Immigration from Japan rose in the late 1880s and was curtailed by The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907. seeking opportunities like Chinese immigrants before them - and they were met with similarly oppressive policies. Subsequent waves of Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. Hall in 1853, in which the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese witnesses could not testify against white witnesses. Exclusionary immigration policies followed, and within 35 years, the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made legal Chinese immigration all but impossible.Ĭhinese immigrants already in the U.S., who faced mass lynching, urban displacement, and violent attacks in their communities, had their options for recourse severely limited by People v. 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 co-author of Gender Ambiguity in the Workplace: Transgender and Gender-Diverse Discrimination and The Ethical Sellout: Maintaining Your Integrity in the Age of Compromise. Lily Zheng is a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist and executive coach who works with organizations to create high-impact and sustainable change.
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