8. Standing behind affirmative action

2017 saw renewed attention to the issue of affirmative action, with Asian Americans in the divisive spotlight. This year, Chinese Americans in particular continued to be cast in the role of the straight-A student denied their rightful place in the Ivy League because of unfair “racial preference.” The barely-coded implication that whites and Asian Americans are being discriminated against by affirmative action policies for supposedly underqualified Black, Latinx, and Native American students took headlines again when Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice announced in August that it would investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The investigation is focusing on Harvard, which has been the subject of a lawsuit filed in 2014 by legal provocateur Edward Blum and the Asian American Coalition for Education, which alleges an “Asian quota” at Harvard and other elite schools. (Incidentally, Harvard’s class of 2021 boasts a 22.2 percent Asian American student body, a record high for the university.) Blum, who has chosen Asian Americans as the face of his new suit, was also responsible for the Supreme Court case that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

While the Asian American Coalition for Education “welcomes” the DOJ investigation, progressive and leftist Asian Americans have been quick to reorient the conversation and represent the 65% of Asian Americans that support affirmative action policies, which have no basis for illegal negative action policies like the quotas Blum and the AACE allege. As of August 2017, over 135 Asian American and Pacific Islander groups had signed onto a joint statement in support of affirmative action policies. That same month, Asian American commentators came together to host a #NotYourWedge Twitter townhall, calling attention to Asian American ethnic groups underrepresented in higher education, the need to situate affirmative action as redressing histories of racial injustice, problematizing the racist roots of meritocracy, and troubling the research of Thomas Espenshade oft-cited as “proving” anti-Asian admissions bias.

As the DOJ threatens to sue Harvard over noncompliance in its probe, the fight to disrupt antiblack narratives of Asian American meritocracy and deservingness are sure to continue in 2018 and beyond.

Read more in Reappropriate: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (#AAPI) Writing in Support of Affirmative Action.

7. SF “comfort women” statue marks Japanese imperialism and sexual violence

Years of silence-breaking and community organizing culminated with the September unveiling of a comfort women memorial in San Francisco’s Chinatown plaza. The memorial honors more than 200,000 women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia — euphemistically known as “comfort women” — who were forced into Japan’s military prostitution system during World War II. The statue has not been without its controversies — San Francisco’s Japanese sister city, Osaka, cut ties with SF because of the statue. Japan claims that such memorials violate a 2015 apology and payment to South Korea that, despite purporting to be a “final and irrevocable resolution” to the painful history, has failed to satisfy many survivors and their advocates.

9/22/17 San Francisco Comfort Women Memorial Ceremony, Frank Jang.

The SF monument is a testament to years of organizing by groups such as the “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition, which called out Japan’s “obstruction and denialism, including its blocking of people’s attempts to build memorials all over the world” in a statement marking the unveiling. “Much of the work was done away from the spotlight,” the statement continued, reflecting the contributions of countless volunteers, activists, scholars and students.

Groups like CWJC have placed the comfort women issue in the context of the larger struggle “against all forms of sexual violence [and] the sexism, racism, colonialism, militarization, and war that fuel it.” To that end, CWJC has implicated the U.S.’s own imperial agenda and its “pivot to Asia” in aiding and abetting Japan’s historical denialism.

The fight for justice and proper memorialization for “grandmothers” impacted by Japanese wartime sexual violence stretches from U.S. college campuses such as San Francisco State University — where protesters fighting for ethnic studies have invoked remembrance of comfort women as emblematic of the need for a discipline that critically engages the histories of communities of color — to Okinawa and the Philippines, where local fights against U.S. military bases and the gender violence they fuel continue.

The fruit of tireless community organizing, the SF memorial is a symbol of the ongoing fight against all forms of imperialism, and a reminder that remembrance is indeed a form of resistance.

Read more: CWJC Statement at Unveiling of the Memorial for “Comfort Women” in San Francisco. Donate to CWJC here.

6. Demanding justice for Tommy Le

On June 14, 20-year-old Tommy Le was fatally shot by Seattle police, the same day he was set to graduate from a high-school completion program at South Seattle College. In the aftermath of the shooting, a Seattle sheriff’s spokeswoman said the officers believed Le was holding “what they thought was a knife.” It took a week for the Sheriff’s Office to report that Le had in fact been holding a pen when he was shot three times by Seattle police.

Le’s family and the Vietnamese American community of Seattle have come together to challenge the police department’s murky, shifting narrative of the circumstances of Le’s death. An autopsy released in September showed Le was shot twice in the back and once in the back of his hand. “There are no scenarios where you would shoot someone in the back because they are attacking you” the Le family’s lawyer said during a press conference. Le’s murder energized groups such as “Viets Who Give a Shiet” and “Justice For Tommy Le,” who organized a public forum in July during which hundreds of community members called for an independent inquiry into the shooting death.

Young activists say the tragedy is galvanizing a new era of Vietnamese American activism, one that draws critical connections to antiblack state violence while navigating the particular traumas of the Vietnamese experience. In an interview with Seattle Weekly, Justice for Tommy Le leader Yenvy Pham said: “We are new to this country, but within the four generations of being here, we have been inspired by the black community to be outspoken and face injustices.”

Read Sharon Chang’s coverage of the Tommy Le community forum here.

Followed less than a week later by the police murder of black Seattle mother Charleena Lyles, Le’s death has prompted important conversations about the stakes for non-black Asian Americans in the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight against police violence. Out of senseless tragedy, Le’s family and community are setting a course for Asian American activism that builds power and coalitions around state violence against black, indigenous, immigrant and refugee communities.

What you can do: Sign and share Justice for Tommy Le’s petition demanding a voice for Tommy Le’s family during the King County inquest into the shooting.

5. Confronting imperialism, orientalism in the U.S.-North Korea “conflict”

This year saw Donald Trump recklessly stoke tensions with North Korea, promising “fire and fury” against the nation to punish Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. While experts agree that a North Korean nuclear weapon would serve as a defensive deterrent against a U.S.-backed toppling of the Kim regime, that hasn’t stopped U.S. politicians and pundits from commencing with the genocidal commentary. A particularly outlandish September op-ed in the New York Post outlined a supposedly “moral” solution: “better a million dead North Koreans than a thousand dead Americans.”

Korean Americans have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula. U.S. bombings during the Korean War killed almost 30% of North Korea’s population, and in the decades since the U.S. has adopted cruel sanctions on everyday resources like coal and oil that punish North Korean civilians. As white Americans try to sift “good” (South) Koreans from “bad” (North) Koreans, many reunification activists in Korea and the diaspora have stressed that the supposed binary depends on an arbitrary border drawn at the 38th parallel by the United States in 1945, which separated10 million Koreans from their family members.