Blog / Colloquies

Recuperating Multiracial Labor Solidarity as a Meaningful APA Politics

October 29, 2020 - By Cedric De Leon

Lessons from the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee

What is a meaningful politics for Asian Pacific Americans (or APAs) at this historical conjuncture? Put another way, when APAs experience anti-Chinese racism under COVID, in a time of murderous racial violence by the police against Black people, what is to be done?

For clues, I turn to the example of Filipino farmworkers in the Great Delano Grape Strike of the late 1960s in California.

Migrant agricultural work was and remains back-breaking work, paid by the piece or the bushel and marked by unsafe working conditions and substandard housing, often lacking basic sanitation and adequate plumbing.

The...

Documenting and Contextualizing Anti-Asian Racism During the COVID-19 Pandemic

October 29, 2020 - By C.N. Le

Since the start of 2020, racist and xenophobic incidents against Asians and Asian Americans have spiked, with the website StopAAPIHate reporting over 2,600 incidents of harassment, bullying, verbal assault, and violence since mid March, with many, many more going unreported.  Each of these incidents are painful but important to hear about. One recent example from their site, an encounter in Marietta, Georgia, is particularly notable: “I was in line at the pharmacy when a woman approached me and sprayed Lysol all over me. She was yelling out, You’re the infection, Go home! We don’t want you here. I was in shock...

Anti-Black Racism and Anti-Asian Racism

October 29, 2020 - By Sangeeta Kamat

Bridging Divides, Renewing Solidarities

As we emerge from a summer rife with anti-Black racism and deadly violence against Black people, followed by police brutality against peaceful protestors, I reflect on the different histories of racism – anti-Black racism on the one hand, and, anti-Asian racism on the other – and their connections with one another. Often these are regarded as separate and unconnected, operating in parallel universes: anti-Black racism affecting one community and anti-Asian racism affecting another, with very little dialogue and exchange among the affected communities. 

In this short essay, I make a case for speaking of these racisms...

Artist Responses to Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic

October 29, 2020 - By Michael Sakamoto

I discuss here two examples of Asian American artists whose recent activities have helped to frame public notions of Asian American identity in relation to other US racial groups. As we continue to hear the stereotypical refrain about Asian Americans enjoying power and privilege in the US, due to our risk-averse, upwardly mobile, and politically mainstream status, these artists put themselves on the line to demonstrate publicly the costs of such allegedly safe passage.

Novelist, scholar, and USC English Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen is a National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, and he publishes regularly in major news outlets. His COVID-...

What We Can Learn from History

October 29, 2020 - By Richard T. Chu

Richard Chu

The anti-Asian xenophobia we are experiencing today is not the first instance of anti-Asian discrimination. We have seen in history several cases of such xenophobia: the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882; race riots against Filipino farm workers in the 1920s; the barring of Japanese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants under the Immigration Act of 1924; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the crackdown against the Chinese suspected of being communists in the 1950s; the rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1970s due to the economic slowdown in the U.S. automotive industry; the unjust deportations of refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam; the racial profiling of Indians and...