More and more, I believe that movements depend on stories. We know the U.S. mainstream has its story of Asian Americans: it’s a story of a politically passive, monolithic community of high achievers ready and willing to align with the violence of white supremacy and capitalism. But sometimes, it seems that even in our critiques of the model minority we can end up reinforcing this story: by tokenizing the most vulnerable Asian American subgroups as proof of our oppressed status, positioning ourselves as allies rather than stakeholders in the fight for racial justice, or by publicly chastising ourselves over our alleged political apathy and proximity to whiteness.

As 2017 comes to a close, I want to ask: what are the stories we are telling ourselves? Are they helping, or harming — lifting up or silencing — grassroots organizing against the matrices of oppression Asian Americans face?

The following are a few stories that reflect Asian America not as a demographic category, or even a political vision, but as a political practice that resists imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and all its attendant gendered/raced/classed modes of violence. This list is by no means comprehensive: I hope you’ll share the #AsAmMovementStories that have compelled you this year, and we can keep growing a culture of Asian American resistance.

-Mark

8. Standing behind affirmative action

2017 saw renewed attention to the issue of affirmative action, with Asian Americans in the divisive spotlight. This year, Chinese Americans in particular continued to be cast in the role of the straight-A student denied their rightful place in the Ivy League because of unfair “racial preference.” The barely-coded implication that whites and Asian Americans are being discriminated against by affirmative action policies for supposedly underqualified Black, Latinx, and Native American students took headlines again when Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice announced in August that it would investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The investigation is focusing on Harvard, which has been the subject of a lawsuit filed in 2014 by legal provocateur Edward Blum and the Asian American Coalition for Education, which alleges an “Asian quota” at Harvard and other elite schools. (Incidentally, Harvard’s class of 2021 boasts a 22.2 percent Asian American student body, a record high for the university.) Blum, who has chosen Asian Americans as the face of his new suit, was also responsible for the Supreme Court case that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

While the Asian American Coalition for Education “welcomes” the DOJ investigation, progressive and leftist Asian Americans have been quick to reorient the conversation and represent the 65% of Asian Americans that support affirmative action policies, which have no basis for illegal negative action policies like the quotas Blum and the AACE allege. As of August 2017, over 135 Asian American and Pacific Islander groups had signed onto a joint statement in support of affirmative action policies. That same month, Asian American commentators came together to host a #NotYourWedge Twitter townhall, calling attention to Asian American ethnic groups underrepresented in higher education, the need to situate affirmative action as redressing histories of racial injustice, problematizing the racist roots of meritocracy, and troubling the research of Thomas Espenshade oft-cited as “proving” anti-Asian admissions bias.

As the DOJ threatens to sue Harvard over noncompliance in its probe, the fight to disrupt antiblack narratives of Asian American meritocracy and deservingness are sure to continue in 2018 and beyond.

Read more in Reappropriate: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (#AAPI) Writing in Support of Affirmative Action.

7. SF “comfort women” statue marks Japanese imperialism and sexual violence

Years of silence-breaking and community organizing culminated with the September unveiling of a comfort women memorial in San Francisco’s Chinatown plaza. The memorial honors more than 200,000 women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia — euphemistically known as “comfort women” — who were forced into Japan’s military prostitution system during World War II. The statue has not been without its controversies — San Francisco’s Japanese sister city, Osaka, cut ties with SF because of the statue. Japan claims that such memorials violate a 2015 apology and payment to South Korea that, despite purporting to be a “final and irrevocable resolution” to the painful history, has failed to satisfy many survivors and their advocates.

The SF monument is a testament to years of organizing by groups such as the “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition, which called out Japan’s “obstruction and denialism, including its blocking of people’s attempts to build memorials all over the world” in a statement marking the unveiling. “Much of the work was done away from the spotlight,” the statement continued, reflecting the contributions of countless volunteers, activists, scholars and students.

Groups like CWJC have placed the comfort women issue in the context of the larger struggle “against all forms of sexual violence [and] the sexism, racism, colonialism, militarization, and war that fuel it.” To that end, CWJC has implicated the U.S.’s own imperial agenda and its “pivot to Asia” in aiding and abetting Japan’s historical denialism.

The fight for justice and proper memorialization for “grandmothers” impacted by Japanese wartime sexual violence stretches from U.S. college campuses such as San Francisco State University — where protesters fighting for ethnic studies have invoked remembrance of comfort women as emblematic of the need for a discipline that critically engages the histories of communities of color — to Okinawa and the Philippines, where local fights against U.S. military bases and the gender violence they fuel continue.

The fruit of tireless community organizing, the SF memorial is a symbol of the ongoing fight against all forms of imperialism, and a reminder that remembrance is indeed a form of resistance.

Read more: CWJC Statement at Unveiling of the Memorial for “Comfort Women” in San Francisco. Donate to CWJC here.

6. Demanding justice for Tommy Le

On June 14, 20-year-old Tommy Le was fatally shot by Seattle police, the same day he was set to graduate from a high-school completion program at South Seattle College. In the aftermath of the shooting, a Seattle sheriff’s spokeswoman said the officers believed Le was holding “what they thought was a knife.” It took a week for the Sheriff’s Office to report that Le had in fact been holding a pen when he was shot three times by Seattle police.

Le’s family and the Vietnamese American community of Seattle have come together to challenge the police department’s murky, shifting narrative of the circumstances of Le’s death. An autopsy released in September showed Le was shot twice in the back and once in the back of his hand. “There are no scenarios where you would shoot someone in the back because they are attacking you” the Le family’s lawyer said during a press conference. Le’s murder energized groups such as “Viets Who Give a Shiet” and “Justice For Tommy Le,” who organized a public forum in July during which hundreds of community members called for an independent inquiry into the shooting death.

