Abstract
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
In late fall 2019, well before the pandemic's terrible rise in anti-Asian racism, US-China geopolitics briefly grabbed sports headlines when the manager of my local pro basketball team, the Houston Rockets, tweeted support for anti-China democratic protestors in Hong Kong. “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” the tweet read, immediately drawing attention both because of the unexpected solidarity between an American sports team and an Asian metropolis, as well as its clumsy implementation.1 In recent years, NBA athletes have become increasingly politicized, regularly using their platform to criticize President Trump and express their support for Black Lives Matter, so the team manager's tweet was probably just meant to assert American freedom by striking a jab at China.2 Yet, because China is also a major source of revenue for the NBA and its major stars, the tweet backfired. Within twenty-four hours, leading NBA stars like LeBron James were publicly suggesting that the manager was “misinformed” and Rockets star James Harden took it upon himself to apologize; a week later, the manager responsible for the tweet resigned from his position.3
This strange intrusion of professional sports into US-China relations may seem an odd anecdote to begin a discussion of our current era of anti-Asian violence, but it is a telling example of how American tendencies to position China as the antithesis of liberal democracy only expose hypocrisies in that implementation. Chinese Exclusion is the most tangible historical instance of American policy refusing Asian bodies rights it grants other residents, but it was also evident in the Cold War, when US anti-Communism prompted the nation to engage in surveillance measures comparable to those with which it assailed Communist power. In the more recent case of the Rockets manager's misguided attempt to play off American anti-China feeling, he may have run afoul of a freshly minted global superpower very different from the easily objectified China of past centuries, but the episode still reveals the emptiness of his alleged support for an ethnic Chinese population. As the fallout after his remarks illustrates, neither the fate of Hong Kong's political autonomy nor the NBA's own recent activism had much validity.
Our current era's anti-Asian hate is a more awful manifestation of this long history of exempting ethnic Asian bodies from the proud self-positioning of the United States as the global leader of liberal democracy. The second half of 2020 saw months of fervent protests for racial justice that started with widespread horror at the police killing of George Floyd, recorded on cellphones and widely shared on social media. But even before his death, in the earliest weeks of the pandemic, verbal attacks and harassment caused gun ownership to skyrocket among Asian Americans—previously one of the lowest rated groups for that demographic.4 Our fears that anti-Asian animosity due to the virus's Chinese origins would spark violence were sadly well founded: over the pandemic's first thirteen months, numerous female and elderly Asians were targeted for unprovoked verbal and physical assaults—such as a young woman who was harassed and then punched in a New York subway, an elderly man in San Francisco who died from his injuries, and especially the horrific mass shooting in March 2021 of eight people in Atlanta massage parlors, six of whom were Asian women.5
Yet despite these parallel narratives of race-based violence exacerbating the tensions in the pandemic-stricken United States, attacks against Asian Americans never seemed to pick up media or public attention in the way that police killings of Blacks have. “The year America confronted racism,” reads a typical headline, reflecting on the turmoil prompted by George Floyd's death.6 Polling surveys of the November 2020 presidential election ranked racial justice equal to pandemic response as Democrats' leading concern.7 Yet when Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-NY) proposed a congressional statement condemning anti-Asian racism, 164 Republican representatives voted against the proposal—rejecting a purely symbolic act that incurred no cost and did not criminalize anything.8
Meng's bill eventually passed after the Atlanta shootings, but attacks against ethnic Asians continued—and continued to be given marginal attention. In New York a few weeks later, an unprovoked beating of an elderly Filipina that was recorded on surveillance video was quickly eclipsed by headlines regarding another mass shooting (by a Muslim immigrant in white-predominant Colorado), as well as ongoing developments in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer charged with (and later convicted for) George Floyd's death.9 Public indifference to imperiled Asian Americans was particularly obvious in the New York case because surveillance video—drawn from the security cameras of apartment buildings near the attack—also showed a security guard closing the door on the woman as she sought help.10
I should be clear here that my focus is not an appeal for parity per se, but rather an attempt to understand why anti-Asian racism does not seem to warrant the same attention as that against African Americans, particularly amid this unprecedented time of national racial reexamination. The Asian American history of immigration and being viewed as a model minority is, of course, fundamentally different from the African American history of slavery and police brutality, but both were race-based systems of discrimination in which US economic growth was facilitated by powerful practices of racial oppression. The legacies of these systemic practices shape our respective racial histories, both in terms of generational trauma and how the white establishment sees us, but huge gaps still remain with respect to the American public's sense of collective responsibility to Asian Americans. Specifically, while this past year's racial reckoning is possible because of a widespread understanding that Blacks are a domestic population (however mistreated), no similar understanding exists for Chinese and Asians.11 This presumably is the result of decades of American policy—from Exclusion through internment—that construes ethnic Asians as foreigners while recognizing those of African descent as having been forcibly settled here. As both the Houston Rockets' tweet and the current spate of pandemic-related anti-Asian racism demonstrate, America may finally be acknowledging the racial inequities of the surveillance practices long central to its national history, but in recognizing how police power often profiles and inordinately punishes African Americans it still ignores the fate of ethnic Asians. Because Asian American and AAPI populations are implicitly perceived and explicitly construed as foreign, attacks and assaults on their bodies—even when documented and visibly registered—often are overlooked.
