Anti-Asian violence and US imperialism

Asians are not immigrants

Anti-Asian violence is a feature of settler societies like the United States that are founded on Native dispossession and the freedoms of property ownership. The violence takes a pattern. It emerges in moments of crisis, when the capitalist mode of production predicated on the seizure of Native lands, the extraction of resources and the exploitation of labour fails to generate profit, threatening the individual worker-consumer and his imagined sense of safety, that is itself derived from the security of his property claims. This insecurity is expressed through a violence directed at those deemed ‘alien’, a figure who occupies a space of illegality and threatens ‘order’, or the governance of property relations, and thus exists to be contained, expelled or eliminated. ² ‘The Chinese Must Go!’ was the rallying cry of the ‘working man’ in the nineteenth century, a racialising and gendered figure aspiring for inclusion into US market society. More than a negative reaction, anti-Asian violence has served as a stabilising force amidst structural inequality, producing a sense of belonging and shoring up the belief in capitalism and white supremacy from unlikely adherents, while foreclosing other modes of relationship not premised on the theft of labour and Indigenous lands. ³ In this view, anti-Asian violence recurring throughout US history should not be seen merely as episodic, arising in periods of xenophobia, but rather as a structure sustaining the racial divides inherent in capitalism, or racial capitalism, and its twin condition, settler colonialism, a system of conquest dependent upon laws, ideologies and other state institutions to buttress property claims on stolen land. ⁴

To understand anti-Asian violence on these terms requires restating an unorthodox premise: Asians were not ‘immigrants’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinx and South Asians arrived in North America as a result of capitalist and imperial expansion that radically altered relationships within households and villages, destroyed working and rural people’s homes and lives, and generally made those lives unliveable. A more accurate term is ‘migrant labour’, which denotes Asians’ sole function within capitalist economy as labour, whose value was derived from their ability to extract profit. ⁵ Unable to naturalise as citizens, they were made to be mobile and replaceable through the enactment of laws that controlled and criminalised their social relations, and that ensured the maximisation of their labour, and not their lives. For example, the California Supreme Court in 1854 determined in People v. Hall that the race of the Chinese was ‘not white’, thereby depriving them of the right to testify against a white person in legal proceedings, and hence leaving them unable to protect themselves from violence. Here, and repeatedly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the law buttressed lawless violence; the two worked in tandem to discipline Chinese labour. They also worked to confer value on whiteness itself, such that being white held a property value articulated over and over again in court and defended violently throughout the expanding US settler empire. ⁶

Violence of inclusion

Participation in the culture of anti-Asian violence in the nineteenth century provided a means for those who were themselves differentially marginalised, excluded and dispossessed under capitalism to assert their belonging in the nation. Put differently, violence against Asians was the means by which European immigrants became Americans. The culture of violence entailed the acts, their public spectacle and the casual circulation of the imagery of brutality in the form of postcards and snapshots. ⁷ Lynch mobs and ‘driving out’ campaigns targeting Chinese people were ceremonial occurrences on the US frontier. On 24 October 1871, a mob of nearly 500 attacked Chinese residents in Los Angeles, dragging them from their homes and hanging seventeen victims in what became the largest mass lynching in US history. ⁸ On 2 September 1885, white coal-miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming, killed at least twenty-eight Chinese miners, an organised brutality that included scalping and castrating some victims before driving the rest of the Chinese workforce out of the camps. ⁹ Two months later, in Tacoma, Washington, hundreds of armed men descended on two Chinese neighbourhoods and violently expelled all 800 to 900 Chinese residents from the city. ¹⁰ These campaigns and sadistic rituals did more than accomplish the stated aim of driving out the Chinese. They were at heart inclusionary processes for participants and observers to forge community in the assertion of white identity and the maintenance of the colour line.

This process extended beyond US ‘domestic’ territory. During the Philippine-American War at the turn of the twentieth century, soldiers seasoned in these campaigns and wars of extermination on the frontier encountered a foreign landscape they likened to ‘Indian country’ and an enemy they called ‘niggers’. The application of these terms to new peoples and places did not signal merely the export of racial idioms but rather demonstrated the racialising processes at the heart of US imperialism, by which entire populations were made enemy and the military’s exterminist tactics justified as necessary to the ‘civilising’ mission. ¹¹ The seizure of distant lands and markets that resulted from the crisis of capitalism in the late nineteenth century required a violence to make ‘Indians’ out of newly occupied peoples. It was a violence that regenerated whiteness and masculinity, the fragile possessions that offered tangible forms of security in precarious times.

