San José, CA – Over the last two years, hundreds of thousands of Asian Americans and their supporters have taken to the streets to protest the wave of violence against Asian Americans. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a Burmese family was assaulted in Texas; to the Atlanta Spa killing in April 2021, where six of the eight people killed were Asian American women, this wave of violence against Asian Americans inspired protests across the country, even including middle-school students.

These protests were the largest ever to draw together Asian Americans of different nationalities. This was in part because the targets of the hate crimes were Chinese American, Korean American, Burmese American, and others. Although the hate and national chauvinism was mainly driven by anti-Chinese sentiment fanned up by racist politicians such as President Trump, the racists did not know and did not care about their victims’ nationalities. There is also a growing common experience of young Asian Americans who were either born here or grew up in the United States, of their common experiences because of the national oppression as people of Asian descent in the United States.

The fight against violence against Asian Americans also pulled many of the different classes in our communities: workers as well as members of petty-bourgeoisie such as small businesspeople, professionals and managers. However other types of national oppression, such as unjust treatment by ICE and immigration can differ, given that more well-to-do Asian Americans better able to afford legal representation.

The struggle against violence against Asian Americans is part of a larger struggle for full equality and against national oppression. Asian Americans have a long history of struggle against racist and discriminatory government laws and actions, from Foreign Miners tax in California in the 1850s to the witch hunt against Chinese American academics today. Asian Americans have also faced racist discrimination in housing, in the labor force, in marriage, in every facet of life.

The struggle against the national oppression aimed at Asian Americans has always had connections with the oppression of African Americans and other oppressed nationalities. Anti-miscegenation laws originally aimed at African Americans were also applied to Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans. On the other hand, restrictive covenants, which banned non-whites from buying many homes (to keep neighborhoods white), were first found in San Francisco, again aimed at Chinese Americans. But these racist restrictions in housing deeds also spread nationwide to enforce housing segregation against African Americans.

The fight against national oppression has also crossed over between Asian Americans and other oppressed nationalities. In 1894, American-born Kim Ark Wong was denied re-entry to the United States after having traveled to China to see his family. The Chinese American community fought a legal case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and 1898 won a decision that guaranteed citizenship for American born children of non-citizens. This was especially important for Asian Americans, as Asian immigrants could not become U.S. citizens until the 1940s. This case was important to the Chicano community as well as other Latinos who have immigrated to the United States.

At the same time the struggle of other oppressed nationalities, especially African Americans and Chicanos, both benefitted and inspired Asian Americans. 1947 Mendez v. Westminster decision ended legal segregation of Chicano and Asian children in public schools in California. More than anything else, the upsurge of African Americans in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the early 1960s set the stage for the end to the racist 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed quotas in the hundreds on immigrants from Asia. Without this change, Asian American would be much smaller and vastly different today, with only Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos as the main nationalities. Many of the young organizers of protests against anti-Asian violence said that this was not their first protests, they first marched after the death of George Floyd.

While Chinese, Japanese and Filipino Americans had fought for their rights since the 1850s, often alongside Chicanos in particular, the first consciously unified Asian American fight didn’t happen until the 1960s. The struggle sparked by Black Students for Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, led to the formation of the first explicit Asian American organization, the Asian American Political Alliance or AAPA, in 1969. AAPA was the major Asian American organization on campus fighting for both a department of Asian American Studies and a College of Ethnic Studies that would include Black, Chicano and Native American Studies departments.

The rise of African American revolutionary organizations in the 1960s also had a large impact on Asian Americans. The Black Panther Party inspired the formation of I Wor Kuen or IWK in the late 1960s. IWK was named after an anti-imperialist uprising in China in 1900, but their political program was based on the Black Panther Party’s Ten-point Program. IWK turned towards Marxism-Leninism in order to better grasp the class struggle within the Chinese American community, and eventually merged with other M-L groups that came out of movements of oppression, such as the largely Chicano August 29th Movement and the largely African American Revolutionary Communist League, formally the Congress of Afrikan People, a pan-Africanist organization.

Revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists in the African American and Chicano movements revived the understanding that African Americans in the Black Belt South and Chicanos in the Southwest were, in fact, oppressed nations in the United States. As nations – that is a historical community with a common language, culture, economy and territory – they had the right to self-determination, up to and including the right to separate and form their own countries.

While a few voices raised the concept of an Asian American Nation, this had no basis in fact. Asian Americans do not share a common language, with most Asian American nationalities speaking different languages other than English at home. They have many different cultures, although they have some historical ties. In fact, Asian Americans comprise many different nationalities from East, Southeast, South and Central Asia: Chinese American, Filipino Americans, Indian American, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans and Vietnamese Americans just to mention some of the larger nationalities.

But most importantly, there is no common territory for Asian Americans in the United States. The most concentrated population of Asian Americans on the mainland is in the San Jose-San Francisco Bay Area, which over the last 20 years has developed two small cities that are majority Asian American. In contrast, in the Chicano Nation there are large cities such as San Antonio, Texas and Los Angeles, California, more than 70 counties across seven states, and even the entire state of New Mexico that are majority or near majority Chicano.