Young activists say the tragedy is galvanizing a new era of Vietnamese American activism, one that draws critical connections to antiblack state violence while navigating the particular traumas of the Vietnamese experience. In an interview with Seattle Weekly, Justice for Tommy Le leader Yenvy Pham said: “We are new to this country, but within the four generations of being here, we have been inspired by the black community to be outspoken and face injustices.”

Followed less than a week later by the police murder of black Seattle mother Charleena Lyles, Le’s death has prompted important conversations about the stakes for non-black Asian Americans in the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight against police violence. Out of senseless tragedy, Le’s family and community are setting a course for Asian American activism that builds power and coalitions around state violence against black, indigenous, immigrant and refugee communities.

What you can do: Sign and share Justice for Tommy Le’s petition demanding a voice for Tommy Le’s family during the King County inquest into the shooting.

5. Confronting imperialism, orientalism in the U.S.-North Korea “conflict”

This year saw Donald Trump recklessly stoke tensions with North Korea, promising “fire and fury” against the nation to punish Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. While experts agree that a North Korean nuclear weapon would serve as a defensive deterrent against a U.S.-backed toppling of the Kim regime, that hasn’t stopped U.S. politicians and pundits from commencing with the genocidal commentary. A particularly outlandish September op-ed in the New York Post outlined a supposedly “moral” solution: “better a million dead North Koreans than a thousand dead Americans.”

Korean Americans have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula. U.S. bombings during the Korean War killed almost 30% of North Korea’s population, and in the decades since the U.S. has adopted cruel sanctions on everyday resources like coal and oil that punish North Korean civilians. As white Americans try to sift “good” (South) Koreans from “bad” (North) Koreans, many reunification activists in Korea and the diaspora have stressed that the supposed binary depends on an arbitrary border drawn at the 38th parallel by the United States in 1945, which separated10 million Koreans from their family members.

In November, Bay Area activists marked the anniversary of the end of World War I to hold a Korean Peace Walk, marching for 2 hours along historic sites of Bay Area activism while pounding drums and waving banners in English and Korean reading “No war on Korea” and “U.S. troops out now — Korea is one land.” Meanwhile, Korean American community group Nodutdol launched an oral history project with Korean elders about their experiences during the war, which was shared as a multimedia performance in Queens. The #KoreanPeace Twitter chat also lifted up Korean/American perspectives on U.S. imperialism, drawing links to militarism in the Pacific, orientalist media coverage of North Korea, and South Korean protests against a U.S. missile-defense system housed in Seongju, a southern farming town whose residents worry about the potential harm of the system’s electromagnetic radiation.

Korean/American activists opposing U.S. warmongering on the Korean peninsula remind us that U.S. imperialism and war has always been a crucible of Asian American political identity — from the rise of the Asian American Movement during the Vietnam War to the current fight against Trump’s genocidal “fire and fury.”

Read more: THAAD Will Not Protect South Korea, Korea Exposé.
Ju-Hyun Park, America’s Forever War and the Cost of Assimilation.

4. Practicing community care in the face of hate violence and Islamophobia

Donald Trump’s first year in office coincided with an upsurge in Islamophobic hate violence, no doubt stoked by Trump’s fear-mongering rhetoric of terrorist threats and his administration’s repeated Muslim Ban attempts.

In February, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was fatally shot and Alok Madasani was wounded by shooter Adam Purinton at a Kansas restaurant. Purinton, a white man, allegedly yelled “get out of my country” and “terrorist” before firing. In March, Harnish Patel, a South Carolina convenience store owner, was found dead by gunshot wounds in the front yard of his home. The same month, Sikh American Deep Rai was shot and injured in front of his Seattle home by an attacker who reportedly yelled “go back to your country.” The list goes on, including the fatal stabbing of two Portland man who intervened when a white supremacist harassment two African American young women with anti-Muslim slurs.

In the face of community threats of violence, Muslim and South Asian American communities have rallied to find strength in solidarity and mutual support. A fundraiser to support the family of Srinivas Kuchibhotla raised over four times its initial $150,000 goal, and hundreds across the country gathered at vigils to honor Kuchibhotla’s memory and stand against rising hate crimes. Meanwhile, community groups such as Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) have been proactive in building safe community spaces, launching the innovative Hate Free Zones project to build mutual support across frontline targeted communities, and conducting community check-ins after an attempted pipe bombing in New York’s Port Authority left Brooklyn’s Bangaldeshi-Muslim community feeling vulnerable to vigilante retaliation.

It’s time to keep investing in creative models of community safety that offer much-needed alternatives to relying on the police state to protect the very communities police target with racist surveillance.

Support DRUM’s Hate Free Zones project, legal services, and youth leadership programs by donating here.

3. #CleanDreamAct demands amnesty with no border militarization

Living up to the anti-immigrant tenor of his campaign, Donald Trump announced in September he would end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that granted deportation relief and work permits to immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. Undocumented Asian Americans between 15 and 36 make up some 10 percent of the DACA-eligible population, and over 16,000 of DACA’s 800,000 recipients are Asian American.

Undocumented activists, Asian American community groups, and other activists have ramped up pressure on the administration to protect undocumented youth. In August, marking the 5 year anniversary of DACA’s implementation, NAKASEC held a 22-day “Dream Action” in support of DACA, Temporary Designated Status (TPS) protection for South Sudan and Sudan, and a legislative Dream Act. Following Trump’s announcement of DACA’s termination, Asian Americans have joined other immigrant community groups to build pressure on Congress to protect undocumented youth by passing the Dream Act, legislation first proposed in 2001 that would provide a path to legal permanent residency. Calls for a #CleanDreamAct have stressed that relief for undocumented youth should not be tied to border militarization or other punitive measures that criminalize parents and older undocumented immigrants. In November, 19 Asian Americans were arrested in a demonstration in front of Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, demanding he put the Dream Act to a vote. On December 15, Latinx immigrant leaders staged a sit-in at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, urging the Democratic leader to reject the Republican budget and force a government shutdown if Republicans don’t allow a Senate vote on the Dream Act.

