained within a severely-restricted and narrowly-constructed framework that unfortunately limited his abilities and led to the perpetuation of certain stereotypes of Asian American men. Nonetheless, within these restrictions, Bruce always injected a sense of passion, creativity, and professional excellence that transcended the limits that were imposed on him. In fact, this same dynamic can be applied to another early Asian American media star, actress Anna May Wong, who had a similar career trajectory (initially playing one-dimensional and stereotypical “dragon lady” roles) but whose professionalism and personal dignity eventually resuscitated her legacy within the Asian American community and who is now cherished as an historical icon and cultural pioneer.

Combined with his initiative to eventually reject this confining media environment, create his own image, and forge connections across cultural divides, it is this legacy that forms the basis of why Bruce Lee is still beloved by so many Asian Americans and how his legacy has inspired so many people from all backgrounds and identities through the decades, as Be Water’s director Bao Nguyen describes. In a society where Asian and Asian American males have been and continue to be stereotyped as weak, Bruce Lee contradicted that perception head-on and gave many Asian American men the opportunity to project a sense of pride in their everyday life. In addition to other excellent documentaries about Bruce Lee such as How Bruce Lee Changed the World, I Am Bruce Lee, and of course the 1993 feature film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story starring Jason Scott Lee, be sure to tune in starting Sunday June 7, 9pm-11m to watch Be Water, the feature documentary about Bruce Lee through ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.

This past week, the U.S.’s deadly legacy of systemic racism was once again on full display as video captured African American George Floyd being murdered under the knee of a White Minneapolis police officer who was utterly indifferent to his cries for help. Unfortunately, what happened to George Floyd is the same as what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Atatiana Jefferson, Akai Gurley, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, and countless other unarmed Blacks for centuries who have been stereotyped as sub-human, dangerous, and summarily killed under the weight of White supremacy. 

It should be abundantly clear to everyone in the U.S. and around the world by now that racism continues to play an insidious and deadly role in the lives and deaths of Blacks every day. When we see ongoing examples of police brutality and murder of unarmed Blacks and other minorities, along with other systematic but less-visible forms of racism such as Black communities being devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and other institutional inequalities related to health care, or being more vulnerable to economic insecurity and being evicted from their homes, just to name a few examples, there can no longer be any doubt that race remains a central dividing line in U.S. society in terms of who suffers versus who prospers, and even who lives and who dies. This is true even without getting into a discussion about the ongoing examples of Whites calling police on “suspicious” Blacks who are doing nothing more than everyday activities that Whites can take for granted, such as walking in the park, taking a nap, eating lunch, having a picnic, sitting in a Starbucks, mowing a lawn, using a swimming pool, playing golf, or other examples of “Living While Black.”

It is with this understanding in mind that I call on members of the Asian American community to unite in solidarity with our Black brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and family to support the Black Lives Matter movement and embrace their struggle for racial justice. Many Asian Americans have recently felt the sting of racism and xenophobia in the form of harassment, bullying, verbal assaults, discrimination, and violence related to the CoViD-19/Coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully Asian Americans recognize how racism against Asian Americans is the same racism that operates against Blacks and other people of color, and how such acts of discrimination are all interconnected into institutional structures of privilege, authority, and power. If we want others to stand up in our defense during those situations, we also have to show up and do the same without hesitation when it happens to Black people.

Many of who already know this political and moral need to ally with and support the Black community, but unfortunately many other Asian Americans do not. Specifically, two types of Asian Americans come to mind when it comes to this form of personal and collective ignorance:

• “Model minority” Asian Americans who have internalized the myth that Asian Americans have succeeded by working hard, staying quiet, and individual efforts rather than relying on any kind of government or outside assistance. Many who fit in this category have indeed worked extremely hard and made numerous sacrifices to attain a good education, land a well-paying job, and provide a safe and comfortable standard of living for themselves and their family. The problem is when they use their personal example of success to then say, “If I/my family can make it, why can’t Blacks? Something must be wrong with them.” Clearly, what they don’t see is what’s wrong is not with Blacks themselves, but the system of racism that all too often denies them equal opportunities to succeed, or even opportunities to remain alive. “What’s wrong” is the pervasive pattern of police officers and other “law enforcement” authorities to quickly act on deeply-ingrained prejudices (and institutional mechanisms like the principle of “qualified immunity” that shield them from prosecution) and to immediately use deadly force to murder Black people. Hopefully these “model minority” Asian Americans see that after attaining success themselves, rather than pulling up the ladder and criticizing everyone below them, they should instead reach back and offer their support to those who are most vulnerable to inequalities and injustices and are dealing with numerous disadvantages that have made it much harder for them to succeed.
  