Today's anti-Asian violence thus should be contextualized in terms of America's long history of Exclusion, Sinophobia, and other anti-Asian policies, not only because disseminating this history helps cultivate empathy and understanding but also because it puts the responsibility for such change back on the non-Asians who believe themselves exempt from our troubles. Sheer empathy alone rarely begets significant progress. By the late spring of last year, after the Atlanta shootings and as attacks on elderly Asians continued unabated, some immigrant neighborhoods and Asian communities were organizing their own neighborhood patrols.12 These efforts were necessary because so many had lost faith that anyone outside our community was going to help (or even care), so such measures—like the Asian Americans buying guns or the Korean granny in San Francisco who fended off an attacker with a two-by-four—are depressing indictments of the collective apathy regarding anti-Asian hate.13 Why aren't we talking about how to mobilize the newly expansive support for racial justice to include anti-Asian racism? Why does this asymmetry exist? Over the past two years, the academic concept of anti-Blackness entered popular discourse, reflecting growing awareness of Ta'Nehisi Coates's observation that “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”14 Yet it is telling that no comparable term exists for acknowledging how exclusionary immigration laws and policies regarding Asian bodies have also been constitutive of American history and culture.
When the very problem for Asian Americans isn't systemic oppression but rather invisibility, what can we do to combat that effacement? How do we prove a negative? Statistical data about the rising number of attacks are meaningless without a baseline, when headlines are obscured or ignored, and while some people think ethnic Asians are a larger proportion or uniformly empowered segment of the US population than we actually are.15 Prosecutors, criminologists, and legal scholars often caution that labeling an incident a hate crime only makes it harder to convict, and distracting claims and contextual information about lateral racism, the race of the majority of the assailants in the anti-Asian attacks, and received cultural tendencies to “eat bitterness” or underreport crime are just red herrings that perpetuate racial stereotypes and assumptions of all kinds.16 The challenge of communicating this predicament to larger audiences was readily apparent in the odd response to the Atlanta shootings—and I don't mean the appalling press conference in which a police captain with documented anti-Asian social media postings characterized the killer as “having a bad day.”17 Rather, while most everyone recognizes the galling inadequacy of that statement, shouldn't we also condemn the unthinking, widespread dissemination of the shooter's claim that his actions were not motivated by racism but instead by sex addiction?18
Similarly, trying to counter unquestioning acceptance of sex addiction as a motivation for mass murder by rehashing Asian women's long historical objectification within Western culture is pointless.19 Like trying to contextualize pandemic-related anti-Asian xenophobia by referencing the equally enduring stereotypes about Chinatown dirtiness and spaces of infection, that history is probably just too ingrained and requiring recognition of subtleties than even many educated, sympathetic individuals can entertain.20 As one example of such impediments to understanding, during the earliest weeks of the pandemic I mentioned to my doctor my anxiety about how non-Asians saw me, particularly given the glares I now received when bad seasonal allergies made coughing inevitable. This kind, gentle man who worries about the pandemic's impact on his patients' mental health and who belongs to a shared-cost medical network because he recognizes how inequitably access to basic resources are distributed across society tried to reassure me that I “shouldn't be afraid that people blame me for the virus”—as if I my anxieties were a choice, rather than the result of aggressions already occurring all over the country.
By the same token, if moments such as my doctor's attempt to be supportive illustrate the difficulties of conveying the corrosive impact of microaggressions and more subtle aspects of racialized experience, even to the most sympathetic of listeners, it is equally useless to invoke inflammatory rhetoric, such as characterizing anti-Asian violence as white supremacy.21 The ideological divisions riving our nation since at least the 2016 election continue to throttle our country, despite or even because of presidential change.22 With regard to anti-Asian hate in particular, while problematic terms such as kung flu and Chinese virus no longer have the stentorian bullhorn that the previous president gave them, defensive, reactionary backlashes that arise due to the ongoing political contentiousness also ensure that such overt critique falls on deaf ears. However accurate “white supremacy” may be as a historical framework by which to conceptualize anti-Asian violence, it is alienating and can seem unfounded when few even know about the lynchings of members of Asian communities that were common in western states throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century.23 Remember, iconic films like D. W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of the Nation ensure that Ku Klux Klan imagery is part of our national origin story, even as our feelings about that imagery change over time. By contrast, what cultural touchstone exists to remind Americans of the mass injustice against Chinese that is also part of the history of American exceptionalism? The famous photograph of the 1869 completion of the Transcontinental Railroad notoriously omits any of the Chinese laborers who made that feat possible.
