Cyborgian Model Minorities for Environmental Justice: East Asian American Stories from the 1991 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit

Introduction

On October 24–27, 1991, approximately 650 people representing racialized communities across the Americas and the American empire, ¹ gathered in Washington, DC, to attend the inaugural People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. ² This conference heralded the beginning of a new era in the American environmental movement: the American environmental justice (EJ) movement. ³ Activists at the conference pushed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ameliorate environmental injustices disproportionately faced by communities of color, created regional and national networks of grassroots activists, and produced the 17 Principles of EJ—a document that continues to guide the growing grassroots movement for EJ. EJ movement is led by racialized and otherwise minoritized peoples with an intimate knowledge of the environment that encompasses all aspects of the quotidian because their lived “environment is woven into an overall framework and understanding of social, racial, and economic justice.” ⁴

Despite a thriving Asian American presence in the movement and a growing social consciousness of issues of EJ, little has been written about the role of Asian Americans in the EJ movement in either Asian American Studies or EJ Studies. ⁵ Asian American participation in social movements is understudied due to the pervasiveness of the model minority myth, which paints Asians as submissive, mechanical, and apolitical beings due to their inherent cultural values. ⁶ Although discussion of the 1991 Summit exists, there is no substantial literature centering the Asian American experience at the conference. This work addresses the gap in the literature by highlighting the experiences of several East Asian Americans at the Summit. Through an analysis of oral history interviews with Pamela Chiang, ⁷ Charles Lee, ⁸ Lily Lee, ⁹ Pam Tau Lee, ¹⁰ Peggy Saika, ¹¹ and Miya Yoshitani, ¹² I argue that East Asian Americans ¹³ in the American EJ movement were critical in expanding historical frameworks of EJ in two ways—beyond issues of toxic wastes to include occupational hazards and from a national framework of EJ to an international one. As environmental issues increasingly transcend national borders, the EPA needs “new kinds of interdisciplinary thinking and systems solutions” to adequately address environmental inequities of the twenty-first century. ¹⁴ With the expansive lens that East Asian Americans have brought to the EJ movement rooted in their histories and lived experiences, they serve as an indispensable asset to the movement and have ability to expand the EPAs frame of EJ in the coming decades to confront global environmental issues.

(East) Asian American Racialization: Mechanical Cyborgs and Model Minorities

Under colonial systems of governance, race serves as a “mark of colonial difference” for processes of racialization that ascribe meaning to racialized bodies. ¹⁵ East Asians were racialized as machines because they were viewed as “industrious but inefficient” in contrast to other racialized groups who were “depicted as indolent and highly resistant to all forms of sustained bodily exertion.” ¹⁶ During the development of the burgeoning American capitalist economy in the late nineteenth century, Asians ¹⁷ were recruited to farm and/or construct railroads. They were valued as cheap labor because white Americans believed that Asians “did not require the conditions, safety, sustenance, and shelter that European descendants required.” ¹⁸ Like machines, Asian bodies produce value by providing labor that is devalued, abundant, and does not adhere to physical limitations. While Asian labor ¹⁹ was essential to the developing American economy, the needs of Asian people were not viewed as crucial to the American nation—they were subjected to xenophobic ²⁰ assaults and denied opportunities to create a life beyond laboring. They were not formally granted access to citizenship, land ownership, marriage, and work in most industries until the twentieth century. Through laws of exclusion ²¹ and disenfranchisement, Asians became cyborgs—not quite human, not quite machine. They “were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream. Only mock it.” ²²

The racialized narrative of the East Asian as machine persists through the model minority myth, which portrays Asian Americans as model minorities whose successes are solely attributed to “cultural values of diligence, family solidarity, respect for education, and self-sufficiency” and suggests that Asians are too busy pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to be concerned about politics. ²³ The stereotype of Asian American apoliticalness was popularized at the height of the 1960s civil rights movement to show other minoritized communities that they should refrain from protesting structural inequities and work toward achieving economic prosperity. Although originally created to refer specifically to the success of Japanese Americans, ²⁴ the stereotype has since expanded to include several Asian ethnicities. ²⁵ It flattens the diverse experiences of Asian Americans to a monolith, racializing them as emotionless, apolitical, mechanical beings who are obsessed with achieving socioeconomic success at great personal expense. ²⁶ The myth simultaneously grants Asians unprecedented access to upward mobility while continuing to racialize Asians as mechanical cyborgs, regardless of how successful they become. ²⁷

