Filipina/x/o American Scholars Unite to Condemn Anti-Asian Hate and White Supremacy
The Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective (CFSC), a national network of Filipina/x/o educators, activists, and intellectuals, commits to further our organizing efforts in opposition to anti-Asian American racism in the United States. We make this declaration in light of recent events when Asian American elders, medical professionals, and women are being attacked throughout the nation. We are especially angered by the recent murders of eight people — six of those individuals being Asian women — in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021 by a white man. We refuse to isolate such violence from the right-wing media pundits and rightist politicians who continue to mobilize racist terminology for COVID-19 to direct blame, disdain, and fear upon our communities. We also refuse the liberal multicultural rhetoric that claims these attacks are “un-American.”
Last Tuesday evening, six Asian women were working low-wage, precarious and gendered jobs in massage parlors when a white supremacist man killed them. We link his gender-based violence to anti-Asian racism. This violence has a throughline in Asian American history beginning with the Page Act in 1875 that codified Chinese women as criminal sex workers, to the killing of Susan Remerata in a courtroom in Seattle in 1995, a “mail order bride” shot to death by her white husband. This history is not separate from the racism and discrimination Asian frontline health workers experience on a daily basis as their care is refused on the basis of their perceived race or ethnicity. We understand that race, gender, sexuality and economic status varies the experience of anti-Asian violence, and more importantly, they are inextricable.
The U.S. has a long history of anti-Asian, anti-Filipino, and anti-immigrant violence. Such barbarism has expressed itself in differing tempos and volatilities that range from white mob terrorism to federal policies like the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934. This federal law restricted Filipino immigration to the U.S. and reclassified Filipinos already here as “aliens.” Throughout history, Filipino Americans have been actively made into “alien” threats or invisibilized as “model minorities.” Such casting indicates that racialization is never a passive process as the powerful seek to perpetuate hierarchical logics to maintain an economic system that renders the necessities of our lives, such as our labor and land, as property to be possessed for the desires of a few.
Racial and gendered discrimination against Asian Americans cannot be separated from U.S. imperialism in Asia. The United States colonized the Philippines and waged war and bombing campaigns on the Korean peninsula and throughout Southeast Asia during the Cold War. U.S. military bases in Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Thailand, Hawaiʻi, Guåhan, and others across the Asia-Pacific have created conditions where local and indigenous communities have been occupied and made dependent on the U.S. military. Through this militarization, Asian women have been hyper-sexualized, exoticized, and transformed into objects of desire for U.S. soldiers and ex-pats, with some Asian women turning to sex work as means of survival and livelihood. The U.S. pivot to Asia under Obama and contemporary anti-China rhetoric and policy are only the latest examples of U.S. aggression. Anti-Asian racism must be analyzed with a global lens addressing the relationship between U.S. empire and the ongoing constructions of Asian Americans as the exotic Other, the “perpetual foreigner” and “enemy aliens.” These tropes are not mere byproducts of U.S. empire, they sanctify U.S. interventions overseas.
Consequently, this same history also equips us with a means to inform our contemporary resistance struggles. Building upon the legacy of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of racialized youth and student activists, we will continue to fight for Ethnic Studies in our schools and academic institutions. Renewing the popular and labor education of Philip Vera Cruz, we will use our scholarship, teaching, and artistic skills to build bridges with a wider public in sharpening analysis of the root causes that threaten our shared humanity. Honoring the legacy of Yuri Kochiyama, whose interracial organizing with Malcolm X is an example of centering the experiences of Asian American women and their visionary leadership to further abolitionist movements. We recognize that our liberation has always been connected to the struggle for Black Lives. This point was further clarified on December 23, 2020 when Angelo Quinto, a Filipino American veteran was murdered by the police in Antioch, California with the same knee-to-neck hold that killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In this way, CFSC commits to abolitionist movements to defend Black lives, defeat anti-Asian hate, and dismantle white supremacy.
The constellation of recent events has affirmed for us that we must continue to teach, write, and organize against the brutalities of the system that we inhabit, while at the same time envision new possibilities for society made anew. We recognize that if we are to realize the society that we dare to dream of, Filipina/x/o American educators, scholars and students (as well as our allies) must continue to organize. The CFSC embraces the fact that as educators we will always have a crucial role to play in the movements to transform the basic features of this country.
To conclude, in this moment of rising anti-Asian violence, CFSC condemns the hate crimes cropping up across the U.S. and we join the call to #StopAsianHate, while refusing increase of police presence in our communities that often lead to the criminalization and brutality against Black, Latinx, and Asian Pacific Islander peoples. We unite with scholars across the country to incorporate Critical Ethnic Studies that interrogates race and racism, capitalism, empire, settler colonialism, cisheterosexism with an abolitionist lens. We commit to incorporating the history and analysis of anti-Asian violence, and its specific intersections with gender and sexuality, in our work and programming, which includes our podcast series, websites, and events. We are dedicated to uplifting organizations in our various locations that seek to build Asian American power in coalition with people’s organizations.
In struggle and solidarity,
The Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective
