Anti-Asian racism, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19

Abstract

This essay charts the professional and personal reflections of Professor Jennifer Ho, president of the Association for Asian American studies and critical race scholar about the rise of anti-Asian racism with the advent of COVID-19. Professor Ho also discusses the intersections between anti-Asian and anti-Black racism, providing historical context for how both are in service to white supremacy and how understanding these shared roots can create a common cause for anti-racism work for all.

Keywords:

• Asian American
• Black
• race
• racism
• anti-racism
• COVID-19

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Chris Nelson (Anthropology, UNC Chapel Hill) and Morgan Pitelka (Asian Studies, UNC Chapel Hill) for reading a draft of this essay and offering their feedback as Japan experts. I’d also like to thank Bill Mihalopoulous for inviting me to contribute this essay to Japan Forum.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For an excellent historical account of the origins of the Asian American studies movement see Daryl Maeda’s (2011).

2 The theme of the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies conference is “Unsettling Transpacific Ecologies” (https://aaastudies.org/calls-for-papers/); both conference co-chairs, Dr. Aimee Bahng and Dr. LeiLani Nishime are scholars whose work looks at the transpacific and transnational connections within Asian American studies and among the Pacific Island diaspora.

3 Though the focus of this article is on anti-Asian racism in the United States, incidents of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian xenophobia have arisen globally, such as in Australia as this article outlines (https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/asian-australian-groups-report-surge-in-racist-abuse-assaults-during-pandemic-20200512-p54s6f.html) and in various European nations (https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide).

4 Between March and June 2020 there were over 2,100 reported cases of anti-Asian harassment (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-asian-american-hate-incidents-up-racism/), which only accounts for the incidents reported and not the overall number of anti-Asian harassment.

5 An excellent history detailing the incarceration of Japanese American during WWII is Greg Robinson’s (2003).

6 For a concise and incisive overview of anti-Black racism in the United States see Carol Anderson’s (2016).

7 In Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy avers that “‘Race’ would then become an eternal cause of racism rather than what it is for me—its complex, unstable product” (14), arguing that racial classifications emerged out of systemic racism.

8 Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2014) explains how race is an epiphenomenon separate from ethnicity, nation, or class that is socially constructed.

9 Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi organized both a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, and a global movement to protest ant-Black racism in 2013. For more see the BlackLivesMatter Herstory page: https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/.

10 Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13^th explores the rise of mass incarceration through the lens of the 13^th Amendment of the United States, which post-emancipation resulted in great numbers of Black people to be used in chain gangs (https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741).

11 The documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? By Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña explores the 1982 murder of Detroit civil engineer Vincent Chin by two white autoworkers.

12 As already referenced above Carol Anderson’s White Rage provides a concise overview of racist state practices that prevented Black people from living in white neighborhoods, attending white schools, marrying non-Black people, and other forms of discrimination, segregation, and bias. For a valuable on-line resource see the National Museum of African American History & Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu/

13 In January 1990 a dispute between a Haitian immigrant and Korean store owners in Brooklyn led to the Red Apple boycotts in which Black New Yorkers called on a boycott of Korean owned stores: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/07/nyregion/black-korean-who-pushed-whom-festers.html.

14 For more about Latasha Harlins and Soon Ja Du see this Ebony article: https://www.ebony.com/news/25-years-later-la-remembers-latasha-harlins/.

15 You can see images of Korean shop owners during the Los Angeles riots in this CNN piece: https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/us/la-riots-korean-americans/index.html.

16 For varied Asian American responses to Peter Liang’s conviction see this NPR piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/23/475369524/awoken-by-n-y-cop-shooting-asian-american-activists-chart-way-forward.

17 This NBC news piece about Tou Thao exemplifies the way that journalism has often depicted the relationship between Asian American and Black Americans as one of historic tension: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/officer-who-stood-george-floyd-died-asian-american-we-need-n1221311.

18 For more on the history of mixed race Amerasians, particularly Black and Vietnamese Amerasians, see Chapter 3, “Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-First Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods” in my monograph Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Jennifer 2015).

19 Two sources that detail the life and activism of Yuri Kochiyama are Diane Fujino’s (2005) and the Rea Tajiri and Pat Saunders documentary Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice (1994).

20 One resource for anti-racism education is a free, on-line, three-week, self-paced course, Anti-Racism I on Coursera that I co-developed along with Shawn O’Neal, a PhD student in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder: https://www.coursera.org/learn/antiracism-1#syllabus.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Ho

Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also holds an appointment as Professor of Ethnic Studies. She is the president of the Association for Asian American Studies and the author of three scholarly monographs. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate. You can follow her on Twitter @drjenho. She may be contacted at [email protected]