These racialized narrations of Asians as mechanical cyborgs and model minorities actively shape their lives as racialized peoples, as race often determines an individual's political rights, relationship to labor, and sense of identity. ²⁸ Asian women in particular were sought out for positions in American electronics factories due to their perceived submissive nature and efficiency. ²⁹ In Silicon Valley, “many Asians form an underclass that works in low-paying high-hazard jobs […] they are constantly exposed to chemicals that can permanently disable them. Employers hire Asians into these jobs because they perceive that Asians are a docile workforce willing to perform monotonous repetitive duties without complaints.” ³⁰ They were not valued as human beings, they were valued as mechanical apparatuses to complete tasks. Machines, unlike human beings, do not need safe working environments free of occupational hazards. ³¹

Beyond racialized narratives of the cyborgian model minority that determine how Asian bodies are made legible in the United States, Asians are the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,” as the history of Asian Americans is defined by these systems domestically and abroad. ³² Asian Americans cannot be understood without a deep historical engagement with systems of racialization in relation to global systems of capital. Early Asian migration to the United States was driven by the need for cheap devalued labor to construct infrastructure to grow the burgeoning capitalist economy. ³³ Similarly, “the 1965 ³⁴ Act opened immigration, renewing domestic labor supplies of exploited, low wage laborers.” ³⁵ Many Asian immigrants arriving post-1965 were forced to flee due to American colonial destabilization of their homelands in an effort to contain Communism. Migration is driven by the ability of immigrants to imagine, create, and build new worlds for themselves to survive and thrive in. ³⁶ Liberation from systems of colonialism, capitalism, and orientalism begins in the imaginative “construction of the consciousness.” ³⁷

1991 People Of Color Environmental Leadership Summit: Building A Multiracial EJ Movement

Since its inception, the American EJ movement has been a multiracial movement for minoritized communities to imagine a world free from systems of racialization. ³⁸ Environmental injustices serve as physical manifestations of racism, as environmental racism dictates that people of color “don't have the complexion for protection” against environmental, occupational or otherwise, hazards. ³⁹ Although many attribute the movement's beginnings with the 1982 Warren County protests and the 1987 release of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ) report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States and the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, minoritized people across the nation were engaged in struggles for EJ on a community level long before these events occurred. ⁴⁰ In the opening speech at the summit, Dr. Benjamin Chavis Jr, Executive Director of the UCC-CRJ, shared, “We're not just announcing that there is a new movement, because we all know that the movement for environmental justice has been alive for a long time now. It's that our society has not yet offered us opportunities to claim it.” ⁴¹ The summit provided the opportunity for people of color to claim leadership over environmental issues—before the conference, the mainstream environmental movement prior did not address environmental issues of communities of color. ⁴² The major goals of the Summit were to:

facilitate an ongoing process for people of color leaders to strengthen their national, regional, and local organizations and communities which are involved in challenging environmental injustice; provide an opportunity to initiate dialogue between people of color leaders and the heads of the national environmental organizations; to identify key environmental policy questions from the perspective of people of color leadership; and to impact the decision-making process in public policy in the interests of environmental justice at the federal, state, and municipal levels. ⁴³