  As luck would have it, there was a recent news item that illustrates one example of these “model minority” Asian Americans who are utterly ignorant of how racism works — members of the Lambda Phi Epsilon Asian American-themed fraternity at NYU who were recently exposed to have shared numerous racist and anti-Black messages among themselves. As the news article summarizes:
  
  “As fucked up as it is, I think the threat of police brutality actually keeps those communities more safe than without it,” [wrote] one member of the chat, Stern student Roger Sun. . . . Justin Tung wrote in the chat, “. . . we [Asian Americans] grinded significantly harder while black peoples were lazy.”
  
  I wish I could say that I am surprised, but I am not. While I am not saying that all members of the Lambda Phi Epsilon fraternity are wildly ignorant racists, I will point out that as the fraternity’s Wikipedia page says, “Lambda Phi Epsilon has experienced the most hazing incidents among Asian-American fraternities” and that since 2005, there have been numerous deaths of fraternity members or pledges, and that 18 chapters have closed as of 2019. Scholarly research by Minh Tran and Mitchell Chang in 2013 found that Asian American fraternities have experienced a disproportionately high number of violent hazing incidents and deaths and that within many of them, there is an implicit or even explicit culture of challenging stereotypes of Asian American men as weak, passive, or feminine by promoting an image of them as physically strong and if needed, violent. As this news from NYU shows, these misguided attempts at asserting power can also involve reinforcing and perpetuating White supremacy.

• The second type of Asian Americans who seem to be unwilling to ally with the Black community are many recently-immigrated Asian immigrants. A number of Asians who recently immigrated to the U.S. tend to be unfamiliar with the U.S.’s tragic history of racism and racial injustice, especially perpetrated against Black people. Instead, they are more likely to see the U.S. as a true meritocracy where, similar to the aforementioned model minority Asian Americans, a person’s success is entirely dependent on their own level of hard work and individual effort. Those within this category also tend to rely disproportionately on stereotypical portrayals in the mainstream media and popular culture of Black, Latinx, and Native American & Indigenous Americans as lazy, unintelligent, and therefore, undeserving of any support of sympathy. This also includes internalizing stereotypes of Blacks as violent, dangerous, sub-human, and therefore devaluing their right to live, as exemplified by Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer who stood by while George Floyd was being murdered.
  
  Based on these structural socializations, many recently-immigrated Asians have also bought into the implicit or explicit belief that in order for them to attain success and be accepted as part of the U.S. mainstream, they need to embrace Whiteness and reject Blackness. One clear example of this category are members of groups such as the “Asian American Coalition for Education” (AACE) that are at the center of the recent lawsuit alleging that Harvard University systematically discriminates against Asian American applicants. As research has shown, members of this group (and Asian Americans in general who oppose affirmative action) are disproportionately comprised of older middle-class and affluent, recently-immigrated Chinese, who among other things, believe that affirmative action in favor of Blacks and other underrepresented minorities means less opportunity for their children and spread misinformation through their WeChat social network. Unfortunately, one of the things that members of this category don’t recognize is that allying with Blacks and other people of color and fighting against systematic racial injustice will mean that everyone’s child will have greater access to educational and other opportunities for success.

Ultimately and at this crucial moment in history, Asian Americans have to make a choice — unite in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters and mobilize collectively to fight for racial justice, or internalize the ongoing racial lies and stereotypes and side with White supremacy. As simplistic as it sounds, it comes down to the old adage — you’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution.

Today, May 18, would have been Vincent Chin’s 65th birthday. As many of you already know, he was beaten to death in 1982 by two White autoworkers who perceived him to be Japanese, even though he was Chinese American, and blamed him for the economic recession that was threatening their jobs. History tells us, and as the excellent PBS documentary series Asian Americans that recently aired portrayed, his tragic death and the gross injustice of how his killers were merely sentenced to just three years probation and a $3000 fine galvanized and united the Asian American community and led to the creation of the modern “Asian American” identity that millions of us now embrace, and led to the formation of numerous pan-ethnic and multi-racial community organizations dedicated to fighting for justice and equity across all areas of life for Asian Americans.

A lot has happened since that fateful day in 1982. In a lot of ways, the Asian American community has grown demographically and socioeconomically, become more integrated into the U.S. mainstream, and achieved notable gains in political representation and cultural citizenship. At the same time, these positive developments are extremely precarious and are easily undone whenever the U.S. experiences some kind of conflict or crisis that involves some Asian country.