US imperialism, scholar Dean Saranillio argues, emerges historically from positions of weakness, not strength. In this view, the annexation of the Philippines and other island territories including Hawai’i, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and Wake Island in 1899–1902 secured new lands and markets for the United States in order to resolve capitalism’s inherent failures. ¹² The ‘fail forward’ pattern of US imperialism continued in subsequent decades. In 1924 Congress established the Border Patrol to further consolidate US sovereignty on stolen land in the Southwest and to control Mexican migrant labour that made the land profitable, mobilising the promise of whiteness to motivate the force. ¹³ The pattern continued in the 1940s, when the federal government reorganised the nation’s manufacturing, resource-extraction and knowledge industries for war-making, bringing the country out of the Great Depression. The second world war and the cold war ushered a permanent war economy in the United States, one in which war no longer served only as the means to acquiring markets but became a profit enterprise itself. This economy was geared around making industrial killing more efficient and wars more ‘humane’, a claim of preserving life that relied on the introduction of the atomic bomb and modes of chemical and psychological warfare developed in tandem with academic disciplines, universities and think-tanks. ¹⁴

The expansion of racial capitalism on a global scale during this period required a shift in the management of US racial populations. Indeed, the period from the 1940s through the 1960s witnessed the inclusion of racial minorities into US national life in unprecedented ways. Racial restrictions on citizenship and immigration bans were lifted, allowing Chinese, Filipinx, South Asians, Japanese and Koreans to become naturalised citizens, and an exceptional few to enter the United States once again. And, for the first time since the end of Reconstruction in 1876 – which we might better think of as a failed revolution, when an experiment in radical democracy led by Black workers after the Civil War was brutally replaced with a vicious system of white supremacy under Jim Crow – the government enacted civil rights laws to protect Black citizens’ freedom from violence. Racial violence continued, to be sure, particularly directed at returning soldiers, anti-racist activists and others who transgressed the racial order, but that violence was seen increasingly as fringe and unsanctioned by a government that officially disavowed white supremacy, now understood as a (foreign) malice and detrimental to government conducts abroad.

Scholars have referred to the post-second world war period as the ‘era of inclusion’, but this needs qualification. If we understand white supremacy not simply as acts of racial terror enacted by racist white people but as a structure of racial capitalism, we can see this period as a continuation of the past rather than a break from it. Indeed, even as Asian Americans and African Americans enjoyed new freedoms as valued – even valorised – members of the nation-state, their value was derived from their participation in the permanent war economy that for some included the work of killing and dying. National inclusion was premised on the very notion that their lives were expendable in order to safeguard the freedoms promised by the nation-state. It also required the making of new racial enemies as targets of US perpetual war. ‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner’, the Commander of US forces William Westmoreland had remarked during the Vietnam War; ‘Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.’ ¹⁵ It may be tempting to interpret the blatant racism of this statement as a contradiction of the era’s mandate of formal equality and disavowal of white supremacy, but it would be more accurate to view them as inescapably entwined. Under racial capitalism, deadly racism formed the underside of liberal inclusion, a contradiction that Asian Americans and other racial minorities helped to stabilise through their recruitment into the military.

Fighting neoliberal austerity

A deep economic recession hit the United States and much of the industrialised world in the 1970s, unravelling the preceding decades of relative prosperity as corporate profits tanked and unemployment climbed to a level not seen since the 1930s. The period also saw the renewal of labour migrations from Asia and Latin America, facilitated by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. The Act abolished the immigration quota system based on ‘national origins’ and reunified families separated by exclusionary policies; in broader terms, it absorbed into the United States populations that were made idle or unsettled by economic policies and state violence under US-backed undemocratic regimes. These outcomes, as seen before, were the result of capitalism’s intrinsic unsustainability that required continual state intervention. Along with the US military defeat in the Vietnam War in 1975, these compounding realities exacerbated the vulnerabilities of people across race and class, including those whose identity in whiteness had reaped them much of the material and ideological rewards of the preceding decades of the ‘golden age’. Not coincidentally, the period witnessed a resurgence of anti-Asian violence. In 1979, white fishermen in Galveston, Texas, enlisted the Ku Klux Klan to wage a campaign of intimidation to drive out the Vietnamese refugees who had resettled there, viewing them as an economic, even communist, threat, abetted by the federal government. They saw themselves as continuing a war against the ‘Viet Cong’ that had been abandoned by the military and the government, now waged on the ‘home’ front, reasserting the scripts of settler violence and white supremacy. ¹⁶

