Without Asian American Studies, We Can’t Understand American Racism

When I hear Asian Americans talk about anti-Asian racism, it’s often with an apologetic tone—as if we don’t believe the racism we encounter is as serious as what other groups face. Or we don’t want to make other people uncomfortable. Or we are afraid of what might happen if we stick out too much.

So it’s been extraordinary to see the many Asian Americans who have been writing and speaking in very public venues about the anti-Asian racism they’ve encountered.

It’s instructive to compare the response to the Atlanta massacre with the media coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. While many Korean American small-business owners lost their stores during this event, it took days for a Korean American — the lawyer Angela Oh — to appear on camera.

After Atlanta, Asian Americans took to some of the most widely read media outlets right away to offer their perspectives. In Harper’s Bazaar, Durba Mitra, Sara Kang, and Genevieve Clutario wrote about the history of Asian women in the United States by also looking at their treatment in Asian war zones and near military bases located in Asia, while, in The Atlantic, Anne Anlin Cheng wrote about the racial meanings of the “happy ending” jokes that showed up everywhere in social media. These ethnic-studies scholars have been especially attuned to the ways in which Asian women have disproportionately been the targets of racial violence.

These scholars are responding to a widely understood problem for Asian Americans, which is our lack of ability to frame stories about ourselves and to remediate the persistent lack of knowledge about this country’s history. Our perspectives have been marginalized, if not completely voided.

In the recent past, this problem has proven deadly. Just four days after 9/11, Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered at the gas station he owned in Arizona by a white man who reportedly told a waiter he was “going to go out and shoot some towel heads.” To emphasize his point, he added, “We should kill their children, too, because they’ll grow up to be like their parents.”

Sodhi (who was Sikh and not Muslim) was the first of dozens murdered in similar acts of anti-Asian violence. And 9/11 also ushered in an era of intense suspicion, surveillance, detention, and deportation for Muslims, West Asians, and South Asians — none of whom had much opportunity to shape public understanding of this tragic event.

Asian Americans have never stopped trying to get ourselves into positions that would give us the chance to shape the U.S. media landscape and to educate audiences about issues relevant to our extremely heterogeneous population. We have faced discrimination and prejudice everywhere, and we will undoubtedly face even more as Asian Americans become more visible. But we have also made substantial gains.

In academe, we have developed Asian American studies programs and built an impressive body of academic books and journals and articles. The very existence of these programs, which began over 50 years ago, insists on the right, and the need, to focus on Asian Americans as an important group of people to study.

Look at organizations like the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) and the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA), and you’ll get a small sense of the work that has been going on for a long time. These academic efforts mirror a greater societywide push to have more of a public presence. As Jennifer Ho, the current president of the AAAS and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me, “I have been trying to plug the scholarship and research we are doing. Russell Jeung is a great case in point with Stop AAPI Hate, but so many AAAS members have been doing the heavy lifting over the last two weeks of educating the nation and the world.”

These efforts are why Asian Americans have been able to assume a role in shaping the frame around the Atlanta massacre. They were building on decades of research and classroom experience — a vibrant corpus of knowledge that is unfortunately often ignored or even dismissed.

While the sheriff’s office of Cherokee County seemed to enter into the killer’s perspective, minimizing his violence by characterizing him as having a “bad day,” and while the mainstream media were happy to perpetuate this perspective, Asian Americans were drawing on a large body of research ready to speak in every venue we could get access to. We insisted on the importance of the perspective of the Asian women who were targeted in the shooting. We insisted on discussing the long history of anti-Asian racism. We insisted on the need to think about this racism alongside class, sexuality, and gender identity.

But the challenge remains steep. On NBC’s Meet the Press, four white people and one African American person composed a panel discussing anti-Asian violence at the end of a show devoted to the “migrant crisis” — as if we were right back in the bad days of 1992. Not only did the producers not think to feature an Asian American voice in this mix, but the regular set of panelists routinely invited to the show rarely include Asian Americans. It’s as if their opinions don’t matter in regard to a wide range of public concerns.

Where do we go from here, after Atlanta, and after the numerous and continuing incidents of anti-Asian violence?