There are many Chicanos and Mexicanos who live outside the Chicano Nation. Some even live in majority Chicano/Mexicano counties such as Adams and Franklin counties in eastern Washington. Chicanos and Mexicanos in eastern Washington are certainly oppressed nationalities faced with economic, political and social inequality. Many have lived in the Chicano Nation, and/or have family there. But with the northern edge of the Chicano Nation some 800 miles away, how could they act on self-determination and separate in any practical way?

In the same way Asian Americans, while certainly oppressed nationalities, cannot be considered to be a nation with the right to self-determination. As communists, we fight for the full equality of the Asian American nationalities, including language equality, political power, etc. in areas of concentration.

We also fight for working-class leadership of Asian Americans and other oppressed nationalities in their fight against national oppression and for full equality. This includes both struggling against reformism, such as promoting voting as the answer for all issues, and narrow nationalism, which sees other oppressed nationalities as the problem (an example of this is opposing affirmative action).

Our strategy for revolution is a united front against monopoly capitalism – against the rule by the billionaires and massive corporations. At the core of this united front will be an alliance between the working class, on one hand, and oppressed nationalities, on the other. Asian Americans will play a growing role in this, both as the fastest growing oppressed nationality, and as a rapidly growing part of the working class.

Masao Suzuki is chair of the Joint Nationalities Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and a former member of I Wor Kuen.

#SanJoséCA #AsianNationalities #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #AsianAmericans

San José, CA – For more than a year Asian Americans have seen a rising tide of violence aimed at individuals of Asian descent. Starting with a vicious knife attack on a father and his two sons, aged six and three years in Midland, Texas in March 2020 and now the murders of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, near Atlanta, Georgia, thousands of attacks have been reported in the last year – and many more have not.

Modern violence against Asians goes back to the 1980s, when Vincent Chin was killed by two white Americans who blamed him for the rise of the Japanese auto industry, despite the fact that he was Chinese American. His killers were sentenced to probation and a $3000 fine. In contrast, African American Michael Vick was sent to jail for 21 months and had to put up $1 million following a conviction for dog fighting, showing that a Chinese American life is worth less than the suffering of dogs.

While the Vincent Chin killing followed in the wake of the rise of the Japanese economy, U.S. government harassment of Chinese Americans has been tracking with the recent rise of China. Chinese Americans, such as nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, army chaplain Captain James Yee, and hydrologist Sherry Chen were persecuted by the U.S. government, only to have charges dropped.

This latest wave of anti-Asian violence was fanned by the Trump administration, whose toxic mix of anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-Asian racism, and U.S. imperial foreign policy brought about these tragic results. But violence against Asian Americans has been a feature of the oppression we have faced in the United States. In 1854, just a few years after large scale immigration from China began, the California Supreme Court ruled that courts could not accept the testimony of Chinese people against a white person, in effect legalizing crimes against Chinese Americans.

Chinese American workers were paid less than white workers while building the Transcontinental Railroad, adding to the profits of the early U.S. monopoly capitalists known as ‘robber barons’, such as Leland Stanford. Chinese American miners were subject to a Foreign Miners’ Tax that provided up to 25% of tax revenues for the state government of California.

Hostility towards Chinese Americans peaked in the 1880s. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 virtually ended immigration from China. A few years later, 28 Chinese American miners were killed and 15 more wounded in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885.

Chinese and other Asian Americans have been the target of racist laws first aimed at other oppressed nationalities. For example the anti-miscegenation laws designed to prevent African Americans from marrying white Americans also were applied to Chinese, Japanese and Filipino immigrants up to and through World War II. While California never had the sweeping Jim Crow laws of the U.S. South, local school districts could and did segregate Chinese, Japanese and Chicano children into separate schooling from whites.

Racist laws also flowed the other way. Restrictive covenants that were first used in San Francisco to prevent Chinese Americans from buying homes outside of Chinatown spread across the country to mainly target African Americans and to preserve white-only neighborhoods.

Asian Americans have also suffered from U.S. foreign policy. When the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. Navy base in the U.S. colony of Hawai’i, the U.S. government immediately began to round up thousands of Japanese immigrants who were in any way prominent, including businesspeople, religious leaders and cultural teachers. This ended up with the mass incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in concentration campus in the western United States for the duration of World War II.

But our history is also one of resistance and struggle for equality. Chinese workers struck for equal wages while building the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1965 Filipino American farm workers joined with Chicanos and Mexicano workers to go on strike in California’s Central Valley, leading to the formation of the United Farm Workers union. And in the 1980s, Japanese Americans with the help of many other Americans, won redress, an official apology and reparations, or monetary compensation, for their World War II incarceration.

Asian American struggles have benefitted other oppressed nationalities, and the struggle of others has helped our communities. When racist immigration authorities tried to exclude Kim Ark Wong, who was an American-born U.S. citizen, the Chinese American community fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The landmark ruling in the 1898 Wong Sun v. United States case affirmed that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution did apply to all those born in the United States, and established that Asians, Chicanos, Latinos and others born in the United States were U.S. citizens.