APALA on Twitter

19 #AAPI #DREAM Advocates Arrested in front of @SpeakerRyan's Office. Read more: https://t.co/vbg4xgraGi #cleanDREAMAct #AAPIs4DREAM

On December 22, Congress passed a temporary spending bill that pushes the threat of government shutdown — and the leverage of tying the federal budget to the Dream Act — to January 19. For over fifteen years, Democrats have promised real immigration reform legislation to Asian American, Latinx, and Black immigrant constituents they take for granted come elections. As always, the fight to hold Democratic leadership accountable for their word in 2018 will depend on the grassroots organizing and direct action of immigrant activists.

Donate and support the work of Asian American undocumented-led organizations like RAISE and ASPIRE (sponsored by the Asian Law Caucus).

2. Refugee communities rally against new wave of deportations

During four years of secret war in Cambodia amidst the Vietnam War, the United States dropped some 2.7 million tonnes of bombs, directly killing a half million people and creating social upheaval that helped lead to Pol Pot’s rise to power. Now, the United States is conducting aggressive raids to deport refugees back to the same country they devastated decades ago.

ICE has begun unprecedented raids targeting both Cambodian and Vietnamese Americans, many of whom entered the country as refugees. For years, Cambodia had refused to accept deported citizens from the U.S. That changed this year after the U.S. placed visa sanctions on Cambodian officials to strongarm the country into accepting deportees. Now, ICE is expected to deport a record-breaking number of Cambodian Americans — some 200 in 2018. More than 200 Southeast Asian Americans were detained by ICE in November alone.

But community leaders and activists have refused to let ICE tear families apart without a fight. “We really need to dispel this myth that we’re here and we made it and the administration has our best interest in mind. We need to stand up for each other when our safety and daily life is at threat of being disrupted,” VietUnity activist Giao Tran told Mercury News. Lawyers from Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus helped win a rare month-long stay for 50 Cambodian Americans scheduled to be deported in December.

Many of those targeted by renewed ICE raids have served time for crimes committed as youth in poor, resource-starved resettlement communities, and have returned to their communities for decades to rebuild their lives. Criminalized in their youth, these individuals are caught in the wrong side of the “good immigrant/bad immigrant” binary that cloaks immigration justice in the language of moral and economic deservingness. A press release from Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus highlighted the stories of those targeted: “In the 22 years since my conviction, I have worked hard to support my family and give back to the community,“ said Mony Neth of Modesto, California, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “To be suddenly torn away from my wife, daughter, and elderly parents is devastating to all of us.”

Vanessa Na (Teck) on Twitter

I am a dreamer & we are the product of dreamers & their dreams. We are our ancestors wildest dreams." -Lee Lo #SEARACSummit #MMDC2017

Beyond legal challenges, refugee community resilience is also the result of long-term movement building. In October, Southeast Asia Resource Action Network held a “Southeast Asian American Equity Summit” to build community leadership and movement strategy amongst Cambodian, Hmong, Iu Mien, Lao, and Vietnamese American communities across the country — a model for investing in underrepresented voices to propel Asian American movements for justice forward.

Take action: support Southeast Asian American community organizations like PrYSM, Mekong — NYC, Vietlead, VietUnity, and SEARAC. The Returnee Integration Support Center, which works to support deported Cambodian citizens, is also seeking donations here.

Read more: Julianne Hing, How a Group of Immigration Attorneys Stopped a Deportation Flight to Cambodia, The Nation.

1. Ny Nourn walks free, 16 years later

Content warning: domestic abuse

After spending 16 years in prison, Ny Nourn was granted parole in January 2016, only to find herself behind bars once again only months later. This time, though, she was awaiting deportation to a country she’d never even been to.

Nourn is one of many women of color who have been criminalized as survivors of domestic abuse, caught at the intersections of the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement. Sentenced to 15 years to life in prison in 2003 for her role in her abusive partner’s murder of her boss, David Stevens, Nourn was convicted despite appeals from expert psychologists testifying that Nourn suffered from Battered Women’s Syndrome. But after serving her time and being granted parole, Nourn was swept up by ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, which grants ICE access to jails and prisons to search for “deportable” immigrants, and transferred from the Central California Women’s Facility to Yuba County Jail, awaiting deportation.

Yet, through the combined efforts of Survived and Punished, which leads freedom campaigns supporting survivors who live at the intersections of gender violence and criminalization, Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, and the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, Nourn walked free in November after a grassroots campaign raised enough funds to meet her $10,000 bail.

Though Nourn is out of ICE detention, ICE continues to appeal her case to carry out her deportation to Cambodia, though she has never been there and fears that her abuser, Ron Barker, will use family ties in Asia to carry out his threats to have her killed. But Nourn promises to continue the fight. In a letter published by Survived and Punished, she wrote: “I am joining all of you outside in fighting for not just my freedom, but for the freedom of all of my sisters and brothers that I left behind inside.”

Asian Law Caucus on Twitter

Ny has been granted bond!!! #FreeNy

May we all learn from Nourn’s resilience, her organizing behind bars, and her dedication to supporting incarcerated survivors.

Read more: Victoria Law, After Abuse and Prison, a Woman Faces Deportation to a Country She’s Never Been To, Vice.

Take action: Nourn has asked supporters to sign a petition to stop the ongoing deportation of Cambodian refugees, and to ask California Governor Jerry Brown to give friend and fellow incarcerated survivor Kelly Ann Savage a chance at parole.

