In mid-March, the country took notice as eight people were gunned down at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area, six of them of Asian descent. Beyond the anguish and mourning, voices sprang up around the country decrying anti-Asian racism that has been on the rise since the onset of the pandemic.
Using the hashtag #StopAsianHate, NBA players and franchises expressed solidarity with the Asian American community. Asian American celebrities, including Sandra Oh, Mindy Kaling, Olivia Munn and Daniel Dae Kim, expressed their anguish and outrage. Comedian Jay Leno, former host of “The Tonight Show,” issued an apology for jokes he’s told throughout his career that perpetuated Asian stereotypes.
For Asian American scholars, anti-Asian rhetoric is nothing new. Dr. Tina Chen, associate professor of English and Asian American Studies at Penn State University, says many of today’s undergraduates are discovering Asian bias for the first time because they are unaware of its history and trajectory.
“Hearing about some of these most recent incidents, it feels to them like maybe this is something new or something that hasn’t happened before,” says Tina Chen. “One of the things that I think we do in the Asian American studies classroom is to actually foreground the history of Asia America and talk about the ways in which there’s a much longer history that informs these more contemporary instances.”
Classroom discourse
“There has been a long history of thinking about Asians and Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners or unassimilable,” says Tina Chen. “There have been obvious historical instances of targeted racism and discrimination against Asians and Asian Americans. All of that is part of the context for understanding these most recent incidents.”
Dr. Thomas Chen, assistant professor of Chinese at Lehigh University, says that, even though current