In the same way, the biggest advances for Asian Americans came about because of the African American freedom struggle. The Civil Rights Movement against segregation and for voting rights ended up with Congress scrapping the racist immigration quotas, leading to the immigration that has largely shaped Asian America today. In 1970, the largest Asian American nationality were Japanese Americans, but today Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese Americans have larger or almost as large populations. The growth of Asian American communities has been met by fear and hatred of white supremacists, such as the KKK who confronted Vietnamese American fishermen in Texas in 1979.

Even the concept of Asian American is a recent one, born out of the struggle alongside African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, and Native Americans for ethnic studies courses in the 1960s. This solidarity in struggle goes back more than 100 years to Japanese farmworkers who joined with their Mexicano brothers and sisters to strike in the fields of California. In 2001, Japanese and other Asian Americans were among the first to stand with American Muslims who were being targeted by the government in the wake of September 11. Just last year, Asian Americans from all walks of life joined in the massive protests calling for justice for George Floyd and denounced the history of racist policing from the Southern slave patrols to the present.

While some Asian Americans, especially business organizations, have called for more policing to fight anti-Asian violence, we have to remember that the police are not just infected with anti-Black ideas, but also anti-Asian ones. The police spokesman in Georgia who said that the murderer of six Asian American women was “having a bad day” was exposed as promoting racist views of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Harris, whose mother was Asian American, have voiced opposition to these racist attacks on Asian Americans. But at the same time the Biden administration has not only kept all of the anti-China policies of Trump, but has even stepped up attacks on China. This will only feed the fires of anti-Asian American racism.

Only the people’s struggle, in unity with other oppressed nationalities who face similar issues of racist discrimination, can lead to victory. At the same time we must fight against the growing anti-China policies, propaganda and military confrontation of the Biden administration, which are deepening anti-Asian sentiment in the United States.

Masao Suzuki is the chair of the Joint Nationalities Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. He became active in the Asian American movement in 1970 after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

#SanJoseCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AsianAmericans

Racism against Asian Americans is on the rise with 650 attacks reported this last week of March, 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic deepens, Donald Trump is PURPOSEFULLY inciting these attacks. President Trump is using anti-Asian racism to distract from his bungled COVID-19 response and to demonize China. Despite the fact that Trump previously praised China’s transparency and heroic efforts to curb the pandemic, he is now maliciously labeling the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”

Trump has repeatedly defended his racist attacks on the Chinese people, ignoring reprimands from the scientific and medical community. Dr. Mike Ryan, an executive director in the World Health Organization responded implicitly to Trump, saying, “Viruses know no borders and they don’t care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin….it’s really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus”.

Trump is not alone in promoting these racist attacks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refuses to stop referring to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus”. Pompeo’s persistence in inserting racism into the public discourse about COVID-19 has hamstrung international efforts coordinating the efforts to fight the Covid19 pandemic. At the recent G-7 conference, Pompeo's insistence in using the term 'Wuhan virus' made it impossible for the G-7 foreign ministers to issue a joint statement on the pandemic.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Representative Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) have introduced a resolution blaming China for the coronavirus. To these politicians, it’s more important to distract from U.S. government failures and smear China than to coordinate global efforts to save human lives.

It is certainly no surprise to us that Trump and his allies would react to this crisis by lashing out in ignorance and fear. We have seen hate-mongering by this Administration in the form of Islamophobic “Muslim bans,” an irrational promotion of the racist border wall, inhumane concentration camps for asylee children, and vindictive sanctions against Venezuela and Iran. Nor are these policies completely out of the blue, given the U.S.’s barbaric history with white supremacy from the two founding sins of genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black people in chattel slavery, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Japanese-American concentration camps in WWII, the Jim Crow era, and the mass incarceration of a disproportionate amount of people of color.

Our lamentable history makes it even more incumbent on all people of conscience to refuse to buy into the racist and white supremacist slop Trump is trying to force-feed us. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent economic crisis grows, Donald Trump and his allies will become more frenzied, inciting greater anti-Asian racism in order to shift the blame for their neglectful handling of COVID to China and protect U.S. global domination. The Anti-War Committee condemns anti-Asian racism and all other forms of bigotry. Mass opposition against racist white supremacy, and solidarity with all peoples under attack by the U.S. government are immediately necessary.

The concentration camps imprisoning migrants swept up in Trump's racist immigration policies must be closed. Islamophobic attacks like the Muslim bans must be stopped, sanctions like those imposed on Iran must be lifted. Anti-Asian slurs like 'Wuhan virus' must be exposed as distractions and U.S. intervention. We must demand these from every level of government in the U.S., always pushing government officials to end these racist attacks.

When Chinese people are under attack, what do we do?! Stand up! Fight Back! When Asian Americans are under attack, what do we do?! STAND UP! FIGHT BACK! Fight anti-Asian racism, Islamophobia and all forms of racism! Fight U.S. imperialism!

#UnitedStates #AntiwarMovement #PeoplesStruggles #Racism #Antiracism #Trump #Coronavirus #COVID19 #AsianAmericans