The recent rise in violence against Asian Americans has lent new visibility to the long history of discrimination experienced by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs).
“AAPI” represents a coalition that spans from Native Hawaiians and Samoans to Indians and Vietnamese Americans. Our presence on this land predates the United States, though we have been constantly entangled with violence, solidarity, discrimination, protest, power, and white supremacy.
In order to understand and combat AAPI hate, we must understand the many unique histories our communities bring to this movement today. We must untangle the policies and decisions through which we have been attacked, colonized, policed, banned, killed, displaced, and persecuted. This non-comprehensive timeline stretches from the Civil War through both World Wars. It includes the Great Depression and the civil rights movement as well as the Cold War and the post-9/11 Patriot Act. Whether we have been actively opposed to it or intrinsically a part of it, AAPI heritage is woven into the fabric of the American story.
Throughout the gold rush of the mid-1800s and ahead of the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese laborers immigrated to California for work. Facing pressure from white laborers who feared competition from these immigrants — derogatorily known as “coolies”— the state passed the “Anti-Coolie Act” to impose taxes on Chinese miners. The act followed initial attempts to discourage immigration via taxes on all foreign miners in the early 1850s, becoming the first in California to specifically target Chinese people.
Although the California law was rendered unconstitutional a year later, its passage laid the groundwork for the Page Act in 1875, effectively limiting the immigration of Chinese women, and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which banned further immigration of Chinese laborers. The restrictions set by the Chinese Exclusion Act were not fully undone until 1968.
After assuming the throne in 1891, Queen Lili'uokalani, last sovereign of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, began drafting a new constitution that would restore the monarchy’s powers and weaken colonizers’ grasp on the island nation. In response, a group of Americans staged a coup in January of 1893, and enlisted the United States military to enforce their new settler-led provisional government. Four years later, the United States officially annexed the islands. Under the occupation, the Native Hawaiian language was banned from schools and the Native Hawaiian’s universal health-care program was dismantled.
A century after the overthrow, Congress issued an apology resolution, acknowledging that the military’s involvement in the overthrow was illegal and that Hawaii remains unceded land. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that this apology does not affect the current government’s claim to Hawaiian land.
Wong Kim Ark, who was born in California in 1873, was barred from returning home after a visit to China because of the 1888 ban on reentry of Chinese immigrants. But Wong Kim Ark had lived in California his whole life and wasn’t an immigrant. At the heart of the case was a question — do Chinese Americans like Wong Kim Ark qualify for birthright citizenship? In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark, expanding birthright citizenship to most people of color in the United States.
In 1857, the infamous Dred Scott v Sandford case ruled that Black Americans did not qualify for birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, changed this precedent, opening a path to Wong Kim Ark’s legal victory. Native Americans, many of whom were considered outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, were not guaranteed birthright citizenship until 1924.
In 1923, Sikh American World War I veteran Bhagat Singh Thind put legal definitions of race and citizenship before the Supreme Court once again. Thind was an immigrant from India who argued that since he was high-caste and had ancestry from the Caucasus region, he was quite literally Caucasian, and therefore white — meeting naturalization requirements. The Court ruled that based on the common understanding of whiteness, a “Hindu” was not white, and was not permitted naturalization, upholding race-based discrimination in citizenship.
Under the Naturalization Act of 1870, naturalized citizenship was only available to white people and people of African birth or descent, and Thind’s case became a prominent example of an Asian American trying to assimilate into whiteness and ultimately failing. Thind eventually obtained citizenship after the passage of the 1935 Nye-Lea Act, which granted exceptions to the race-based citizenship requirement to WWI veterans.
At the onset of the Great Depression, riots broke out in Watsonville, California, when a mob of whites attacked a crowd of Filipinos at a dance club after seeing white women dancing with Filipino men there. The riots expanded out from Watsonville, with many reports of Filipinos being dragged from their homes and beaten in the streets. Formen Tobera, 22, was shot and killed after a group of white men opened fire on a Filipino bunkhouse; in nearby Stockton, a Filipino club was bombed by whites.
At the time, the Philippines were a U.S. territory. The Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924 drastically limited most Asian immigration, but did not apply to Filipinos due to their status as U.S. nationals. Filipinos quickly became a source for cheap farm labor in California and began to be seen as an economic threat to white workers, not unlike the Chinese laborers of the 19th century.