#AsAmMovementStories

Seventy-five years ago today, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas…from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War…may impose in his discretion.”

Despite the race-neutral language of the document, in the midst of wartime anti-Japanese hysteria, the singular intent of the order was clear: to target Japanese Americans, and to a lesser extent, German and Italian Americans, to be stripped of their property and livelihoods to be detained indefinitely in concentration camps. The rest is history: 120,000 Japanese Americans, sixty-two percent of whom were American citizens, were forcibly relocated to ten concentration camps scattered throughout the West and Arkansas.

Steeped in similar wartime paranoias, this anniversary of E.O. 9066 takes on a new resonance. The Trump administration’s rhetorical and policy escalation of the War on Terror, but also the War on Drugs and the War on Crime, urges a rereading of WWII state violence against Japanese Americans: one that challenges Asian Americans whose political convictions are guided by the atrocities of Japanese American incarceration to radically expand our political sympathies, solidarities, and strategies.

Since September 11, 2001, Japanese American incarceration has been read in conversation with the state’s unconstitutional profiling of Muslims under the guise of national security. Such parallels have been fertile ground for building Muslim-Japanese community partnerships and engaging in strategic interventions to Islamophobia as state policy. For example, in 2003, incarceration resistor (and plaintiff in Korematsu vs. United States) Fred Korematsu filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Muslim inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, calling on the court to learn from the mistake of restricting the civil liberties of Japanese Americans due to similar racist paranoias. Meanwhile, just last December, Japanese and Muslim American community groups in Chicago marked the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor by warning against Trump’s calls to register Muslim Americans. Many more such convenings taking place across the country this weekend acknowledge the dire stakes for remembering the history of Japanese American incarceration in order to resist Islamophobia today.

These comparisons are apt, and given the Trump administration’s plans to issue a revised executive order to selectively exclude Muslim travelers, more urgent than ever. As Trump surrogates such as Carl Higbie cite Japanese American incarceration as legal precedent for Muslim registration, and amidst a flurry of ahistorical editorials arguing that E.O. 9066 was justified, it is clear that the right is attempting to use the history of Japanese American incarceration to lay the ideological groundwork for the increased persecution of Muslim Americans. But the contemporary resonances of Japanese American mass incarceration need not end there. Unfortunately, the logics and mechanisms of that history — forced displacement, labor exploitation, the detention of immigrants, and the repression of dissidents — recur throughout the state’s war on communities of color today.

In a 1972 interview, Japanese American reparations activist and prison abolitionist Yuri Kochiyama remarked on how her experiences in American concentration camps informed her intersectional analysis of the conditions of all communities of color living under white supremacy:

“It happens to all third-world people, only they give it a different name. Africans were put in plantations. They were concentration camps. The American Indians were put in reservations, which were concentration camps. Wherever there is a concentration of people who have been dispossessed and disempowered, they are in concentration camps…The Chinese, while they were building the railroads, lived in railroad camps that were very much like concentration camps. I think that the Chicano migratory workers camps were like concentration camps.”

How might borrowing from Kochiyama’s reading of state violence urge a more robust analysis of the state’s systematic denial of civil liberties to communities of color? How might excavating the political priorities of early Japanese American leaders of the Asian American Movement — from Kochiyama to Mo Nishida — reinvigorate a growing Asian American movement calling for an end to prisons, policing, deportations, and beyond?

With newly aggressive ICE raids terrorizing immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Day of Remembrance is not complete without reckoning with another form of concentration camp growing within our midst: the for-profit immigration prisons that house tens of thousands of migrant people and families awaiting forced deportation. Indeed, Japanese American psychologist Satsuki Ina made this very connection when she compared a family detention center for Central American refugees to the Tule Lake concentration camp in which she was born 70 years prior.

Similarly, as critiques of prisons as a source of underclass labor enter the mainstream through groundbreaking work like Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, it is worth revisiting the role that labor exploitation played in making Japanese American incarceration profitable. Amongst the litany of horrors of incarceration, it is less known that Japanese American prisoners were paid as little as $12 a month (compared to a 1941 median market wage of $108), often while being forced to build the very camps that kept them prisoners.

Knowing the brutal treatment of internment dissidents and resistors, our Day of Remembrance also requires reflecting on the ongoing conditions that led incarcerated people at Vaughn prison to rise up this month to fight for dignity and opportunities for rehabilitation. Remembering the Manzanar uprising — in which hundreds of protesting prisoners were subjected to tear gas by military police and two were shot and killed — as a prison rebellion presents another lens through which Asian Americans, particularly those of East Asian descent, can see our histories as inherently tied to movements for prison abolition. Indeed, this is the reading of state violence that led movement elders like Kochiyama to dedicate their political lives to the pursuit of justice for political prisoners (recognizing that under white supremacy, all prisoners are political).

Meanwhile, remembering the commonalities that Japanese Americans saw between their treatment by the War Relocation Authority and Native Americans under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the history of Japanese American incarceration may also be seen as a call for reinvestment in the fight for Native sovereignty and the protection of Native treaties. Recalling that Poston concentration camp was strategically placed to exploit Japanese American labor to build the infrastructure for a future Native American reservation, these histories of forced relocation and post-war resettlement can inform ongoing coalitional work towards Native liberation. Drawing from past histories of Japanese-Native American movement building — such as Japanese American participation in the occupation of Wounded Knee and Alcatraz in the height of the American Indian Movement, can lay the groundwork for continued Asian American support in the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline and other ongoing attacks on tribal sovereignty.