As we have all seen, the CoViD-19/Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare how racist and xenophobic stereotypes and underlying prejudices of Asians and Asian Americans as the Yellow Peril easily resurface and lead to suspicion, hostility, hate, and even violence against anyone perceived to be Chinese or more generally, Asian or Asian American. These dynamics are exacerbated by political leaders who seek to scapegoat Asians and/or Asian Americans as a way to misdirect anxiety or their own mistakes during such times and whose actions implicitly or explicitly embolden other acts of anti-Asian hate. These hateful acts represent the worst forms of ignorance and result in Asian Americans having to be in a constant state of hyper-awareness and vigilance when they are in public, taking a huge emotional toll.

As we remember Vincent Chin’s 65th birthday, I hope that everyone, and particularly our political, community, and institutional leaders, will not forget the needs of the most vulnerable members of our society, including those who already feel marginalized and face everyday challenges in their lives due to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and other overt and covert forms of prejudice and discrimination.  I also hope that people from all racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds do everything that they can to recognize their own implicit biases, find resources that will educate themselves about the historical and contemporary structures of racism, xenophobia, and other forms of inequality in the U.S., and intervene when they hear or witness bigoted or hateful remarks or behaviors against anyone who is in a vulnerable position.

Ultimately, recommitting U.S. society to fight ignorance and hate with all the tools at our disposal to prevent anti-Asian prejudice and discrimination from becoming normalized is probably the best way for us to remember and celebrate Vincent Chin’s birthday, and the month of May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

As you may have heard, May is Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month and despite the CoViD-19 pandemic, there are many events and programs taking place all around the U.S. to commemorate this occasion, even if almost all of them are being conducted online. As one example, in conjunction with the Center for Asian American Media and WETA Television, PBS will be airing a five-part documentary series titled “Asian Americans” on May 11th (8pm-10pm eastern time) and 12th (8pm-11pm eastern time), so be sure to tune into your local PBS station to watch this extraordinary video series. Angry Asian Man also has a listing of different events and programs through the end of the month.

In the spirit of contributing to these collective efforts to commemorate APA Heritage Month, I was also asked to participate in two “Zoom-inars” (online seminars conducted through Zoom), and below are some video clips of my contributions. The first Zoom-inar was titled “Stand Together: Solidarity During Coronavirus” and organized by the Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success at my university, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. On this panel, I was joined by several of my distinguished colleagues at UMass Amherst including professors Amilcar Shabazz and Stephanie Shonekan (W.E.B. Du Bois Afro-American Studies department), Alice Nash (History department and Native American and Indigenous Studies Certificate Program), and Laura Valdiviezo (Teacher Education and School Improvement department and Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies). The panel discussion focused on issues related to how people of color and communities of color can strengthen our ties and connections during the CoViD-19 pandemic.

In this first clip (about 4 minutes long), I discuss recent incidents of discrimination faced by Africans in China since the start of the CoViD-19 pandemic and how they relate to historical and ongoing examples of anti-Blackness in the Asian American community:

In this second clip (about 3 1/2 minutes long), I discuss how the model minority image hurts the Asian American community and our efforts to form critically-important bonds of solidarity with the Black community:

I was very privileged to share this (virtual) space with my awesome UMass Amherst colleagues, to be able to share our academic expertise and our personal experiences with each other and with the audience, and to reinforce our commitment to collaborating with each other to mutually support our Ethnic Studies programs, during this present moment and throughout each moment in which our programs and our communities are being threatened politically, economically, or culturally.

The second Zoom-inar related to APA Heritage Month was organized by the Massachusetts Asian American Commission, titled “AAPI History: Debunking Stereotypes and Finding our Voice,” and also took place on May 4, 2020 (that’s why I’m wearing the same shirt). In this first clip (14 minutes long), I answer several questions related to (1) the history of activism among Asian Americans and how they first defied the stereotype that they were quiet and passive; (2) the origins and basic summary of the Model Minority image; and (3) why Ethnic Studies programs are important and how they contribute to greater understanding, equity, and justice in U.S. society:

In this second clip (less than 3 minutes long), I briefly discuss the need for young Asian Americans to get involved and to support Asian American Studies programs at their university, including the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program that I direct at UMass Amherst.

A big part of APA Heritage Month is to renew the bonds of connection and solidarity within the Asian American community, and also between our community and other racial, ethnic, and cultural minority groups. This is especially true in times of crisis. As we individually and collectively continue our fight for justice and equality, let’s also remember to celebrate all of the positive and inspiring examples of our heritage, and to draw on the strength, resilience, and power of our families, our communities, and our allies.