Organizers of the summit recognized that “if we are to find solutions to the critical and intractable problems of environment and justice, we must think innovatively and alternatively” to achieve these goals. ⁴⁴ Creating spaces where grassroots community leaders were prioritized within the EJ movement required intentional curation of communal meeting spaces. ⁴⁵ In lieu of a traditional conference structure, Summit organizers divided attendees of the conference into three categories: delegates, participants, and observers ⁴⁶ to ensure grassroots community leaders would be centered in the space. ⁴⁷ The first 2 days of the summit was restricted to delegates to discuss the future of the movement, as the organizers were wary of the tendency of more established environmental groups to monopolize environmental movement spaces. ⁴⁸ The UCC-CRJ ⁴⁹ raised more than $400,000 for the summit, ⁵⁰ with three-quarters which was used to provide travel grants for nearly two-thirds of 300 delegates attending. ⁵¹ Much of the funding came from traditional environmental groups whose representatives were relegated to observer status at the summit—Peggy Saika, founding board member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), shared “the people that were considered core [at the summit] were all practitioners representing movement organizations. That was huge in of itself to ask people to fund this thing and to say when you come, you are an observer and have no voting rights. That's bold.” ⁵² Richard Moore, co-director of the Southwest Organizing Project in Albuquerque, New Mexico, discussed the impact of the summit—“as we begin to build a net that works, we begin to realize that there is nothing that can stop us, as long as we are doing it together. In the face of massive environmental racism and the EPA's inaction, communities of color have won many victories, when organized, have incredible power. We are POWERIZING ourselves to go back in our communities. Because what this is all about is building a movement. As a movement gets built, it starts from the bottom up.” ⁵³ Delegates of the conference used this network to highlight inequalities in EPA enforcement of laws—the EPA has failed to protect racialized peoples from exposure to pollutants, even with policies such as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. ⁵⁴ In the early 1990s, communities of color knew the EPA as the “industrial protection agency” rather than the “environmental protection agency.” ⁵⁵ Furthermore, the EPA did not enforce laws equally: white communities often saw “quicker action, better results, and harsher penalties” regarding pollution cleanup than communities of color, regardless of class. ⁵⁶ Communities of color have continuously requested assistance from the EPA to alleviate the detrimental environmental impacts, only to be turned away and told their situations were isolated. ⁵⁷ For these reasons, summit attendees pushed the EPA to incorporate issues of EJ into their work. ⁵⁸ In acknowledging the EPA and other environmental organizations have failed to adequately address environmental inequities, delegates at the summit drafted the 17 Principles of EJ to “carry back home and institute in all of [our] communities throughout this country.” ⁵⁹ Peggy Saika describes how East Asian Americans at the summit carried the principles with them in their EJ work—it shaped “how we should approach people in power and decision makers, but build the capacity of our communities to be at any table to participate, to articulate and to be able to change the narrative, and to create a new narrative based on these principles. I took this whole instruction as a call to create an API ⁶⁰ presence within the movement. What we did was not just create a formation but to work and apply these principles to what we were building. Pam [Tau Lee] worked around occupational health. When you think about the government, Charles [Lee] goes to work for the EPA.” Saika took the 17 Principles as a call to build an Asian American presence within the movement because while the 1991 Summit highlighted the start of a multiracial movement toward economic, racial, and EJ, the racialization of East Asians as model minorities affected the way several folks navigated the space.

East Asian American Experience at the 1991 Summit

Only 24 of the 301 delegates from communities of color across the Americas and the American empire were Asian/Pacific Islander. ⁶¹ The dearth of Asian Americans throughout the conference was noted by everyone interviewed for this project. In a plenary session titled “Building A Multiracial and Multicultural EJ Movement,” panelists spoke on Native American, African American, Chicano, and Indigenous Hawaiian historical and cultural perspectives in relation to the growing movement. Not seeing an Asian American panelist on this plenary, Pamela Chiang, representative from Nindakin: Students of Color for EJ at UC Berkeley, called for a deeper understanding of Asian American issues in the EJ movement. ⁶² This led to the creation of an Asian American caucus where only 12 people showed up, ⁶³ even though Asians are often subjected to occupational ⁶⁴ and environmental ⁶⁵ hazards. Pamela Chiang recalls another moment when she realized the Asian American presence in the movement was insufficient: “We did a march during the summit to Capitol Hill. We were on the steps with the bullhorn and people saying typical beautiful rally type things. Someone goes ‘QUICK! WE NEED AN ASIAN!’ Someone grabs me and goes ‘Pamela, go up there!’ Got thrown up there, said some stuff […] It was so funny they were like ‘let's get an Asian up here’. It was well intentioned but in some aspects, it meant that all Asians were replaceable. They didn't say let's get Pam up there, but let's get an Asian up there!” ⁶⁶

In this instance, it appeared that folks at the march were more preoccupied with the optics of the growing multiracial movement than the foregrounding of environmental hazards faced by Asian communities in the United States. The inability to adequately incorporate the needs of Asian Americans in the EJ movement remained prevalent in the second People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 2001, as specific organizers of the 2001 summit were not willing to fund translation equipment for non-fluent English speakers in attendance. ⁶⁷