As historian Kevin Waite points out, these “binary terms: North versus South, Black versus white” that are rooted in US race consciousness ensure that “America's defining narratives leave little room for people of Asian descent.”24 This has perhaps been never more true than today, as historical facts like redlining or the discrepancies in police response between the 2020 racial justice protests and the 2021 Capitol riot are widely covered, but even the current president's condemnation of anti-Asian hate fails to stem the violence.25 That Asian Americans have been occluded in national race history has long been the case. Writing before the pandemic, Wesley Yang, in his pointedly titled essay collection The Souls of Yellow Folk, describes the Asian American experience as being “a conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality.”26 Similarly, in a book that came out amid last year's turmoil, poet Cathy Park Hong notes, “We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon.”27
For me, as both a scholar and an Asian American, there is no question that the current attacks on Asian Americans are directly continuous with the past century and a half of anti-Asian history in America. But as citizen, resident, and neighbor who must interact and make small talk with all manner of people, I also know that it will not help to hurl adversarial labels against a population already determined to shore up their privilege against those that they believe are stealing from them or posing a danger.
Hence my position that the most productive approach to combatting anti-Asian hate begins with a laser focus on disseminating the history of Exclusion—and not simply in an attempt to elicit empathy by narrating injustices but rather as a framework for compelling a comprehensive reconsideration of the nation's collective responsibility regarding racialized surveillance. Just as racial profiling and police brutality against African Americans is wrong, so too is the widespread indifference to anti-Asian experience that has long been fostered by US national history, a phenomenon the current pandemic has put in high relief. If our current national reckoning about race hinges on the dawning acknowledgment that juridical institutions ostensibly formed to maintain civil society often protect some by inordinately punishing others, that same racial reckoning must also examine why another racial other was constructed so differently in American surveillance history, and how the ongoing traces of this asymmetrical surveillance history continue to marginalize Asian American experience.
It may seem that I am making a general call for education, similar to the reading and viewing lists about racial justice that proliferated in the first few weeks after George Floyd's death. Yet, as many critics and commentators subsequently pointed out, mere educational recommendations are usually too subtle, slow, and noncombative to be useful.28 Recent attempts to bring Asian American history into the wider purview are a case in point. Even before the pandemic, Chinese Exclusion history was slowly beginning to reach larger audiences. In 2017 filmmaker Ric Burns (brother of famed documentarian Ken Burns) released a three-hour PBS special on Exclusion, and a key moment in Heidi Schreck's award-winning Broadway show What the Constitution Means to Me concerns how the playwright-performer lost the naive beliefs about American equality she held as a child when she learned, as an adult, about Chinese Exclusion. Such newfound empathy and understanding were especially evident in the early months of the pandemic, when news reports and other headlines about rising anti-Asian racism sometimes referenced Exclusion as a way of explaining ethnic Asians' historically ambiguous status in America.29 Yet as the year dragged on and pandemic fatigue merged with protest exhaustion, such in-depth discussions shrank, disappeared, or went ignored. (Try showing the list of headlines and incidents in this article to a range of Asian Americans and non-Asians to see the difference in degrees of awareness.) All racialized others inhabit some kind of double consciousness, but for Asian Americans during the current pandemic our double consciousness is particularly tangible in the different newsfeeds we get through news and social media, in which the constant warnings and reports about anti-Asian assaults that we all know about seem to have little impact on the wider consciousness.
For all of these reasons, any effort to combat anti-Asian racism and to highlight Asian American precarity has to be more specific than mere reading lists and programming. As Barack Obama observed in a widely circulated essay during the first weeks of protests about George Floyd's death, “the more specific we can make demands . . . , the harder it will be for [people] to just offer lip service to the cause.”30 For Asian Americans and our different history of systemic occlusion, our paramount goal should be textbook representation and mandated teaching of Exclusion and internment. This won't be easy. For decades now the culture wars in the United States have sought to minimize science and emphasize Creation, and have clashed over the language and depth by which to describe Latino immigrants and Native Americans. The current efforts to stamp out critical race theory in schools and universities only underscore the consequentiality of classroom culture wars—but given Asian American demographics this battleground could be a powerfully efficient means of effecting overall change. California and New York have two of the largest ethnic Asian and AAPI populations, and as two of the nation's most populous states they are (along with Texas) the most influential buyers of school textbooks. Illinois has become the first state in the nation to require a unit of Asian American history be taught in elementary and high schools, but its mandate that the “teaching of history of the United States shall include the study of the wrongful incarceration of Japanese Americans . . . and the heroic service of the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442 Regimental Combat Team” still omits Exclusion.31 Residents of these states have a unique opportunity to influence populations with far less of an Asian American presence. If we can mandate public teaching of Exclusion history, we will lay the groundwork for a future where everyone is confronted with a more detailed and nuanced understanding of America's racialized surveillance history already acknowledged by Heidi Schreck and Ric Burns.
