Factually! with Adam Conover - Asian American Histories Of The U.S. with Catherine Choy

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

Asian Americans are an essential part of the history of this country, but the true story is all too little told, especially in a time of rising anti-Asian sentiment and violence. Historian and author of “Asian American Histories of the United States” Catherine Choy joins Adam to discuss the origin of racist ideas such as the “model minority myth,” and dive into the history. You can purchase Catherine’s book at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the incredible shit they know that I don't know that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together. We're going to have a great time doing it. And before we get started, I just want to remind you that I am on tour this summer. If you live in Boston, Nashville, the D.C. area, Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, or New York City, please come out and see me do standup. You can find tickets at adamconover.net slash tour dates. That's adamconover.net slash tour dates. And of course, if you want to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash adamconover. Five bucks a month gets you bonus podcast episodes, exclusive standup I don't post anywhere else, including the entire hour of my 2019 live show,

Mind Parasites Live. And you can join our live community book club. Right now we're reading Teen Winds, Games, Agency as Art. And we're going to be discussing that in August. So if you join right now, you can join the book club and discuss the book with us and tea live. It's going to be a great time.

And we need a great time because I don't know if you've noticed, America is a fucking wreck right now. Looking around, there is smoke from a seemingly endless series of metaphorical directions, not to count the actual fires that burn their way across the landscape every year. And trust me, I am very aware of many of the problems happening right now. And we're going to be discussing a lot of them on the show in the future. But this week, I want to talk about one that has gone a little bit less remarked upon than it should, and that is the rise of anti-Asian sentiment and violence in the wake of the

pandemic. According to one report, there was a 339% increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans last year. And another study says that Americans are twice as likely this year, against Asian Americans last year. And another study says that Americans are twice as likely this year, 2022, as last year to blame Asian Americans for the pandemic. Now, that's nothing new. There has been a long and terrible history of anti-Asian stereotypes in America. But the weird thing is those stereotypes are often contradictory. On the one hand, Asian Americans are portrayed by some as being connected to sickness,

and the furor over their supposed fault for the recent pandemic is not that far from the racist presentation of Asian Americans as carriers of incurable disease in the late 19th century. But on the other hand, we have the equally weird and incorrect stereotype of Asian Americans as the, quote, we have the equally weird and incorrect stereotype of Asian Americans as the, quote, model minority, which posits that they're a uniquely compliant and integrative group who work hard to chase the American dream. And this weird racist myth is something we discussed on Adam Ruins Everything a couple years ago, but it still persists today. And both of these racist stereotypes deny the reality, which is that Asian Americans are a wildly diverse group, both economically

and culturally, that they happen to be the fastest growing minority in the nation, and that their history in America, their part in the American story, is hundreds of years old. But when it comes to that Asian American history, most of us, frankly, don't know dick about it. Almost 60% of Americans can't name a single prominent Asian American. Not one, not even George Takei, and he has been on TV in our faces daily since the fucking 60s. Myths and ignorance have overpowered the true history of Asians in America,

even though their history is American history. So in order to begin to tell this story and correct the record, our guest today is Catherine Seneza Choi, a historian at Berkeley and the author of Asian American Histories of the United States. I'm so thrilled to welcome her on the show. I hope you are, too. Please enjoy this interview with Catherine Seneza Choi. Catherine, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So you've written a book about Asian American history. Why write that book now? Well, unfortunately, not many people know about Asian American history, even though Asian Americans are a very large and historically significant group in the United States today.

And we have a history that's over 200 years old. And sadly, there have been some really difficult things that our communities have been confronting since 2020 related to the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, some of which is connected to COVID-19. And you write in the introduction that you focus on three major themes in Asian American history, that violence, erasure, and resistance are the three themes, if I got it right. Why divide it into those three themes and tell me about them? of those three themes and tell me about them. Well, I think in order to understand what has been happening, especially since 2020, with the increase in anti-Asian hate and violence, despite our longstanding presence in the United States, people need to understand that there's a history. There's a history to this violence, that it didn't just start when the WHO announced that COVID-19 was a pandemic. It didn't just start when Donald Trump started referring to the China virus and the Kung flu on Twitter and in presidential speeches, that it is much longer than that.