Although attendees were disappointed by the lack of Asian American presence at the conference, Lily Lee, student representative of Nindakin, shared “everyone was super welcoming of what we wanted to add. That made me realize we need to speak up for ourselves and tell the stories of Asian Americans and highlight those issues. This is a place that would welcome that.” ⁶⁸ The creation of the Asian American caucus at the summit was evidence of this. Furthermore, this was one of the reasons Miya Yoshitani, director of the Student Environmental Action Coalition at the time, was recruited to be on the drafting committee of the 17 Principles of EJ—“I ticked a bunch of boxes because I was from the Midwest, was a youth, and Asian American. That's how I ended up in those late-night meetings where we talked for hours and hours about every single aspect of the principles.” ⁶⁹

Asian Americans were a minority at the summit because during the planning process, organizers recruited folks based on recommendations from communities beginning to organize around environmental issues—Charles Lee shares that when organizing the summit, UCC-CRJ wanted to show “the EJ movement was thriving and that people of color were involved in environmental issues. AAPIs ⁷⁰ were pretty silent, and the issues were not super clear except for farmworkers, development and displacement in communities, and oil refineries in Richmond.” ⁷¹ At this point in time, there appeared to be a limited number Asian Americans engaging in EJ work. For this reason, several interviewees for this project initially thought Charles was Black before meeting him in person, as an Asian American in a prominent position at a racial justice organization was unheard of. ⁷²

The lack of a significant Asian American presence at the summit, compounded with the general assumption that Asian Americans do not face environmental injustices due to the pervasiveness of the model minority myth, ⁷³ inspired several attendees to form the APEN in 1993. ⁷⁴ Beyond APEN, Charles Lee and Lily Lee went on to pursue EJ work with the EPA at the federal and regional level. Lily Lee recounts why she chose to work at the EPA: “At the summit, I met Richard Moore, introduced myself and asked him, ‘Hey, I have this job offer from the US EPA, but I don't know if I should instead be considering working at the grassroots level for a nonprofit instead.’ He encouraged me to work at the EPA because ‘we need brothers and sisters everywhere to be promoting environmental justice’ and that I would have opportunities for influence within the USEPA that would be different from the opportunities in nonprofit groups.” ⁷⁵ Both Lily Lee ⁷⁶ and Charles Lee ⁷⁷ chose to conduct EJ work at the EPA because they knew they could facilitate dialogue between communities of color and environmental organizations while impacting “decision-making process in public policy in the interest of environmental justice at the federal, state, and municipal levels.” ⁷⁸

East Asian Americans, EJ, and the EPA

In EPA at 40: Bringing Environmental Protection in the 21st Century, Fiksel et al. wrote “the new century's [environmental] problems […] require new kinds of interdisciplinary thinking and systems solutions […] history shows an early recognition of multiple stressors acting on the environment and the need to address them in an integrated manner.” ⁷⁹ Environmental policy in this century must focus on complex multiscalar issues using a systems approach that provides a deep understanding of global systems of production, distribution, and consumption. ⁸⁰ As a result, “EJ issues in the twenty-first century will be local, regional, national, and international.” ⁸¹ The EPA needs “to lead in addressing global threats to the environment and human health as they become increasingly serious.” ⁸²

Given that Charles Lee and Lily Lee went on to advocate for EJ as regional and national EPA employees, and Pamela Chiang, Pam Tau Lee, Peggy Saika, and Miya Yoshitani went on to build APEN, it is clear that these East Asian Americans are an understated yet significant part of the movement. East Asian Americans are an integral part of the EJ movement—they are present and engaging in EJ work and have expanded the frame of EJ to include occupational hazards and beyond a national frame to an international anti-war analysis. Having brought that perspective to the summit, a remarkable event that shaped how the EJ movement developed, these East Asian Americans are uniquely situated to help broaden the EPAs framework of EJ adequately address environmental inequities of the twenty-first century.