In his stirring, elegiac Inauguration Day remarks at the Holocaust History Center in Tucson, Arizona, poet Brandon Shimoda explains why he “locate[s] the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the heart” — the hearts of everyday Americans ready to accept, or even encourage, the systematic stripping of an entire community’s basic human rights. Today, we must interrogate our own hearts in search of those dark places that have similarly accepted that some targets of state violence do not deserve our mourning, do not deserve our solidarities. This Day of Remembrance, we can ask ourselves whether we are capable of the radical expansion of empathy necessary to see our own experiences reflected in the political conditions of all those who face exclusion, incarceration, detention, and removal. This is the vision, and work, of mutual liberation. This is the path that leads to abolishing all systems that make people into prisoners.

Towards Abolition: Reading Executive Order 9066 in Trump’s America was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the President-Elect of the United States is slinging drivel at civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis on Twitter; Washington, D.C. is bracing for a 200,000 person anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington; and protesters in cities across the country are leading #ReclaimMLK demonstrations to denounce homelessness, police violence, attacks on voting rights, and the sanitization of Dr. King’s radical vision of Black liberation.

Amidst all of it, I’m revisiting my copy of The Radical King, wondering what Dr. King’s legacy means in this movement moment. As an Asian American, I keep coming back to King’s 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence,” in which a defiant King unburdened himself of his silence on the Vietnam War. “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” he declared. “That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” Denouncing the war’s “cruel manipulation of the poor” in diverting economic investment away from the country’s poor “like some demonic, destructive suction tube,” King lamented the role the United States occupied as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He addressed critics who cautioned him that speaking out against the war would be “hurting the cause of your people,” remarking: “their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

In 2014, Scot Nakagawa marked MLK Day with a reflection on what Asian Americans owe to the Civil Rights Movement. He noted the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibited language discrimination, which many Asian Americans rely on to vote in their language of choice; the Immigration and Nationality Act that ended the racist quota system restricting Asian immigration; and the end of interracial marriage bans. Reflecting on “Beyond Vietnam,” I am struck by the debt we owe to Black liberation thinkers like King who have also been at the vanguard of anti-war movements, challenging U.S. imperialism in Asia and catalyzing Asian American movements in the process.

While Black liberation movements inspired Asian Americans to interrogate the circumstances of their own oppressions under white supremacy, Black critiques of the war urged an international perspective that would come to define the Asian American movement. As Yuri Kochiyama recounts in Passing It On: A Memoir:

“I remember [Asian Americans for Action co-founder Kazu Iijima] would often say: ‘We must create an Asian American perspective of the Vietnam War. An Asian nation is being bombed, and Asian Americans will be going to Vietnam and fighting against the Vietnamese too…We must know what this war is really about.”

What the war was really about, according to Black radicals like Angela Davis, was the “war economy” of the United States — the “military apparatus [putting] down the resistance in the black and brown community, on the campuses, in the working class communities” at the same time it terrorized civilians in villages across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The struggle in Vietnam, then, was about everyone: “the struggle of the whole Third World: the struggle against colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism,” as Malcolm X put it in a speech delivered to honored Hibakusha guests (Japanese atomic bomb survivors) at Yuri Kochiyama’s Harlem apartment in 1964.

If, drawing from Andrea Smith, we see the “three pillars of white supremacy” as slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism/war, then Black anti-war efforts must be understood as anti-Orientalist efforts, too. American history tells us all too clearly that the fate of Asian America is tied to U.S. foreign policy in Asia. W.E.B. DuBois’ condemnation of the inhumane bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is thus also a condemnation of the inhumane incarceration of Japanese Americans. Muhammad Ali’s declaration “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong” is a declaration of solidarity with Asians and Asian Americans. As key disruptors of the U.S. war machine in Asia, Black internationalists have been central in undermining the racist frame of American imperialism that cast both Asians and Asian Americans as enemy others.

In this light, Dr. King’s call to break silence is turned back onto us: it is a call for Asian Americans to break our own silence in the face of Black oppression. Davis’s linking of the violence sown by the war economy in Vietnam and in Black and brown communities stateside becomes a call for us to connect the militarism that has driven Asian migration to the U.S. to the systems of police violence and mass incarceration that continue to steal Black lives with impunity.

For the past several years, Black Lives Matter chapters have turned MLK Day from an exercise in apolitical excerpting of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech into a day of reclamation of the radical Dr. King and his legacy in an America that continues to deny that Black lives matter. As direct beneficiaries of both 1960s civil rights legislation and a Black anti-war critique that helped forge that era’s Third World solidarities, Asian Americans can and must be part of the work to #ReclaimMLK. That means reclaiming King’s legacy from white conservatives who wield out-of-context quotes to shame Black protestors and urge a “color blind” ignorance towards systemic racism, and from members of our own Asian American communities that trade in canned King soundbites in order to oppose affirmative action or police accountability. When Chinese American protesters wield signs saying “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” to defend a Chinese American police officer charged for the shooting of an unarmed Black man, we cannot be silent. When family members and community leaders cry “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” to denounce affirmative action, we cannot be silent.

Reclaiming MLK means channeling King’s internationalist lens to our own moment: to stand against the U.S. war economy whether it is escalating tensions in the South China Sea or suppressing Black protest in Ferguson or Charlotte. It means being vocal in the face of our oppressions just as it means refusing to be silent in our privileges, and grounding our movements in the experiences of Black, indigenous, undocumented, disabled, Muslim, gender non-conforming, and poor communities most impacted by state violence. It means remembering that the seeds of the Asian American movement were sown in the Black liberation movement, in the fight to free political prisoners, and the dream of a Third World: one defined by the multitudinous experiences of peoples of color and yet joined by a singular vision.

