Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander Solidarity

As educators, we need to teach about the structural intersectional racism that victimizes Asian and Asian American women in devastating ways. 

When the then-spokesman of the Cherokee County sheriff’s office dismissed his fellow white man’s actions by saying “he had a bad day” and attributed them to a “sexual addiction,” we bore witness to the ways that fetishization, hypersexualization, sexism and racism are used to reinforce — and justify — the dehumanization of Asian women. These statements perpetuate a deeply rooted white supremacist practice that invokes damaging stereotypes to dehumanize and disempower Asian women, just as U.S. pop culture uses graphic images and messaging to sexualize and fetishize Asian women.

As educators, we need to teach about how generations of systemic racism harm and victimize not only one racial group, but society as a whole.

Anti-Asian hate and violence is deeply enmeshed in the history of the United States, where it has been carried out on a systemic level for generations through policy and practice. Anti-Asian legislation includes the passing of the the 1875 Page Act, which barred East Asian women from U.S. entry to ostensibly eliminate white men’s sexual temptation and the 1882 Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers and perpetuated anti-Chinese racism, leading to the creation of San Francisco's Chinatown.

As educators, we need to teach about how stereotypes are used to essentialize and diminish Asian identities to dismiss their experiences and contributions.

In U.S. history, we must realize the damage that comes from failing to acknowledge and take seriously the racism Asian and AAPI communities experience. The “model minority myth” has long been used to create a racial wedge between Asians and other BIPOC communities in order to downplay anti-Asian racism by promoting claims of white privilege, which diminishes the real hardships some members of the Asian and AAPI communities face, including unemployment, derailing mental health and poverty. The resulting Asian American experience is one that is complicated due to the diverse community of intersectionalities and identities, but is falsely labeled by the majority of America as a monolithic community. Thus, Asians are “perpetual foreigners” who become invisible and are easily subject to vilification, fetishization and exclusion.