Moreover, organizing around highly specific and tangible goals such as textbook inclusion and classroom coverage also has the additional advantage of poetic justice. Exclusion should not be rewarded with an exculpatory absence of accountability. After a century and a half of Asian Americans being subjected to inordinate monitoring intended to minimize their presence, it's time that the beneficiaries of that asymmetry acknowledge that history, so that current and future generations learn what the United States did to efface Asian American experience and presence. By insisting on classroom and textbook coverage of Exclusion history, we remind the members of establishment culture that they, too, are being watched and tabulated, thereby undoing the erasure that has long shielded them from culpability. We can hope that such recognition will also spark—as happened these past two years with regard to African American history—a new sense of responsibility regarding the powers that act in their name.
“I see you.” In recent years this simple phrase has acquired a cultural and generational power, commonly used in African American vernacular speech as a form of celebration or praise, as well as to indicate empathy with another's experience.32 Yet it is interesting that the phrase also literally describes the act of visual identification that underlies power, such as the interpellative practices of surveillance and monitoring described by Orwell, Althusser, and Fanon.33 For racialized populations such as AAPI, Asian Americans, and African Americans, to be seen has always been an ambivalent experience, fraught with both possibility and cruelty. Yet while these past two years has seen important progress in non–African Americans shifting from uncritical trust in surveillance practices toward a more empathic positioning as watchers of the watchmen, the issue for Asian Americans is first to get the nation at large to see us at all. Insisting on sustained dissemination of information regarding Exclusion is an important first step in cultivating collective understanding of how our very presence in the United States has been systematically marginalized and displaced (how generations of Americans have been taught not to see us at all). As with recent African American experience, change in anti-Asian violence and hate will not occur until the nation shifts from an interpellative and punitive surveillance toward empathic oversight over those responsible for such actions. Uniquely in the case of Asian Americans, however, our nation will not really “see” us until they first begin to see us at all.
Notes
Yeung and Levenson, “LeBron James Says NBA Exec Was ‘Misinformed’ in His Tweet Supporting Hong Kong Protests”; Wimbish, “Rockets' James Harden Apologizes for GM Daryl Morey's Controversial Tweet about Hong Kong.”
Yu, “Some Asian Americans Become First-Time Gun Owners for Protection amid the Coronavirus”; Tavernise and Oppel, “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked.”
Pereira, “Woman Beaten in Anti-Asian Attack on a Train in Manhattan”; Handa, “75-Year-Old Asian Man Dies Following Oakland Assault.”
As I've noted in a discussion of children's literature, for example, while the racial justice protests of 2020 spawned countless recommendations for reading, few similar lists surfaced for anti-Asian racism. K. Fang, “Where Are the Allies for Asian American Kids?”
“Elderly Asian Woman Attacked in San Francisco Fights Back, Sends Alleged Attacker to Hospital.” Gun sales among Asian Americans spiked again after the Atlanta shootings; Tayeb, “Asian Americans Are Increasingly Purchasing Guns to Defend Themselves amid a Spike in Hate Crimes.”
Ho, “Asian Americans Reported 3,800 Hate-Related Incidents during the Pandemic, Report Finds.” For a more useful index of anti-Asian hate, see Wang, “‘You Have Chinese Virus!’” One particularly complicated example of antipathy and misconceptions regarding Asian American demographics is the ongoing legal and cultural battle over affirmative action. See Gerson, “Uncomfortable Truth about Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans.”
Sanchez, “Hate Crime Laws Won't Deliver Justice to AAPI Communities”; Yam, “Viral Images Show People of Color as Anti-Asian Perpetrators”; Hou, “Swallowing Our Bitterness.”
“Georgia Officer Condemned for Saying Atlanta Shooter Was ‘Having a Bad Day’”; Gostanian and Ciechalski, “Georgia Sheriff's Official under Fire for Remarks on Spa Shootings, Anti-Asian Facebook Post.”
Bailey and Elbeshbishi, “Americans Want Compromise but Think Political Gridlock Will Worsen”; Spetalnick etal., “Trump's Legacy.”
For an Asian American history that focuses on the erasure of anti-Asian violence in the nineteenth century, see Pfaelzer, Driven Out.
Kahlenberg, “‘New Redlining’ Is Deciding Who Lives in Your Neighborhood”; Chason and Schmidt, “Lafayette Square, Capitol Rallies Met Starkly Different Policing Response”; Yancey-Bragg, “‘Historic Surge.’”
Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act; Shivaram, “Illinois Has Become the First State to Require the Teaching of Asian American History.”
