But as I looked around at the mostly Asian\/AAPI crowd, listened to the mostly Asian speakers, and heard the slogans and chants, I realized\u2014with shock\u2014that this rally and a previous one in downtown Columbus had been the first demonstrations specifically against anti-Asian racism that I had attended in my twenty-five-plus years as an activist and organizer.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, in which six of the eight victims killed were Asian women, the United States seemed to have woken up to the topic of anti-Asian racism like never before.<\/p>\n The trending slogan #StopAsianHate on social media was reflective of rallies and demonstrations across the country, a proliferation of articles and Op-Eds about racist attacks, physical and verbal, and even (for what it\u2019s worth) corporate embracing of the issue.<\/p>\n Laws and events that were mainly talked about in Ethnic Studies classes seemed to become more widely known. It was impressive to see interest in not only the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for instance, but also the 1875 Page Law<\/a> before it, barring Asian (specifically Chinese) women from entering the U.S.\u2014in the name of preventing the spread of \u201cimmoral\u201d behavior among Americans.<\/p>\n The growing movement against anti-Asian racism, attuned to questions of intersectionality from the very beginning, challenged the false idea that the Atlanta murders were about gender and not race. Activists, scholars, and community members supported this political position with historical evidence, showing that Asian immigration to the U.S. has always been intertwined with questions of gender and sexuality.<\/p>\n As director of Asian American Studies at Ohio State, I can tell you that faculty, staff, and graduate & undergraduate students went into high gear after March 16, working tirelessly to forge connections and creating spaces for students and for ourselves in ways that complemented activism in the streets: organizing forums, writing articles, gathering educational resources, speaking at events, and creating networks of communication within an institution that, despite speaking often of race and diversity, has not had much experience with specifically Asian concerns. Such efforts were happening all across the country.<\/p>\n Ohio State faculty and staff generated a statement<\/a> with an easily usable historical timeline about anti-Asian racism and U.S. imperialism, a series of Op-Eds in The Columbus Dispatch to reach broader audiences and push for action beyond the \u201cstop hate\u201d sentiment (for example, here<\/a> and here<\/a>), a public forum<\/a> that brought together writers, scholars, journalists and students, and a resources page<\/a> for those who wanted to delve deeper into historical, theoretical, and political questions.<\/p>\n Over the process of this work, a few conceptual questions emerged around Asianness and Asian\/AAPI identity that ought to be taken up as we build knowledge about Asian-American history and identity in the U.S. left.<\/p>\n I will mention these in brief, provide some historical context to remember and learn from, and outline how we can integrate the fight against anti-Asian racism with the broader struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism.<\/p>\n The relative newness of the topic of anti-Asian racism in our society did not only mean we had to educate non-Asians about this long history of racism against us. No: at the closed and intimate forums and gatherings for campus Asian communities, we quickly found that we also had to educate ourselves. Even as we tried to heal.<\/p>\n In addition to meeting the public demand for more knowledge, we had to both grapple with the trauma of racist violence and to assert that what we were experiencing was, in fact, racism.<\/p>\n While we needed to argue, in the mainstream, that yes, the Atlanta shooter\u2019s sexual obsession with Asian women was about racism, we also needed to dispel popular myths that many Asians ourselves have internalized: that race in the U.S. is a Black\/white binary, that all Asians are basically privileged and almost-white Model Minorities, and that what we experience might be about cultural or religious prejudice, or perhaps \u201chatred,\u201d but not racism and white supremacy.<\/p>\n It was heart-breaking to see that people being targeted by racism, who are part of communities that have borne the impact of white supremacy, colonialism, exile, and alienation (to various degrees) did not have the historical knowledge or language to name and address what they\/we were experiencing. This, too, is the intended impact of white supremacy and divide-and-conquer tactics, with the effect of wiping the history of Asians in the U.S. from our consciousness.<\/p>\n Asians\u2019 internalizing of the idea that we do not face racism, that we are not racialized, is in fact a symptom of how race works in the U.S.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Pranav-Image-One-1024x768.jpg\")
Challenges in discussing Asian\/AAPI identity<\/h4>\n