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Article Excerpt
ASIAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDERS HAVE BEEN POLITICALLY CONSTRUCTED AS AN ALIEN presence or as "forever foreigners" in U.S. culture (Lowe, 1996; Tuan, 2003; Lee, 1999). For millions of Asian and Pacific Islanders who fully identify as Americans, they are reminded repeatedly that one of their core identities is at best questioned or at worst denied (Cheryan and Monin, 2005). This image of Asians and Pacific Islanders as "forever foreigners" or as "sojourners" ideologically positions them as outsiders who do not have a stake in American society and therefore constitute the sources of moral panics and social anxieties that must be subjected to social control and regulation. Simultaneously, Asian and Pacific Islanders in the United States are ideologically constructed as "model minorities" that have been well integrated into mainstream America (Osajima, 1988; Lee, 1996; Omi and Winant, 1994). This ideological construct portrays Asian and Pacific Islander Americans as passive populations that do not experience racial discrimination, violence, and social problems (Vo, 2004). However, Asians and Pacific Islanders have been deeply engaged in the struggle for social justice in America. Historically, Asians and Pacific Islanders have challenged exploitation in the workplace, unjust immigration policies, barriers to U.S. citizenship, discrimination against gays and lesbians, exclusion from labor unions, and discrimination in education and residential segregation (Chan, 1991 ; McClain, 1994; Omatsu, 1994; Takaki, 1989; Wong, 1994; Zia, 2000; Espiritu, 1992; Vo, 2004). Asians and Pacific Islanders have organized against domestic violence (Lin and Tan, 1994; Abraham, 2000; Rudrappa, 2004; Supriya, 2002). They have also formed social movements and coalitions with other groups in the struggle for immigration rights, affirmative action, and social justice (Scharlin and Villanueva, 1992; Kim, 2004; Yoshikawa, 1994; Saito, 1998; Geron et al., 2001; Zia, 2000; Pulido, 2006). Despite their long history of fighting for social justice, the image of Asians as model minorities renders this history invisible (Aguilar-San Juan, 1994; Wei, 1993). This special issue of Social Justice will contribute to the emerging literature on Asian and Pacific Islander community formation and the struggle for social justice in the United States.
International Spaces of the Asian and Pacific Islander American Struggle for Social Justice
The experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States have been shaped by the larger global context, including the integration of Asia into the modern world-system, imperialist competition between the various global powers, colonialism, and wars (Bascara, 2006; Choy, 2005; Palumbo-Liu, 1999; Tyner, 2006). The transnational space for the circulation of capital, the formation of labor migration, and the commodification of migrant labor structure the contours of Asian-American community and identity formation. The relatively weak position of China in the modern world-system during the 19th century meant that Chinese immigrants were vulnerable to physical attacks, as well as economic and political exclusion in the United States. The 1882 Exclusion Act and the 61-year-long exclusion resulted in forced segregation, limited occupation choices, and an extreme sex-ratio imbalance (Li, 2007). Imperialism led to the incursion into and colonization of the Philippines, Hawaii, India, Southeast Asia, etc. The Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War affected the perception and treatment of Asians and Pacific Islanders by the majority population of the United States. During World War II, when China and the United States were allies, Chinese Americans became a symbol of friendship between the two countries; simultaneously, however, 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated in internment camps. The Cold War led to a crackdown on labor organizers among Filipino farm workers and Chinese Americans (de Vera, 1994; Zhao, 2002). The Korean and Vietnam Wars affected how Asians were perceived in the United States (Yoshimura, 1989). The economic rivalry between Japan and the United States in the 1980s created the social conditions in which Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was murdered in Detroit because his murderers thought he was Japanese. September 11 generated hate crimes and murders committed against South Asians and Muslims (National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, 2001; The Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force, 2001/2002; Naber, 2002; Narasaki and Han, 2004). Asian-American workers were disproportionately affected by September 11 because they constituted a significant sector of service workers and the strata of low-wage workers (Matsuda, 2002; Das Gupta, 2004). Since September 11, racial profiling has expanded to target South Asians. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have aggressively used the powers under the Patriot Act to detain Pakistani immigrants indefinitely (Narasaki and Han, 2004).
The international context also shapes the political opportunities and the particular collective action frames for mobilization (Meyer, 2003). By altering political and economic conditions, as well as the perceptions of those conditions, changes in the international context can change the opportunities for activists within a country (Ibid.). In the 1960s, the rise of nationalist, anti-imperialist, other world-systemic movements had an impact on Third World liberation movements in the United States (Umemoto, 1989; Ho, 2000). Thus, the Black Liberation struggle, the Chicano Movement, the Young Lords, CASA, the Native American movement, the anti-imperialist national liberation struggles and revolutions in the Third World, socialist China, and the movement against the Vietnam War inspired the Asian-American movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Ho et al., 2000; Louie, 2001; Omatsu, 1994). Asian-American activists studied the works of revolutionary intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and Vladimir Lenin (Umemoto, 1989; Nakano, 1989; Nishida, 1989). Revolutionary organizations such as the Red Guard Party, I Wor Kuen, Wei Min She, and other collectives connected the issues of racism to imperialism by linking opposition to the war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia with the struggle for liberation and against racism/ sexism in the United States (Ho, 2000). The Bay Area Asian Coalition Against the War (BAACAW) was formed in 1972 to build an Asian presence in the anti-war movement in the San Francisco Bay Area (Geron, 2003: 172).
The global women's movement created the political opportunities for Third World and white women to organize against an economic and political system that gave rise to racism and sexism (Quon, 2001). In the 1970s, the battered women's movement in the United States and United Kingdom initiated a movement that transformed the meaning of marital violence from a private, individual problem into an important social problem (Abraham, 2000). From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, Third World feminist groups began to address the "woman question" in their own countries. In the 1980s, South Asian women's organizations emerged in the United States to...
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