For colleges and universities, this is the time to recognize the work that Asian American studies performs — and has performed for decades — alongside other ethnic-studies fields. And it’s the time to make more concerted efforts to build programs and departments for the long haul.

Such academic units allow universities to act with moral conviction and thoughtful coordination; their absence can lead to hasty and inadequate responses when crises like the Atlanta massacre occur. It’s time, then, to heed the calls of students and alumni to commit fully to ethnic studies, speeding up processes that have in many schools dragged on for decades and reversing efforts in other schools to defund and marginalize already existing programs and departments.

Ethnic-studies programs and departments should be established, and expanded, in more colleges and universities, and not just at the most exclusive. The courses they teach should also be adapted for K-12 education so that students do not first learn when they become undergraduates about the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the annexation of the Philippines, early 20th-century Punjabi and Korean settlements in the U.S. West, or the mass incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. As James Kyung-Jin Lee, a former chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine, recently told me, “I just finished teaching a Korean American studies class, and the overwhelming feeling of my students was not gratitude that UCI offered this class but anger that they didn’t learn this history earlier.”

Asian American studies cannot flourish alone. It needs to be in conversation with the study of other racial minorities in the United States and the study of other countries, especially in the global south.

African American studies has long been an inspiration. As Black and Asian peoples are often seen as somehow inextricably at odds with each other, the need to emphasize a history of collaboration and solidarity is constant. In addition to stories about how Yuri Kochiyama cradled the head of her friend Malcolm X after he was shot, or how Grace Lee Boggs moved to Detroit and became a pivotal figure in many Black-led social movements there, we need to explore the rich but too often unknown stories of the many Black and Asian people who found common cause with each other. And, of course, there are many people who are Black and Asian.

It’s also through dialogue with Pacific Islander studies and Native American studies that we in Asian American studies have begun to challenge models of inclusion based on “claiming America” in favor of a frame emphasizing settler colonialism. And the field’s transnational turn has looked at the geopolitical relationships between the U.S. and numerous Asian countries that have conditioned the movement of so many people. This movement has not only been from Asia to the U.S. but to Latin America and elsewhere.

As Nitasha Sharma, a professor of Asian American studies and African American studies at Northwestern University, reminded me, “We get an expanded discussion of Asian relations to Black and Indigenous communities when we shift our sights to the Caribbean, where nations like Trinidad and Jamaica saw the involuntary movement of enslaved West Africans followed by the coolie labor trade of indentured workers from China and India.”

Along the same lines, when I asked about the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, the Pulitzer-winning novelist and USC literature professor Viet Thanh Nguyen observed, “Most of our graduate students are now working not just at the intersection of American and ethnic studies, but with an international consciousness, at the least, and comparative international methodology at the most, which also includes multilingual study.”

Ignacio Sánchez Prado, one of the leading scholars of Latin American studies in the U.S. and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me, “As someone working more in area than in ethnic studies, I would add that ethnic studies could also ally itself with area studies in order to finally link the stories of the U.S. communities with the histories of empire and the histories of the ‘motherlands’ (for a lack of a better word).” This is sage advice, and advice that many in Asian American studies are already heeding.

I understand that I am making the case for ethnic studies during a time of incredible challenge for higher education in the United States, as declining numbers of tuition-paying college-age students and shrinking state support for public education are accompanied by rising tuition costs and the mass adjunctification of the faculty. The pandemic has only amplified these worrisome trends.

But ethnic studies is in part the study of how we have arrived at a present — when state support for public higher education has been so diminished, when tuitions are so high and faculty security so low. As the number of Asian American college students climbed (with 53.5 percent of all Asian Americans having attained a bachelor’s degree compared to the U.S. total of 31.5 percent), support for higher education among elected officials has declined.

Ethnic studies teaches students about painful histories of racism and gives them opportunities for making sense of how these histories continue to shape the present. Ethnic studies also takes seriously the task of building a multi-racial democracy that respects our differences and that is robust enough to address the very serious challenges that face us all — like this country’s enormous prison population, its anti-immigrant and anti-refugee movements, its enormous military presence abroad, and the ecological crises that are all around us, and getting worse.

We must insist, without apology, that the capaciously defined study of race — which includes Asian Americans as members of a racial minority — is an essential part of the university’s mission.