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The Unerasing of Asian American Civil Rights History
How decades of erasure of Asian Civil Rights history lead to generations of lost identity.
Back in 2016, when the fight for civil rights came roaring back into sharp focus during the Presidential race and Democratic National Convention, I was in Philadelphia marching with Black Lives Matter. Like most Asians I knew, we were outraged by the injustices and oppression we saw our fellow POCs struggle with. In a show of solidarity, we made signs and went out to add our voices to those of other protesters, but while doing so, I was also confronted with questions of my own Asian American history. Where were we in this fight? All through high school and college, there were no mentions of Asians in the fight for Civil Rights at all, yet here I was, marching with thousands of other POCs, including other Asians. And it wasn’t soon after that, that I was confronted by someone who said to me, “Yeah, you Asians just benefit off our work. Asians have never fought for civil rights. Asians don’t know racism.”
The worst part of this confrontation from a fellow POC was that I had no response. With the exception of my own life experiences, I couldn’t defend myself. I knew nothing about the Asian American Movement of the 1960s. I knew nothing of what affect Asians had on American history aside from the few lines mention of Chinese railroad workers, Japanese Internment, and The Chinese Exclusion Act in my American History books. Asian American history had been effectively erased from my education and those of everyone around me. How could it be that two hundred plus years of Asian occupation on US soil resulted in only enough history to fill a paragraph? Asian American history has largely been ignored and buried, leaving many young Asian Americans to wonder if we’d ever been in the fight for equality at all.
Well, rest assured, young bloods, Asian Americans have always been involved. It is just that part of the system that created the “model minority” myth also consciously made efforts to erase Asian American struggles from the civil rights narrative.
When I returned home from that hot, humid week in Philadelphia, I vowed that I would find answers. I knew deep down that there had to have been uprisings and fights from the…