East Asian Americans in the movement exist as part of a larger coalition of communities of color advocating for EJ, and for safe places to live, work, and play. ⁸³ East Asian Americans at the summit took it upon themselves to develop “the visibility and the participation, the leadership, and the grounding of AAPIs in our lived realities” through the creation of APEN. ⁸⁴ During APENs creation, its founders grappled with questions of representation, relationality, responsibility, and resource allocation. ⁸⁵ Beyond the construction of an Asian American presence in the EJ movement, organizers sought to understand constellations of power to “learn new couplings and new coalitions” to challenge environmental injustices. ⁸⁶ East Asian Americans “understood that it was never just about API formation—it was always centered in the context of building a multiracial movement. It wasn't about pushing our own interests, being apologetic, or trying to debunk the model minority myth […] if we build a network, there is just not enough of us to build a force, we just have to pivot to build our own organizing.” ⁸⁷

Historically, East Asian American contributions to the EJ movement lie in the expansion of traditional frameworks of EJ to include occupational hazards and a global anti-war analysis. ⁸⁸ These frames are informed by the lived experiences of East Asian Americans, racialized as cyborgian model minorities, who do not require safe working conditions and therefore “experience occupational illness at three times the rate of workers in general manufacturing.” ⁸⁹ East Asian American delegates such as Young Hi Shin ⁹⁰ and Pam Tau Lee ⁹¹ expanded frameworks of EJ at the time to consider occupational hazards. ⁹² Pam Tau Lee facilitated the policy group workshop on occupational health and safety issues, which called for cross-coalition collaboration between labor unions and environmentalists to advocate for safe workplaces. ⁹³ Young Hi Shin shared environmental injustices Asian women face—“Industries ⁹⁴ employ Asian immigrant women because of our cheap labor and a total lack of marketable opportunity in this society. Being immigrants and women, and a racial minority, systematically and institutionally put us at the very bottom end of these industries and put us in very unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. […] to achieve environmental justice for low-income, limited English speaking immigrant women at our workplace, we need the support from and be a part of progressive, broader, inclusive environmental movements, which includes workplace issues along with other environmental issues. We need jobs which do not slowly and permanently disable or kill us.” The analysis Lee and Shin brought to the summit resulted in the implementation of the eighth principle of EJ, which “affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment.” ⁹⁵

East Asian Americans ⁹⁶ at the summit also called for an explicitly global anti-war analysis in the movement because local exposure to occupational hazards is intricately linked with wars fought abroad—perpetrators of the Korean war massacred Korea, forcing migrants to flee to countries such as the United States where “women of color are the preferred labor force for science-based industries. […] Young Korean women in electronics assembly are educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English, distinguishes the ‘cheap’ female labor so attractive to the multinational corporations.” ⁹⁷ Korean participation in the EJ movement is crucial “because just as people of color in the US have suffered the most from environmental abuses, we must not forget that internationally it is the people from the Third World who are subjected to the most dangerous and grave consequences of environmental destruction […] The US environmental policy has been parallel to the military, economic, and political policy, which is keeping Korea at a state of war—keeping over 40,000 US troops there and conducting war games.” ⁹⁸ In addition to the Koreans calling for an anti-war analysis in the movement, Pam Tau Lee pushed attendees to include an anti-war stance in the Summit's call to action. ⁹⁹ As a member of the Red Guards and later I Wor Kuen in San Francisco in the 1960s, she learned the importance of connecting national and international struggles for liberation from exploitative systems from the Black Panther Party. ¹⁰⁰ Under her guidance, attendees voted to include this statement in the call to action—“We call for an end to war, violence, and militarism, because these are among the most environmentally and ecologically destructive phenomenon known to humankind, millions of people of color have perished due to war.” ¹⁰¹

Conclusions

Attendees of the 1991 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit left with a renewed sense of inspiration, camaraderie, and purpose regarding the future of the environmental movement. The EJ movement, known by many ¹⁰² as the first true rainbow movement, has the prospect of liberating minoritized people from systems perpetuating environmental inequities. East Asian Americans have been crucial in expanding the national EJ framework to an international framework that includes occupational hazards as environmental issues. With the expansive analysis that East Asian Americans have brought to the 1991 summit and the broader EJ movement rooted in their histories and lived experiences, they hold the potentiality to expand the EPAs frame of EJ to confront global environmental issues of the twenty-first century. In their rejection of the apolitical, cyborgian, model minority myth, East Asian Americans in the movement unveil “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.” ¹⁰³