Unlike those that urged Dr. King to keep quiet about the Vietnam War for fear it would detract from his cause, we cannot afford to not “know the world in which we live.” It is a world in which, out of political urgency and moral clarity, our causes — to halt deportations, stop the Muslim registry, end police violence, preserve access to birth control, and so much more — must be joined. In these times, to be silent is nothing short of betrayal.

When Silence Is Betrayal: On Asian American Debt To The Radical King was originally published in Organizer Sandbox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We get it. Representation matters. But Asian American activism doesn’t begin and end with the fight for mainstream media representation. 2016 may have brought us #StarringConstanceWu and a Master of None Emmy, but it also brought us grassroots fights against deportations, racial profiling, gentrification, and Islamophobia. As we stare down the barrel of the loaded gun that is a Donald Trump administration, it’s worth taking a moment to look back on some (by no means all) of the big moments of community resistance and resilience from 2016. Here’s hoping we can build on this work in 2017.

10. When Activists Put Chinatown Gentrifiers On Blast

From San Francisco to NYC, Chinatowns are under siege. Housing abuses, rent hikes, and illegal evictions are all pushing longtime residents out of their communities to make way for Wall Street and Silicon Valley professionals looking for the next “up and coming” neighborhood.

But activists are taking creative means to take a stand against gentrification. In July, flyers were plastered across San Francisco’s Chinatown calling out landlords for using AirBnB to host illegal (and highly profitable) short-term rentals. In New York, the newly-formed Chinatown Arts Brigade in staged outdoor projections in September calling attention to the crisis of displacement — while leading community conversations to push gallery owners to question their complicity in displacement. Meanwhile, groups like CAAAV worked to win a rent freeze for 1 million rent-regulated tenants in New York City, a much-needed win in the long fight for affordable housing for New York’s low-income communities of color.

9. When Japanese Americans Said “NOPE” To a Muslim Registry

As Donald Trump’s talk of a “Muslim registry” went from an abhorrent pipe dream to a potentially pending policy, Japanese Americans have been among the loudest critics of this mass infringement of Muslim American civil liberties. Citing their own experiences with mass incarceration during World War II, Japanese American public figures like George Takei have called out the heinous proposals for a Muslim registry. In Chicago, Muslim and Japanese American groups came together in a show of solidarity on the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing to speak out against Trump’s calls to register or even incarcerate Muslim Americans.

In a political climate in which Trump surrogates have claimed Japanese American internment as a legal precedent for Trump’s proposals, and the L.A. Times sees fit to publish letters to the editor defending the virtues of internment, Japanese-Muslim solidarity is an example of the power we can channel when diverse Asian American groups come together to condemn xenophobic policies in every form.

8. When Thousands of Okinawans and Filipinos Told the U.S. Military to GTFOH

From the occupation of Hawaii to the Obama Administration’s “Pivot to Asia,” for too long Asia and the Pacific have been a stomping grounds for U.S. militarism. This year saw massive protests abroad, from Okinawa to the Philippines, calling out the expansion of U.S. military bases that appropriate land, drive sexual violence, and undermine national sovereignty. Just as the Vietnam War politicized early leaders of the Asian American Movement in the 1960s, today’s fight against U.S. militarism abroad continues to inform Asian American and Pacific Islander activists, with organizations like API People’s Solidarity drawing connections between U.S. imperialism abroad and the militarization of police forces stateside.

7. When Queer Asian Americans Shut It Down To Protest Racial Profiling

Invasive TSA searches; police harassment of gender-nonconforming people of color; stop and frisk practices that criminalize Black and brown youth…Profiling on the basis of race, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation is as pervasive as ever. To speak out against the ways law enforcement justifies targeting queer people of color using the language of “security,” National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) and its member organizations hosted a week of #RedefineSecurity actions in May. As NQAPIA organizer Sasha W. said in a statement: “Our communities will redefine security for themselves, without law enforcement agencies that routinely profile and harass South Asians and Muslims as terrorists, Southeast Asians as gang members, and LGBTQ API people as targets for harassment…As LGBTQ APIs, we are in solidarity with all Black and brown people who experience profiling from police, from ICE, and from all state agencies.”

6. When Student Activists Made Asian American Studies Programs A Thing

If you’ve ever been asked what the difference is between Asian American Studies and “Oriental Studies,” don’t worry: you’re not alone. The fact is, too many people — university faculty and administrators especially — don’t know the first thing about Ethnic Studies or Asian American Studies. So it’s fallen on students to hold their institutions accountable for erasing Asian American perspectives from their curriculum.

From the creation of an AAS minor at William & Mary, to the establishment of an AAS major at Northwestern after two decades of student organizing, 2016 was a big year in the #Fight4AAS. But at Hunter College and so many other schools, the fight to have our histories and perspectives taught continues.

[Read more: I took a deep dive into the perspectives of Asian American student activists in a piece published back in February]

5. When Reproductive Justice Activists Came Together To #FreePurvi

In March, Donald Trump told MSNBC if Roe v. Wade were overturned, there would have to be “some form of punishment” for people who receive abortions. Many were rightfully horrified by the comments — but others with roots in the reproductive justice movement knew that, as in the case of Purvi Patel, punitive measures for those seeking abortions were already underway.

Patel had been charged and convicted of feticide and child neglect after suffering what she described as a miscarriage and the loss of her 25-week-old-fetus. Patel’s guilty verdict and 20 year jail sentence showed the dangerous efficacy of Indiana’s recently adopted feticide laws that criminalize unlawful abortions. But after a long legal battle and fierce organizing from advocates like the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), an Indiana Appeals Court overturned her conviction, freeing Patel, who had been held in jail since 2015.

NAPAWF Executive Director Miriam Yeung described how the multiracial coalition of reproductive justice activists came together to #FreePurvi because “each of us can see ourselves in her story.”