The Watsonville riots were a foundation for the Filipino farmworker movement pioneered by labor legends like Larry Itliong, who participated in his first strike that same year. Itliong and other Filipino farmworkers would go on to partner with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in the Delano Grape Strike of 1965.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 marked the United States’ entry into World War II and the rollback of civil liberties for Japanese Americans. Only a few months later, on February 19, 1942, New Deal architect Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War to designate the West Coast a war zone, allowing the military to evict and incarcerate around 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. After the war, the prisoners were released and forced to rebuild their lives with little to no assistance.
The Executive Order and subsequent military action garnered a number of Supreme Court cases, notably Korematsu v. United States. In the highly criticized decisions, the Supreme Court upheld that the military could target and relocate people based on ethnicity. It was only after Mitsuye Endo, another incarcerated Japanese American, petitioned for release that the Supreme Court agreed that the incarceration of loyal citizens was illegal, closing the majority of the camps.
Decades later, Japanese Americans won reparations for survivors of internment in what is now perhaps the most successful reparations campaign in United States history. It wasn’t until 2021 that Evanston, Illinois, became the first town to issue reparations for Black residents.
After unleashing the horror of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, the U.S. began conducting nuclear testing in the Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, precipitating the Cold War. Operation Crossroads, the first two of 23 nuclear tests, was the beginning of an arduous saga of radiation, contamination, and displacement that is still impacting the Marshallese today. Nuclear testing permanently contaminated Bikini and exposed residents of nearby atolls to harmful radiation. Studies have found that the radiation led to an significant increase in incidents of cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects among the Marshallese.
More than 100 Bikinian residents were relocated to other atolls with the promise that they would be able to return once nuclear testing was completed. But nuclear fallout, especially the disastrous Castle Bravo test, was far greater than expected. After one attempt to resettle Bikini Atoll in the 1970s failed due to continued high levels of nuclear radiation, the atoll was abandoned for good.
On the momentum of the Black Power Movement, Asian students joined other students of color at San Francisco State University to form the Third World Liberation Front, participating in what was then the longest college student strike in U.S. history. Across the bay in Berkeley, Asian students coined the identity, “Asian American,” unifying Americans of Asian descent under one pan-Asian identity for the first time. This momentum kicked off the Asian American movement, which would last throughout the Vietnam War and organize against the war, police violence, and evictions. Across the ocean, a burgeoning Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement began gaining steam, inspired by the work of the American Indian Movement (AIM).
In Hawaii, 1968 marked the opening of the Mauna Kea Observatory, which has become the subject of numerous protests after the sacred site was selected for the construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope. At the center of these, and other protests by Native Hawaiians, is indigenous land and sovereignty. The AIM’s focus on these ideas informed the creation of Aboriginal Lands of Hawaiian Ancestry (A.L.O.H.A.), one of the first pillars of the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, in 1972. The movement to create a sovereign government by and for Native Hawaiians continues to this day.
On June 23, 1982, two white auto workers beat Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American celebrating his bachelor party, to death with a baseball bat in Detroit. They apparently thought he was Japanese and blamed him for their lack of work because the rise in popularity of Japanese cars was hurting manufacturers in the city. Chin was neither the first nor the last Asian American to be murdered by white supremacists, but his murder, and the ridiculously lenient sentancing of his murderers, reinvigorated the Asian American Movement, becoming one of the first iconic moments in which Asian Americans banded together as a coalition across different ethnicities.
In response to the killing, journalist and activist Helen Zia founded American Citizens for Justice (ACJ). Unlike older organizations like OCA (then Organization of Chinese Americans) and the Japanese American Citizens League, ACJ was founded as a pan-Asian American organization, marking a new shift in politics and identity. Vincent Chin’s death was and is not seen as a Chinese American issue, but an Asian American issue.
In an early instance of video-taped police brutality, Los Angeles police officers were recorded attacking Melinda Dole Paopao’s bridal shower. About 100 officers beat or arrested 36 attendees. Their later defense was that the attendees had thrown bottles and rocks at them, which was easily disproved via eye-witness testimony and the video recording. The $23 million settlement received by the victims was reported as the largest award ever ordered from a U.S. law enforcement agency.
The case can be seen as a legal test case for police departments dealing with video evidence of police brutality. In subsequent cases, like the Rodney King beating two years later, police unions were able to organize and direct their power to thwart accountability.
