Here. Again. Anti-Asian violence in the city

ABSTRACT

Over the course of 2020 and 2021, several Asian-owned businesses were vandalized and individuals of Asian descent were attacked in Tacoma, Washington, part of the alarming increase in anti-Asian violence in the past several years. The incidents occurred in parts of the settler colonial city, which sits on the ancestral territory of the Puyallup nation, that are embedded with histories of privilege, dispossession, and anti-Asian violence. Many of the targeted businesses are just blocks away from where riotous White mobs with torches drove away Chinese residents in 1885, an episode known as the ‘Tacoma Method.' These very same streets were later locations on which Japanese immigrants had businesses and homes prior to being driven out and incarcerated during WWII. This paper excavates the reappearance of racialized violence in the same city spaces through the work of Allan Pred as well as scholars who consider the complexity of belonging in the settler colonial city. This excavation aims to make visible that which is unsaid and silenced in our urban landscapes so that we may counter the reproduction of expulsion/alien status and material violence in the settler colonial city.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Asian violence
• Allan Pred
• collective amnesia
• settler colonial city
• Tacoma Method
• Japanese incarceration

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers, Heather Merrill, and Katharyne Mitchell for their encouragement to stretch our analysis. We greatly appreciate their engagement and are responsible for and failings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The majority of these residents are in the 35–55 age cohort. See https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Tacoma%20city,%20Washington%20Race%20and%20Ethnicity&g=1600000US3651000&tid=ACSDT5Y2020.B01001D accessed July 5, 2022

2 See US Census Bureau 2020, https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Tacoma%20city,%20Washington%20Populations%20and%20People&g=1600000US3651000&tid=DECENNIALPL2020.P1 accessed July 5, 2022.

3 Our interest in this layering of racism in the urban landscape grew out of our research on the pre-WWII Japanese American experience in Tacoma. In fact, it was because the Tacoma Japanese Language School (TJLS) building was in a state of disrepair and an historic preservation study determined that renovations could not restore its historic “value” and “integrity”, that it was torn down by UW Tacoma in 2004. This decision propelled the two of us into this project and we set out to interview Nisei (completing 42 interviews) who had lived in Tacoma and attended the Language School prior to the war. Most of the Issei and Nisei who lived in Tacoma prior to the war did not return upon release from incarceration after January 1945 so we traveled to Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles for interviews. The TJLS was a particularly important site as it was the only language school in the community and unlike other communities on the west coast and in Hawaii, it was secular, thus bringing children together from across the community and serving as a community gathering place. Its loss was profound (Hoffman and Hanneman 2020).

4 The 1924 Immigration Act established a quota system, which set the number of immigrants allowed into the US at 2% of the number of US residents of that nationality per the 1890 census. Asians were barred from the quota system; the Magnuson Act resulted in applying the quota system to the Chinese, but arrived at the tiny figure of 105 as being 2% of the Chinese population in the US. (Daniels 2004, 91–93).

5 A list, likely created in 1886 or shortly thereafter, documents in both Chinese and English a total of 35 businesses destroyed and/or damaged in the fires, including 13 laundries, 10 stores, 2 “vegetable stores,” 3 restaurants, 2 Butcher shops, 1 and 1 drugstore. Additionally the list includes 3 “Family” locations and 1 boarding house for mill workers. It is divided between businesses which were “near the wharf,” “up in town,” and at “Old Tacoma.” University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections: Pacific Northwest Historical Documents Collection, “List of Chinese businesses burned in Tacoma during anti-Chinese unrest, approximately 1886,” Digital ID PN W00466. https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/pioneerlife/id/2961/rec/38.

6 “Chinese Homes Burned,” Seattle Daily Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 6, 1885. Museum of History and Industry, University of Washington Special Collections,

https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/imlsmohai/id/14841/rec/29h

7 University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections: Pacific Northwest Historical Documents Collection, “List of Chinese businesses burned in Tacoma during anti-Chinese unrest, approximately 1886,” Digital ID PN W00466. https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/pioneerlife/id/2961/rec/38.

8 Tim Greyhavens has collated a number of sources on the expulsion and published them here https://www.noplaceproject.com/. See this link for the testimonials https://www.noplaceproject.com/chinese-voices

9 see https://www.tacomamethod.com/chinese-community

10 University of Washington Digital Collections, Pacific Northwest Historical Documents,“ Digital ID PNW00503. 'Mow Lung deposition describing the destruction of his property during anti-Chinese riots in Tacoma in 1885,' https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/pioneerlife/id/2957/rec/43 (Accessed July 14, 2022).

11 See also Pengfei Zhao’s description of the powerlessness in these experiences as “minor feelings” (2021).

12 The original map published in Becoming Nisei was created by Ben Pease, with support from research by Sarah Pyle. We have reconstituted the map with the layering of 1885 and 2020/1.

Additional information

Funding

No grants have supported this article.