CRE/SJS 287 - Helen Zia on the Asian American Movement

 Helen Zia on the Asian American Movement

-Helen Zia a Chinese American author and activist -intersections of struggles for racial and LGBTQ+ justice -foundation for AAPI led resistance against racism and violence

1. Violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders has persisted for centuries

2. Not until the constellation of events in the 1980s did it emerge onto the public stage

                a. Leading this movement has been the voice of Helen Zia

b. author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (2001), Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of Chinese who fled Mao’s Revolution (2020

3. Zia came into prominence in 1982 when she became the public spokesperson and primary organizer of a campaign that sought justice for Vincent Chin

                a. A Chinese American man brutally murdered in a hate crime in Detroit, Michigan

                b. events and others that followed galvanized the pan-cultural Asian American movement

                c. providing an essential foundation for AAPI-led resistance to racism and violence -that continues to present.

4. Zia framed her path by discussing her upbringing as a child of immigrants to U.S.

5. Either you were invisible, or you were not human -is how Chinese people often viewed

                a. Zia wanted to tell the stories of invisible people.

Vincent Chin one such person but how did it happen

Events unfolded at a time when the U.S. automobile industry was collapsing, and millions of Americans were laid off because Japanese automobile manufacturers were out-competing them

Zia notes -this created racist hatred against Japanese Americans, even though relatively few lived in Detroit

Chin was targeted in this brutal crime not because he was Japanese but because he purportedly looked Japanese

Chin visited a bar as part of a bachelor party in the lead-up to his wedding only to be chased down with a baseball bat, having his head smashed by a white man who served as a supervisor at the local Chrysler plant.

The judge decided not to send Chin’s murders to jail, instead giving them probation and a fin of $3000 because they “didn’t look like the kind of people who should go to jail” in a predominantly Black Detroit.

The verdict a watershed moment that prompted more Asian American people than before to consider the interconnected experiences..as well as the broader implications of the people being able to kill Chin so brutally and not be held accountable.

Zia: “Until this point, the Asian American community wasn’t even Asian American.  It was Japanese American, Chinese American, Filipino, Indian, Korean -everyone in their own little ethnic community -no national advocacy groups, nobody to stand up about hate crimes…but here was a Chinese being killed because he looked Japanese.

The release of the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin would expand the Asian American movement to an unprecedented level.

First mass community Pan-Asian coming together for a political reason

There have been student movements, such as the Asian American Studies Movement, but not on a mass community level.

Here, you had waiters, cooks, and laundry people out on the streets carrying banners and pushing people in wheelchairs/baby carriages alongside engineers and scientists.

Following these events, advocacy groups around the U.S. formed, and an entire generation of activists and lawyers emerged around the country.

 

This is a historical primer on the Asian American movement

But also a window into the anti-Asian racism that has grown increasingly visible in recent years.

Asian Americans have long been an existential threat to America

This is evidenced by the phenomena ranging from fears about Asians taking Americans’ jobs to racist theories of contagion that scapegoat Asian people for somehow provoking illness around the world

The roots of these deeply damaging ideas and the ability to chart continuities with present-day rhetoric are crucial in disrupting anti-Asian racism and violence

With this information -we can move from the acceptance of racist notions so pervasive in our society to a better understanding of their content and consequences.

Such words as the China Virus cannot be taken for granted as it has heightened anti-AAPI violence that often goes unchallenged.

Facing history