American Somoans have long been the targets of harmful and racialized stereotypes, and even amongst communities with other Pacific Islanders, their stereotypes are coded with a specific hostility as darker-skinned people.
The tragic attacks on September 11, 2001, changed the trajectory of the 21st century. And for many South Asian, West Asian, Arab, and Muslim Americans, they marked another spike in violence, hateful rhetoric, surveillance, and policing. Amid widespread fear, Congress rolled back civil liberties, enabling the government to detain prisoners without the standard modes of accountability through legislation like the PATRIOT Act and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, Muslim and Arab Americans have been denied citizenship, detained at airports, coerced into interviews without lawyers, and incarcerated without due process.
The policing and surveillance of Muslim Americans began with the passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Following 9/11, in New York, police instituted a Muslim surveillance program, monitoring mosques, planting undercover agents, and creating databases of Muslim residents.
This state-sanctioned targeting has empowered white supremacist violence against people of all backgrounds. Communities have mourned the losses of Khalid Jabara, Ben Keita, Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha. Muslim children, as well as Sikh children, report facing increased amounts of bullying from peers. In 2017, Indian Americans Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Deep Rai were shot in two suspected hate crimes within a two-week period.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, George W. Bush’s head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed an agreement with Vietnam, paving the way to deportation of Vietnamese immigrants who entered the U.S. after the two nations began diplomatic relations in 1995. The agreement immediately made around 1,500 immigrants subject to deportation, even if they had lived most of their lives in the U.S. Many of these immigrants arrived as refugees after crises intensified in their home region.
In 2017, the Trump administration reinterpreted the agreement to deport some of the immigrants who were protected by the agreement. Despite a resurgence of community organizing, Vietnamese Americans are still being deported in violation of the agreement.
Vietnamese Americans were not the only targets of new deportation policies. When Cambodia halted additional deportations in 2017, the U.S. imposed visa sanctions on Cambodian officials until they complied. Some Cambodian deportees were born in refugee camps to parents fleeing the dangerous regime of Khmer Rouge, and had never been to Cambodia before.
Barely a week after his inauguration, Donald Trump instituted a travel ban which became known as the Muslim ban for targeting majority-Muslim countries, including Iran, in West Asia. Like the Scott Act that targeted Wong Kim Ark, the ban upended the lives of immigrants and residents from all walks of life, who realized that if they returned to a banned country, they wouldn’t be able to come back. The first executive order kicked off a series of battles with the courts, culminating in two additional bans, airport protests, numerous injunctions, and eventually the Supreme Court Case, Trump vs. Hawaii. The Court upheld the Muslim Ban, drawing ire from legal experts who likened the Court’s rational to the flawed Korematsu decision.
After 2001, Iran was labelled a sponsor of terrorism and Iranian immigrants faced extreme scrutiny despite many being political asylees. Iranian nationals were ordered to register at Immigration and Naturalization Services offices, but many of them were arrested in some areas. The injustices Iranian Americans faced after 9/11 sparked a wave of organizing, including mass protests in Los Angeles and the creation of the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans.
When the United States entered a pandemic-induced lockdown, Republican politicians began relying on racist terms and rhetoric to score political points in their economic war with China. Despite a decisive election that cost Republicans the White House and the Senate, state-sponsored rhetoric has empowered a surge of hate crimes and violence against Asians. Alongside this rise in violence, many AAPI communities, as well as other communities of color, are still being hit by dramatic health disparities in COVID-19.
A renewed wave of Asian American organizing ignited after Thai American elder, Vichar Ratanapakdee, was killed in what his family is calling a hate crime. In March, on the same day that Stop AAPI Hate released a report recounting more than 3,700 incidents of anti-Asian hate, a gunman killed eight people in the Atlanta area, including six Asian and Asian American women. Not even a month later, another gunman attacked a FedEx facility with a staff that was 90% Sikh, killing four Sikh Americans and four others.
Despite making up a mere 4% of the nursing population nationwide, almost a third of nurses killed by COVID-19 have been Filipino. In California, Pacific Islanders are dying from the coronavirus four times as much as the rest of the state — more disproportionate than any other group. In San Francisco, Asian Americans account for almost half of COVID-19 deaths. Black, Native American, and Latinx communities also bear the brunt of the pandemic, but a lack of data on specific AAPI groups, especially Pacific Islanders, has stymied advocacy efforts.
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