And there is a certain kind of urgency when you see these attacks that have been quite visible and egregious on various media platforms that have been circulated over and over again on social media. And it brings Asian Americans to the forefront of the media. And yet so many people, the general public, doesn't seem to know any well-known Asian Americans in this country, according to one study, which pointed out that over 40% of Americans couldn't name one single well-known Asian American, even though our vice president, Kamala Harris, is the first Asian and Black vice president and first woman to hold such a prestigious position. And so why is that? And that's where the theme of erasure comes in, that Asian American histories have been neglected, omitted, or even purposefully erased. And then the theme of resistance is to say that

throughout this long history, Asian Americans have been there pointing this out, pointing out their omission, denigration, and dismissal in US history and saying that it's wrong. And so what we see happening here with Asian Americans in the 21st century fighting for representation and a dignified and humane representation of themselves and their communities is also not new. Yeah. I mean, these are, I think about just an experience I had, and this is not even that remarkable,

but I think about when I lived in New York for many years and going downtown, going to, you know, New York, Chinatown, the one that is in Manhattan. There's a few, you know, areas in New York. But seeing like various, you know, benevolent associations or various, you know, community groups, Asian American community groups and seeing, I can't remember the name of it, but you know, the side of a building, the name of the group was chiseled on it. And it was like, you know, many, many, many decades old, this organization. And it really stuck with me as like, oh, this is, this is like a long history. This is, you know, these folks have been at least in this area of Chinatown in New York city for decades and decades. And as you say, building groups of

community, building infrastructure, building supportive systems for each other, for much of the city's history. Absolutely. So the Chinatown you're referring to in New York City and Manhattan specifically, that history goes back to the second half of the 19th century and around the 1870s. So it's well over 150 years old. And here, I'm based in Berkeley, California, and in San Francisco's Chinatown, there's the presence of mutual aid societies that certainly goes back 150 years. And you'll see the presence of Asian Americans and specifically Chinese Americans, for example, in Angel Island Immigration Station, because those Chinese detainees since the 1910s who arrived there would carve poetry in Cantonese on the barrack walls of Angel Island Immigration Station.

And so the presence is here. We just have to look and we have to be aware of the ways in which this presence has been erased, if not neglected. And why do you feel that that erasure has happened? I mean, you write in the introduction of the book that so often, you know, you and your colleagues will present a piece of Asian American history and the audience will say, wow, I never learned that in school. And you hear that over and over again. And I read that and I was like, well wow, I never learned that in school. And you hear that over and over again.

And I read that and I was like, well, here I am again. I'm going to have this interview with Catherine and I'm going to say that probably a bunch of times during the interview, right? I'm going to be like, oh, wow, I didn't, you know, I mean, we did, you know, we did the World War II internment camps in ninth grade global studies and that's about it, right? And so why do you think that is, that so much of that history has been erased or at the very least not told? Well, there are a number of things, but you're not alone, Adam. Okay, thank you.

Look, I was born and raised in New York City, and I never learned about Asian American history when I was in grade school, in high school in the 1970s and 1980s. And it's only this year that there has been a more serious move to teach Asian American history in New York City high schools. So it's, you know, 2022. This is a history that's over 150 plus years and it's still not in our schools. So that's why so many of us, including Asian-Americans ourselves, are unaware of this history until perhaps we're fortunate enough to go to a college or university and we take that one Asian-American studies class or that one ethnic studies class that includes it. And now with ethnic studies in some universities and some high schools, we are seeing the inclusion, but albeit very limited, of Asian American history. And so you brought up one example of the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Some of that is in our high school textbooks, and maybe

some of the Chinese labor participation in building the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. But oftentimes it's just a few sentences, you know, maybe a paragraph. And then there are these so many other aspects of Asian American history that don't even make it into the curriculum. So that's part of the erasure and not knowing. But in the book, I write that it's not just about our classrooms. It's also about the erasure of documentary evidence. So during that World War II Japanese American internment, the famous photographer, Dorothea Lange, took many photographs of the internment and that process. And her photos portrayed Japanese Americans on the West Coast who were forcibly being incarcerated. She portrayed them as American. And there was this subtle, nuanced critique of what our U.S.

government was doing by incarcerating them without due process. And yet her photographs were marked as impounded and then tucked away in an archive, and they weren't made visible until decades afterwards. So there's so many moments where some of that evidence is erased, or you'll have historical places. I mentioned Angel Island Immigration Station and the Chinese detainees' poetry on the barrack walls, but Angel Island Immigration Station was completely neglected until just a few decades ago. And some of that poetry would not have been acknowledged or seen had it not been for the work of Park Ranger and then the broader Asian American community to make sure that that history would be documented and preserved.