Anti-Asian violence in the United States, which had never let up since the time Asians first entered the profit calculus in the nineteenth century, came into the US national spotlight in 1982 with the brutal slaying of Vincent Chin by two Detroit autoworkers. On the night of 19 June, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz bludgeoned Chin to death with a baseball bat after a confrontation at a night club in which Ebens said, ‘It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.’ The shock of the murder was compounded by the tragic realisation that the post-civil rights age of colour-blindness would offer no reprieve from racism’s deadly consequences. The murder case and subsequent acquittal of the killers ignited a grassroots movement led by Asian Americans calling attention to the spate of racially motivated hate crimes against people of Asian descent and demanding justice for Vincent Chin. Spearheaded by the Detroit-based group, American Citizens for Justice, which comprised Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipinx Americans, the movement was deliberately pan-ethnic and crossed class lines, and it spanned coast to coast. ¹⁷

What has gone unnoticed in most historical accounts of this movement, however, is that many activists understood anti-Asian violence in broad terms, seeing it not as a result of ‘discrimination’ or ‘scapegoating’ but as symptomatic of the capitalist system itself, including the violence of criminalisation and policing. Indeed, the spike in anti-Asian violence in the 1980s coincided with the rise of punitive governance in the United States that targeted a host of marginalised peoples, including undocumented migrants, queer and trans people of colour, the workless and the houseless poor. This was the dawn of the neoliberal era, in which the government’s answers to social and economic precarity was to further dismantle the welfare state by slashing and privatising public services, while ramping up policing to protect the propertied class. Seen as a malignancy of disordered families and households and an index of crime to-be-committed, poverty itself became criminalised, deflecting attention away from capitalism’s failures.

Grassroots movements such as the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) made these connections explicit. Founded in New York City in the summer of 1986, CAAAV pulled its members from other civil rights and labour groups, including Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Korean-Americans for Social Concern, New York Asian Women’s Center, the Japanese American Citizens League – New York Chapter, among others. Observing a rise in hate crimes against Asians throughout the country, CAAAV sought to diagnose and tackle the problem at the roots. Its statement of purpose read: ‘The recent series of attacks on Asian Americans is neither a new phenomenon nor an aberration in an otherwise just and peace-loving society.’ Rather it is a function of ‘the American economy that is based on . . . confiscated lands and 150 years of institutionalized slavery’. ¹⁸ This broad view enabled organisers to see ‘police brutality’ as part of the organised violence of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession. In early 1987 CAAAV won its first campaign to defend the Wong and Woo Family, Chinese immigrants who were beaten by New York City police officers after they had broken down the door of their Chinatown apartment and entered without warrant, arresting them for allegedly bootlegging cable television services. Recognising such police conduct occurred regularly in impoverished Black and Brown communities – an institutionalised practice later termed as ‘broken windows policing’ that criminalised the behaviours of the racialised poor – CAAAV organised with other ‘Third World groups’ in an effort to hold the police officers accountable. ¹⁹ On 28 July 1987, CAAAV mobilised 200 Chinatown residents to deliver a community indictment of the 5th Precinct police, condemning its racist violence. ²⁰

In its approach to organising, CAAAV built on already existing organisational forces set into motion through struggles that came before, specifically those that sought to make New York City’s Chinatown a liveable place for residents. In the early 1980s, in response to new zoning laws passed by the city that paved the way for the construction of luxury apartments in Chinatown, the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) organised low-income tenants to stop evictions and to fight for better and more affordable housing. ‘A dangerous trend is under way’, a CPA Housing Committee pamphlet declared, as the government facilitated the incursion of capital into the historic neighbourhood through urban renewal projects, displacing long-time residents and fracturing communities. ²¹ The people fought back. In 1983, in response to the latest city plan to rebuild the dilapidated White Street jail in the neighbourhood, thousands of Chinatown shop owners, workers, tenants and students descended on city hall to demand a halt to the plan. The protests resulted in a major concession by the city government, the Chung Park Project, a three-floor building slated for senior housing and community use. As the development of the project got underway, residents mobilised once again, this time to push back against the developer’s nefarious plans to promote real estate speculation and to attract corporate businesses to the space. Residents signed petitions and showed up for public hearings to demand accountability to the community, including keeping rents affordable to incentivise small shopkeepers and making space for a day-care centre. ²²