But the fight is far from over, as Yeung explained: “Purvi Patel should never have been jailed in the first place. We will not rest until we are assured that all women have the basic freedom and dignity to access the reproductive health care they need and deserve.”

4. When Former Detainees Called Out the Hypocrisy of Obama’s Deportation Record

In April, as the presidential campaign heated up and Donald Trump’s bombastic Islamophobia continued to put targeted communities on edge, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) and former ICE detainees came together to challenge the Obama administration’s policy of deporting Bangladeshi refugees seeking asylum from hostile political conditions back home.

Building from the energy of 2015’s hunger strike, in which detainees at El Paso Detention Center protested human rights violations, DRUM held a symbolic funeral in Jackson Heights, Queens in April. The action was meant to “mourn all the migrants deported to death,” including 85 migrants deported that same month back to Bangladesh, where they expected to face violence and persecution for their involvement with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, a group that has faced government disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings.

The action marked a key moment in grassroots efforts to bring public attention to the reality of President Obama’s immigration policies that have led him to be known by critics as the “deporter-in-chief.” As DRUM’s campaign put it: “Trump rhetoric + Obama policies = Deported 2 Death.”

3. When Asian Americans Kept Showing Up For Black Lives

2016 saw the continuation of the crisis of police violence against Black communities — from the police killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Korryn Gaines, and too many others, to the acquittals of many officers with blood on their hands. But 2016 also brought us the Movement for Black Lives Policy Platform, a visionary document bringing together the nation’s most powerful Black activists and organizations to lay out a radical and intersectional vision of Black liberation.

This year, Asian Americans have continued to navigate their positioning in the context of antiblackness and Black resistance. It hasn’t always been pretty: in April, after former NYPD officer Peter Liang was charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of Akai Gurley tens of thousands of Chinese Americans protested, claiming that Liang was made a “scapegoat” of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The pro-Liang protests helped spur creative interventions under the banner of #Asians4BlackLives that urged Asian American communities to recognize the need to say unequivocally: Black Lives Matter. Bay Area group Asians4BlackLives kicked off 2016 with a community intervention in front of San Francisco mayor Ed Lee’s house to denounce his role “acting as a general” in the war on Black lives through his inaction on issues of gentrification and police violence. In May, New York City protesters called out Chinese language newspaper Sing Tao Daily for spreading misinformation and fomenting antiblack sentiments through its coverage of the Peter Liang trial. And in July, following the shooting of Philando Castile, Letters For Black Lives put out an open letter — translated into over 30 languages — addressing antiblackness to urge their parents and community members to rethink their stance on the crisis of antiblack police violence.

2. When California Asked What We Really Mean By “AAPI”

2016 saw a long, bitter fight over California legislation that would break down data on Asian American and Pacific Islander communities by ethnicity. AB 1726, or the data disaggregation bill, was championed by groups like the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) and Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC) whose constituents’ unique needs are often erased under the umbrella term “AAPI.”

But the bill, which originally applied to educational and health data, was met with vocal backlash from Chinese American groups that saw disaggregation as unfairly targeting Asian Americans and as a potential backdoor towards affirmative action policies. Some groups went so far as to compare AB 1726 to past discriminatory policies like Chinese Exclusion and Japanese American internment. Political pressure from groups like the Silicon Valley Chinese Association led to the removal of the bill’s education provision. In September, Governor Jerry Brown signed the amended bill into law, requiring the Department of Public Health to break down AAPI demographic data. It’s a small step in the right direction for better meeting the needs of underserved AAPI demographics. But there’s still a lot of work to be done in making sure umbrella terms like “Asian American” and “AAPI” center, rather than erase, the most marginalized members of our diverse communities.

1. When Muslim American Activists Took Down NSEERS

Amidst all Trump’s talk of a “Muslim registry,” many feared that his administration wouldn’t be starting from scratch come January 20th. That’s because a registry program for men from Muslim-majority countries — the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System — had been in place since 2002. NSEERS was widely criticized as a civil liberties violation and for being an ineffective counterterrorism tool: despite registering over 80,000 people (mostly Muslim and Arab men) and placing 14,000 into deportation proceedings, the program didn’t yield a single terrorism conviction. And while the registry has not been in use since 2011, many worried the existing infrastructure would enable Trump’s team to quickly implement new policies targeting Muslims.

Enter: Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), MPower Change, and MoveOn.org, who organized a march on the White House earlier this month calling on Obama to dismantle the program before he leaves office. Armed with a petition with 340,000 signatures and some 150 protestors, the groups marched to the White House as activists recounted stories of the impacts of NSEERS, which DRUM organizer Roksana Mun described as turning South Asian immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn into “ghost towns.”

Less than two weeks after the march, the Obama administration announced it would heed calls to formally dismantle the “obsolete” program. It’s a symbolic and material blow to the incoming administration: proving once again that our communities won’t put up with racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic state violence without a fight.

It’s hard to look towards 2017 with anything but fear and dread of the violence to come under a Trump administration. But as much as 2016 has been a year for loud and proud white supremacy, so too has it been a year of inspiring resistance and resilience. From Standing Rock to Charlotte, we’ve witnessed the power of visionary movements against antiblackness and settler colonialism. And Asian Americans have been far from silent — and not just when it comes to Hollywood representation. This year Asian American activists have taken brave and creative stands against police brutality, Islamophobia, mass deportations, and all forms of white supremacy. So if there’s anything to be hopeful about in the new year, it’s the knowledge that we can carry the things that fueled 2016’s big movement moments — our legacies of resilience, our love of community, and our visions for alternative futures — with us into 2017. Indeed, all of our futures depend on it.

In the era of President-elect Trump, and in a political landscape that is increasingly post-factual, words matter more than ever. Is bragging about sexual assault criminal, or “locker room banter”? Is Richard Spencer a white supremacist, or “alt-right”? Is Trump a bigot, a fascist, or just another politician (or all three)?

