By the early 1850s, the 25,000 Chinese migrants attracted by the California Gold Rush constituted roughly 10% of California’s total population.ĭespite the integral role of these laborers in American mining, agriculture, textiles, and perhaps most prominently, the Transcontinental Railroad, Chinese immigrants faced mounting hostility from white settlers who saw them as an economic, health, and moral threat. The first immigrants were Chinese laborers looking for new work opportunities abroad in the aftermath of the Opium Wars. The Roots of Anti-Asian Racism in the U.S.ĭiscrimination against Asian immigrants began almost as soon as they entered the U.S. Recognize that while there is always more to learn, understanding at least some of the complexity behind this issue will help you meaningfully take action. I’m sharing this overview in the hopes that it starts or supplements you or your organization’s learning journey. In order to meet this moment and make good on the promise of corporate social justice, we need to fully understand the under-written histories of anti-Asian racism and the Asian American identity - and how today’s #StopAsianHate movement fits into those histories. We all need to self-educate on anti-Asian racism. In my work over the past few months, it’s become clear to me that many of my colleagues in corporate America lack the knowledge to contextualize this recent wave of anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S. The previous day, they had been pointedly told by a junior employee, who is Asian, to self-educate on anti-Asian racism. “There’s just too much we don’t understand,” one executive confided to me, a few days after the Atlanta shooting. Months later, amid Asian Heritage Month, we’re still struggling to move beyond saying #StopAsianHate toward actionable change. The actions to dismantle it felt harder to find, still. We knew that a tragedy of racist violence had taken place, and yet the language to describe the “why” behind that racism felt far out of reach. They are the author of DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing it Right. Lily Zheng is a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, consultant, and speaker who works with organizations to achieve the DEI impact and outcomes they need.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |