Categories
Anti-Asian Violence History

Racism Has Always Been Part of the Asian American Experience

If we don’t understand the history of Asian exclusion, we cannot understand the racist hatred of the present.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/we-are-constantly-reproducing-anti-asian-racism/618647


April 21, 2021

Mae Ngai

Asian American Studies and history professor at Columbia University

Asiatic exclusion and Jim Crow segregation were two modes of racial management necessary for white supremacy after the Civil War, when the West and the South were being integrated into a national economy based on corporate capital and a polity made up of white male voters. These policies relied on euphemisms and legal fictions—“aliens ineligible to citizenship” and “separate but equal”—to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection and due process for all. Indeed, in the late 19th century, the Supreme Court would interpret the Fourteenth Amendment to favor the rights of capital, and not those of formerly enslaved people or Asian immigrants.

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Categories
Anti-Asian Violence History

Resistance to State Violence Against Japanese Americans

https://50objects.org/object/the-demolished-monument/

Seventy eight years ago today — also a Sunday — James Hatsuaki Wakasa was shot to death at 7:30 p.m. at Topaz, Utah, by a guard tower sentry. After we posted a story about the killing, titled “The Demolished Monument,” we received a letter from an 86-year-old Ohio reader who was a child at Topaz at the time. He shared some memories that have haunted him for years.

50 Objects / Stories of the American Japanese Incarceration – Nancy Ukai Tweet
James Hatsuaki Wakasa - National Archives

See also, “The Demolished Monument”

James Hatsuaki Wakasa
and the erasure of memory

At the former Topaz concentration camp in Utah, there’s only dry grass where a concrete monument once stood, to mark where an innocent man was killed by a guard tower sentry. The man was walking his dog after dinner. HIs name was James Hatsuaki Wakasa.

Categories
Anti-Asian Violence History

The Bay Area town that drove out its Chinese residents for nearly 100 years

Katie Dowd, SFGATEApril 7, 2021Updated: April 7, 2021 10:44 am

https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/antioch-race-riot-chinatown-arson-california-16067820.php

Antioch Chinatown, CA

Before the white residents of Antioch burned down Chinatown in 1876, they banned Chinese people from walking the city streets after sunset.

In order to get from their jobs to their homes each evening, the Chinese residents built a series of tunnels connecting the business district to where I Street met the waterfront. There, a small Chinatown and a cluster of houseboats made up the immigrant settlement. If they ever felt safe there, it was fleeting. Above the tunnels and outside their doors, the threat of violence was simmering.

Read the rest of the article here: https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/antioch-race-riot-chinatown-arson-california-16067820.php

Categories
Anti-Asian Violence History Working-Class Power

The Systemic Roots of “Anti-Asian Violence”

Anti-Asian Violence Through a Working Class Lens: Pt. 1
CLICK HERE to read

 

Individual acts of anti-Asian violence are offsprings of corporate anti-Asian violence

“Racial violence against Asians has been initiated by corporations and the government in order to make profit, and is part and parcel of our political economic system which perpetuates racism for all nationalities in particular working folks.”

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