That's really striking. I want to ask you about some of these particular, you said we know these one or two stories. There's so many more we could tell. I want to ask you what some of those are. But first, I just, one last piece of setup here, because, you know, this is a book about Asian American history, but of course, Asian Americans constitute so many different groups from, with vastly different experiences from, you know, around the world. And those countries had their own histories, right? These are very different places. And so how do you go about when writing a book about Asian American history? How do you go about, you know, figuring out how to tell that story as one story or as multiple stories that converge into one? Because there's a shared experience, I must imagine, of being, at the very least, called Asian American once one arrives, right? But there's also the differing origins and different... How do you approach that?

You approach it with a great deal of humility. I've been teaching Asian American history, teaching it, studying it, writing about it for over two decades. And that's how I feel when approaching this topic, that even with my education and expertise in particular areas, I still approach it with a great deal of humility and also curiosity. And I really appreciate your question because even the term Asian American, it has its own history. It's an umbrella pan-ethnic term. And in the 21st century, it is generally referring to an American of Asian descent. But it is an umbrella term that's encompassing over 20 million people from over 20 countries in East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent. And on top of the numbers and the diversity in terms of national origin, you have incredible diversity in terms of regional diversity here

in the United States. New York, California are well known to have large Asian American populations. But Texas, Illinois, Florida, Massachusetts, Washington State, these also have large populations. And some of the fastest growing Asian American populations are in North Dakota, South Dakota, North Carolina, you know, states that wouldn't necessarily come to mind. So there's this regional diversity, there's this incredible socioeconomic class diversity. The Pew Research Center has pointed out that income inequality among Asian American groups is incredibly high, that this gap between higher earning Asian Americans versus those on the lower end of the economic spectrum has doubled in the late 20th, early 21st century. And so there's just so much diversity.

In the book, I also feature the experiences of mixed race Asian Americans, Asian American adoptees. And each of these groups have such unique histories. So it's an incredible challenge to write one book about Asian Americans. I can imagine. Yeah, that's why I tried to emphasize that by the title, that there are Asian American histories and that there's no way I could include every experience in this book. But I could talk about the ways in which we are different, but also the similarities we share, as you were alluding to earlier. And one of those similarities are these experiences regarding anti-Asian violence and the erasure of our histories and different groups of Asian Americans, sometimes in their own specific groups, but other times across Asian American groups coming together to say, this is wrong. Yeah. this is wrong. This kind of violence and hate is wrong, that it can be used against other people,

not solely Asian Americans. And we need to do something about it. Is there, in that sense that, you know, you have people coming from all different parts of the world with vastly different cultures in vastly different parts of the United States, as you say, world with vastly different cultures in vastly different parts of the United States, as you say, the Midwest versus the coast versus everywhere else. But do you also find in the book that there is a, you know, common Asian American experience that unites or, you know, that at least has to be grappled with, at least insofar as, you know, the way Asian Americans, you know, have been treated by white Americans or by, you know, quote, mainstream American culture over the years. Like, is there is there some sort of melting pots?

The wrong word. But is that you know, is there like a is there is there some sort of unifying factor that that comes out? I think there are several unifying factors. And aside from common experience and I've already mentioned anti-Asian violence, but another common experience is being misunderstood. And it's not that there isn't an understanding of Asian Americans in the United States, but that it's often a misunderstanding. And stereotypes of our diverse communities lump us together. Yes. And make it seem like Asian Americans are a knowable people. But actually, these stereotypes tend to do more harm than good. So some of the most popular examples of stereotypes of Asian Americans that pass this common knowledge include the model minority. Yeah.

That Asian Americans are model minority. And that's a very complex stereotype, but it depicts us in a very flat one-dimensional way. That Asian Americans are successful, that they are apolitical. We pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and we don't complain. And we're all smart, we're whiz kids, and we have, like, natural ability in the STEM fields. Yeah. And these kinds of stereotypes like the mild minority seem positive, but they are really harmful. And other popular ones include Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners that were newcomers, even though we have this very long history that's over a century long. I'm a second generation Filipino American.

