Asians in America is a Sophomore Scholars in Residence Program (SSIR) for 2022-23

This course examines the history and politics of Asian communities in the United States. It is designed to help students think critically about the familiar tropes of “exclusion” and “model minority” in order to understand how Asian communities have historically been situated (by themselves and others) not only between the black-white binary but also in relation to their real and imagined links to their natal places. The course will give students intellectual tools to analyze and understand the politics of the present with the resurgence of anti-Asian racism and the increasing political mobilization of Asian communities, most recently through affirmative action, education politics, #Asians4BLM, and #Stop AAPI Hate.

With the recent rise of anti-Asian racism in the United States, individuals of Asian descent across the country have become targets of race-based violence and hate crimes, sometimes with fatal results. At the same time, Asian communities have not remained unaffected by the larger uprisings for racial justice by Black Lives Matter. Some Asians have allied themselves with Black activists and forged cross-race solidarities, while others have come down on a different side of the racial political landscape, as demonstrated by the recent San Francisco school board recall and the anti-affirmative action cases pending before the Supreme Court.

These issues may seem as if they have emerged from nowhere. But if you take the long view (as we do), these issues look less like unexpected eruptions than the return, reemergence, and reformulations of the exclusion and othering that has been part of the Asian experience in the Americas since the first migrants came in the 1840s. Then, as now, the exclusion and othering of Asians have resulted in structures that reinforce White dominance and anti-Blackness, trapping Asians in a racial caste system on which they are both victims and perpetrators of racism.

Asians in America is team-taught by Dr. Jennifer Erkulwater (Political Science) and Dr. Tze Loo (History)