Asian American anti-colonial rage of the 1960s, solidarity with Palestine, & decolonial futures
Remembering the Asian American movement to inform our politics of solidarity today
From my screen, I witness Palestinian mothers cradling their stiff, dead children, wrapped up in delicate white sheets. They rock their babies, sing to them, whisper prayers in their ears, as their own eyes stare blankly ahead, empty of life and pregnant with death.
I hear the sounds of Palestinians dying to the backdrop of bomb after bomb after bomb, striking down neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, even refugee camps. Orange missiles light up the smoke-filled skies for just a moment as Gaza falls back under the heavy cloak of darkness, with Israel pulling electricity and communications in attempts to murder without a witness.
“WAKE UP SO I CAN NURSE YOU,” a mother screams, out of the rubble. “UNCLE!!!,” a man gutturally cries from the depths.
I witness the little shoes, soaked in blood, small enough only to fit a toddler.
I witness the tiny feet, bloodied, peeking out - almost mischievously - from under the white sheet of death.
I am haunted.
Meanwhile, Genocide Joe dares to gaslight us. US who made calls and knocked on doors and registered our neighbors and waited hours in line to vote him into office. Dehumanizing and dismissing Palestinian suffering, Genocide Joe lies to our faces without shame, claiming he has “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” He requests $105 billion in military funding to Israel, as the death toll nears 10,000 and UNICEF reports Gaza turning into a “graveyard of children.”
I share these scenes and quotes and numbers because I don’t want us to forget.
I was ignorant to assume it would be a no brainer for Asian American community organizations to put out statements of solidarity with Palestine. The central role of the U.S. in the systematic displacement and extermination of Palestinians is obvious (the receipts have been there for decades), yet the issue remains contentious for many. Further, those calling for a ceasefire are getting censored, doxxed, and harassed, a phenomenon backing many of us into fear rather than compelling us into moral courage and action.
While some Asian American organizations have taken leadership by issuing unwavering statements of solidarity and calls to action, others have remained silent. There are statements condemning Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, but statements explicitly naming genocide, settler colonialism, and decolonial struggle seem fewer and farther in between.
“I feel an unease within Asian Americanness. We don't have a common understanding of who we are, who we belong to, or who belongs to us,” Jeanelle Abiola, Filipinx anti-imperialist organizer and pastor, shared with me over zoom a few months ago.
When the Asian American movement emerged in the late 1960s, Asian American youth wrestled with the questions of who we are, who we belong to, and who belongs to us in the context of the anti-war movement. As the country witnessed the atrocities and bloodshed of American intervention throughout the Global South during the Cold War, anti-colonial rage became central to the formation of Asian American identity and politics. The war in Vietnam in particular was a “brutal and urgent politicization.”
To identify as Asian American at the time was to be unapologetically critical of the U.S. empire and to fight for liberation and self-determination in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples at home and abroad.
In 1968, UC Berkeley graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka coined the term “Asian American” with the Asian American Political Alliance as a rejection of the externally imposed, colonial label “oriental.” Edward Said, Palestinian-American academic and political activist, introduced the concept “orientalism,” which explains the West’s dehumanizing depiction of the East as primitive, static, despotic, perpetually foreign, and objectified. Orientalist representations of Asia depended on the financial, cultural, and institutional support of Western colonial regimes.
Thus, to reject the dehumanizing and infantilizing identity of “oriental” and assert Asian American subjectivity on one’s own terms inherently required a rejection of the U.S. imperialist system that laid the foundation for orientalism, anti-Asian racism, and white supremacy domestically and internationally.
Given such forthright calls for internationalist solidarity against imperialism, how are the ties between Asian Americans and the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle ambiguous to so many of us today? How did the questions of who we are, who we belong to, and who belongs to us shrink from an expansive, anti-imperialist, internationalist solidarity to insular arguments about representation and inclusion into the imperialist State?
Native Hawai’ian scholars Teves & Arvin argue that Asian Americans are racialized and assimilated in ways that erase indigenous claims, which are critical to the U.S. settler colonial project. The white supremacist structure in America rewards Asian Americans for “civic participation and cultural assimilation, while ignoring the genocide and slavery upon which their aspirations for inclusion depend.” Thus, the political agenda for Asian Americans may mean “a bigger piece of the American pie,” but it is “cooked from a recipe of native displacement and dispossession” (Trask 1999, Tzu-Chun Wu 2018).
Asian American liberal aspirations for inclusion into the U.S. have long been critiqued by Pacific Islander feminists for maintaining settler colonialism, and ultimately American imperialism (Fujikane and Okamura 2008, Saranillo 2010, Trask 1999). The irony is that many of us - via forced or voluntary migration - are here because of American imperialism and interventions in our home countries. Asian American solidarity with Palestine demands us to reckon with our own - often painful - relationships to U.S. empire, as well as our own status as settlers on and benefactors of stolen, indigenous land.
The children, trapped, dying slowly under the rubble. Their tummies still hungry - they hadn’t eaten yet. Their cries suffocated by another explosion.
The doctors, valiant, vowing to stay through the bombs and bloodshed for their patients. They may be killed, but they will not be moved.
Our representatives, who we elected, cowardly sitting on their hands with the Ceasefire Resolution, despite the calls, emails, and 300,000 of us marching in the largest pro-Palestinian rally in U.S. history.
What we feel in this moment is not far from what I assume our movement predecessors felt in the late 1960s.
We must alchemize this pain into action.
We must remember and recenter the robust anti-colonial politics we come from.
We must interrogate our own relationships to the U.S. empire.
We must relinquish inclusion into the genocidal U.S. State as something worth striving for.
We must keep speaking out, keep calling, keep protesting.
May the anti-colonial grief and rage that tie us together free us from the U.S. imperialist war machine and bring us closer to decolonial struggle, solidarity, and futures.
FREE PALESTINE.
Calls to Action and Resources:
Call your representatives DAILY to demand a ceasefire using the 5calls app on your phone.
Sign on to 18 Million Rising’s letter to demand our Asian American electeds endorse a ceasefire resolution.
Join the Asians for Palestine POWER HOUR: a gathering to call and email congress to demand a ceasefire on November 7th 12PST/3EST
Join the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement to divest from Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.
Join a local Palestinian-led protest (look up your local Palestinian Youth Movement chapter).
Sources:
Fujikane, Candace, and Jonathan Y Okamura, eds. 2008. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i. Honolulu: Universiyt of Hawai’i Press.
ROOTS: Asian American Movements in Los Angeles ZINE. 2017.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Saranillo, Dean Itsuji. 2010. “Colliding Histories: Hawai’i Statehood at the intersection of Asians ‘Ineligible to Citizenship’ and Hawai’ians ‘Unfit for Self-Government'.’” Journal of Asian American Studies 13(3) (October): 283-309.
Teves, Stephanie Nohelani and Maile Arvin. 2018. “Decolonizing API: Centering Indigenous Pacific Islander Feminism,” in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan. University of Washington Press.
Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1999. From a Native Daughter: COlonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i. 2d ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. 2018. “Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Feminisms: Radicalism, Liberalism, and Invisibility,” in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan. University of Washington Press.