One contentious choice of words has to do with those comparing Trump to another demagogue who played on racism, fear, and promises to make his country “great” again: Adolf Hitler. But the debate over the similarities between the two fails to account for the ideological work accomplished by separating Nazism from American racism.

Matthew Rosza argues compellingly that we don’t need to look to some faraway evil for a historical predecessor to Trump — America’s history of Native American genocide, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow segregation make U.S. Presidents such as Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson more apt comparisons.

Rosza’s reminder is so necessary because when it comes to racism and white supremacy, the United States has weaponized erasure and ahistoricism. (Case in point: the narratives surrounding “holidays” like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, or a recently published history textbook that describe victims of chattel slavery as “workers”.) But comparing Hitler to Trump demonstrates the way that mainstream narratives surrounding Nazism and World War II also whitewash the international impacts of modern American racism.

In American accounts of World War II, the United States is painted as both a military and moral superpower uniquely capable of liberating democratic Europe and defeating Nazi Germany both with its military prowess and its American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality. Meanwhile, Hitler and his Nazi regime are understood as an utterly foreign, perverse evil — the very antithesis of America and what it stands for.

The more complicated reality is that the United States is deeply implicated in the racist, anti-Semitic, ableist ideology of “racial hygiene” that led to the slaughter of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Romani, disabled, and queer people. For centuries, the United States used similar theories of “scientific racism” — a merging of white supremacy and biased anthropology, archaeology, history, and other seemingly objective disciplines — to justify the continuation of chattel slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, and the exclusion of immigrants deemed undesirable.

In fact, in the decades prior to the Holocaust, the United States was the home base for the 20th century cutting edge of scientific racism — eugenics. Though coined by English mathematician Francis Galton in 1883, it was in Progressive Era America that eugenics first thrived. Mainstream public intellectuals, politicians, and institutions embraced the idea that human societies can and should use selective breeding techniques to breed out “undesirable” traits in the population. The “science” of eugenics proved a useful tool for reinforcing the glue of white supremacy in an evolving America — cloaking racism in the supposed objectivity of the natural sciences.

In a time when Anglo-Americans felt increasingly threatened by post-Reconstruction Black migration and immigration waves from Southern and Eastern Europe and East Asia, eugenics cut to the heart of what it meant to be truly American amidst a changing America. Progressive-minded white philanthropists funded eugenics research initiatives such as Long Island’s Eugenics Record Office. Following Congressional testimony from eugenicist Harry Laughlin, Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, establishing racist racist quotas and an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that would go largely unchanged until 1965. When he signed the legislation, he declared that “America must be kept American” — a rallying cry that must resonate with today’s “alt-right” white nationalists. At the same time, dozens of states implemented laws that forcibly sterilized an estimated 350,000 Americans deemed unfit to reproduce, while others ramped up anti-miscegenation laws.

In a time when Anglo-Americans felt increasingly threatened by post-Reconstruction Black migration and immigration waves from Southern and Eastern Europe and East Asia, eugenics cut to the heart of what it meant to be truly American amidst a changing America.

So when Adolf Hitler announced an Endlösung — a final solution to the “Jewish Question” — it did not happen in isolation from this American movement. For decades prior, German race hygiene scientists had exchanged notes with American counterparts at international eugenics fora hosted at the American Museum of Natural History. Hitler himself called a best-selling book by American eugenicist Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, his “bible.” Mein Kampf referenced American immigration policies as an example for Germany to follow, and he spoke admiringly of American sterilization laws that prevented reproduction of those whose children would be “injurious to the racial stock”. Meanwhile, Harry Laughlin had returned to Washington in 1939 to warn Congress against admitting Jewish refugees he described as “human dross” — complicating America’s self-portrayal as a (Zionist) haven for the Jewish diaspora in the face of European anti-Semitism.

Though historicized as beginning and ending with the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the persistence of eugenic ideas and institutions into the 21st century makes clear that scientific racism is not an exception but a theme of U.S. history. A chilling 2013 report from the Center for New Community demonstrated the clear ties between Progressive Era eugenicists (and Nazi sympathizers) like Harry Laughlin and modern-day right-wing immigration and population control think tanks such as John Tanton’s Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Unsurprisingly, Trump is similarly implicated. For instance, a fear-mongering anti-immigrant advertisement sponsored by the Trump campaign in August cited statistics from the Center for Immigration Studies, a notorious think tank started by Tanton himself and described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the “three faces” of the nativist lobby. One can imagine similar ties between 20th century eugenics institutions and today’s “white-collar supremacists” such as Richard Spencer and the National Policy institute, the Islamophobia industrial complex, and beyond.

When we talk about normalizing Trump, we also must be wary of normalizing what has come before. Racial violence and white supremacy are the foundations of this country. Even Nazism — the supposed antithesis to wholesome Americana — has deep roots in American scientific racism and anti-Semitism. Unimaginably terrible as it was, Hitler’s Final Solution was in many ways the logical conclusion of racist eugenic ideas that flourished in the United States. So too is Trump’s ascendance a logical, if terrifying apex to a modern American political trajectory that has teetered unpredictably between slow, hard-won racial progress and rapid racist backlash.

In the wake of the terrors of the Holocaust, the world promised “never again”. But in order to confront the violence to come under a President Trump, we have to do away with the fairy tale that this has never happened here before.

Further Reading: N Ordover’s American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism is a crucial resource for those interested in deeper engagement with eugenics ideology and its past and present impacts.

Mark Tseng Putterman is a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. In 2014 he was the associate curator of Haunted Files, a public exhibition project interrogating the history and legacy of American eugenics.