Movements against anti-Asian violence in this period were multifaceted, and they were long term. Throughout the country, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and New York City, these movements were struggles for affordable housing, health care and other basic needs, and they were sustained through collaboration with other movements fighting for the same things, out of a shared recognition that violence against any one group was a violence against others. This Third World consciousness, a legacy of the global anti-colonial revolts of the late 1960s, allowed activists to extend their analysis beyond the boundaries of their own communities and to draw connections to anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles around the world. In particular, the movement to end apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1980s mobilised many of the housing activists in New York Chinatown. In June 1986, organisers from the CPA, New York Chinatown Senior Citizens Coalition Center, Alliance for Filipino Concerns, Young Koreans United and Japanese American Citizens League – New York Chapter formed an Asian contingent to march in the city-wide anti-apartheid rally. Rocky Chin of CPA spoke on its behalf, ‘In [P.W.] Botha’s marshall (sic) law measures, we see the parallels with [Ferdinand] Marcos’ regime in the Philippines and Chun Doo Wan’s repressive Korean regime.’ ²³ These fascist states were not exceptional, he insisted, but parts of a globe-spanning neoliberal regime rooted in histories of colonialism and the economy of permanent warfare. The people’s struggles were connected throughout the globe.

Abolitionist futures

This brief snapshot of anti-racist organising in the 1980s shows that the crisis we confront today is not entirely new, and that in confronting it we need not dream up entirely new solutions. For while we have inherited the crisis in the form of a growing carceral state, we have also inherited a tradition of radical activism that set its sights on dismantling racial capitalism and imperialism and building something new in its wake. Today we call these forms of radical activism ‘abolitionist’, a term applied to anti-prison organising specifically but at its core is imagining a society that does not thrive on punitive governance, and doing the slow work of getting us there, pulling from already existing movements and capacities. ²⁴ An abolitionist framework explains why many of the movements that were activated in the 1980s are finding space to make their mark in the current conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed state violence. ²⁵ CAAAV is one example. In the 1990s, CAAAV shifted from anti-hate crimes advocacy to organising immigrant communities to fight for safe and affordable housing and healthcare, counteracting the criminalisation of immigrants and organised abandonment of the Clinton era. To mark this shift, it changed its name to CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. In 2005 it founded the Chinatown Tenants Union to empower tenants to fight for greater protections from predatory landlords and unjust evictions. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisers activated these capacities to launch a mutual aid effort to assist vulnerable senior citizens, demanding landlords repair dilapidated and unsafe housing units and clean and disinfect common areas. CAAAV also joined housing justice advocates state-wide in calling for rent cancellation and a moratorium on evictions. ²⁶

The mounting death toll from the pandemic and the crackdown on protests throughout the country in response to the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks and many more Black people lays bare the violence of a system that cares for profit over people. Asian American activist groups formed in the time of neoliberal multiculturalism have been among those on the front lines combating the government’s deadly negligence and racist violence. At a time when civil rights advocates were condemning Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric and the spike in hate crimes against Asians, some are reminding us yet again that ‘anti-Asian violence’ has deep roots. They see the racism of the Donald Trump administration as part of the calculated cruelty of the United States itself, linking the COVID-19 pandemic to the violence of US empire. Nodutdol is one such organisation. Formed in 1999 among diasporic Koreans in New York City united by a struggle to end war and militarism on the Korean peninsula and in the United States, Nodutdol called for the lifting of US-backed sanctions that prevented life-saving medical equipment from entering North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and other countries. The pandemic has not slowed the US drive to build borders, prisons and other war infrastructures, its organisers noted. The struggle therefore must be expansive. Its statement on COVID-19 read: ‘We encourage collective struggle and solidarity, as the capitalist system collapses, to provide relief for the unhoused, the incarcerated, the unemployed, the undocumented, the immune-compromised, the uninsured, and for all workers in the US and around the world.’ ²⁷ The slow work of dismantling US imperialism calls for the implementation of radical forms of aid as well as the eradication of anti-Black racism, which requires nothing short of efforts ‘to abolish police and prisons and to undo the United States for our collective liberation’. ²⁸

This is ultimately why the fight against anti-Asian violence is one with the struggle for all Black lives. In New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, and other cities throughout the United States ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the violence of capitalism, groups are uniting and fighting for the lives of those left to die. Alongside demands to defund and dismantle the police, people are modelling other ways of living through mutual aid and practices of transformative justice. They are showing that the time for decolonisation is now, and when this moment passes, another world will be more possible.