My husband is a third generation Korean American on his father's side and third generation Chinese American on his mother's side. And so we have two children and they're this multiple generation Korean, Chinese, and Filipino American. And yet there's this sense that Asian Americans are newcomers and that they're not American. just two of some of the very popular one-dimensional images of us that passes common knowledge. And it's unfortunate. It is really unfortunate. But one of the things that I think is most interesting is seeing how the history interacts with those stereotypes or with those ideas. Like one that struck me, you mentioned the idea of foreignness. And one story that always struck me, I first heard it on the podcast Radio Lab

and then another version of it in the documentary, The Search for General Tso, which is a wonderful documentary about American or Americanized Chinese food. And it described the sort of process that, you know, in Chinatowns around the United States, that they were often viewed in the early days as being, you know, viewed negatively by folks in the cities. And there was by white folks specifically. by white folks specifically. And there was an effort to sort of have like renovate Chinatowns to like make them interact with white people's notions of foreignness, um, to sort of make them tourist attractions in a way a little bit more. Um, and, uh, that when I read that history or I encountered, I was like, Oh, that explains so much of, you know, what, like when I would go

visit Chinatown as a kid, right? And I find that really interesting, because it's like a conscious interaction with the forces that you're talking about, that's been, you know, that Asian Americans have been grappling with for, you know, well over a century. I don't know, am I doing any justice to any of this or am I completely messing it up? history and how we've learned that in our lives growing up in the United States, it's often not in the school, but it's often in the communities we grow up in or near. Chinatown or have a Chinatown like in your region or state, so many of us will think of it as a tourist destination, as a place that is exotic and different. And there's a history behind that with New York City's Chinatown and San Francisco's Chinatown and San Francisco's Chinatown. And we have to remind ourselves also that these were ethnic enclaves that grew out of a history of racism, discrimination, racial segregation.

Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans would be in these enclaves because they weren't welcome outside of these enclaves. And while there is a history of tourism, what that did was rather than saying or integrating Chinatown and Chinese and Asian Americans into the broader fabric of being American and being part of American life. Instead, it was used as this is what the other looks like and how they live. And again, more stereotypes would emerge from this. And some of the most harmful stereotypes include the association of Chinese and other Asian bodies, including Asian American bodies with disease. And then Chinatowns would be exotic places sometimes, but then also diseased and depraved places.

And we would think, well, you know, that kind of, those kinds of histories, so those were like, you know, late 19th, early 20th century histories. And yet here we find ourselves in the age of COVID-19 and the same kinds of associations with Chinatown's Asian ethnic enclaves and Asian and Asian American bodies as disease carriers. So some things haven't changed. Yeah. And they need to change. I mean, there's the film Chinatown. That's the premise of, you know, forget it, Jack. It's Chinatown, right? It's like that is, oh, Chinatown is a corrupt place. It's a place where bad things happen. It's a, you know, it's depraved, as you say, and it's not that long ago that that film was made. But I'd love to, as you say, like talk about some of the other interesting historical strains in America of, you know, forgotten, not forgotten pieces, but untold pieces of Asian American history.

Like, are there any particular stories from the book that leap out to you that, you know, you wish people knew? Oh, there's so many different stories. It's too broad a setup. I'm sorry. Are you able to pull one out or is there? Well, let me talk about one story first. And then we can talk about others because there's so many I could use. And that's why that's like a major theme. But one of the things that's different about the book is that it's different from other traditional history books in the sense that it's nonlinear.

And so, for example, each chapter of the book features a specific year. And rather than beginning with a year in, let's say, the 19th century, the first chapter is the year 2020. And what I did with the year 2020 was I focused on one of the things I focused on in that chapter was the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on Filipino nurses in the United States who are working on the front lines of this deadly disease and who are a group that have been here working in U.S. hospitals and other healthcare institutions for six decades now. But I was talking about that stereotype of the perpetual foreigner. And there's a way in which people are still thinking, unless they personally know a Filipino nurse, they're still thinking that this is somehow a new group. And in that chapter, I say, it's not a new group. This is a group that U.S. hospitals have actively recruited to work at the bedside, to work in intensive care units, to work in emergency rooms, often in public inner city hospitals, often on the least desirable work shifts,

work shifts, which are the places and the times that are very difficult to recruit nurses to work in. And so this is a history that goes back to the mid-20th century when immigration laws changed. So many Philippine nurses could come here, but actually even goes back to the late 19th and early 20th century when the U.S. colonized the Philippines and established an Americanized training hospital system there that educated Filipino nurses in the Philippines in U.S. hospital techniques and in the English language. So in order to become a Filipino nurse in the Philippines in the early 20th century, you had to have fluency in the English language. Wow. So these are some of these layers of history that help explain why things are the way they are today. And it's not solely that Filipino nurses immigrate here because they want to, but it's also because they're actively recruited. It's also because of this colonial legacy of their nursing training and their English language

fluency. Wow, that's fascinating. I mean, Filipino nurses is a phenomenon that I think a lot of Americans are familiar with. Maybe say, oh, why is that? I don't know. People like to immigrate, and this is the sort of job that people take. We think that there's a simple, you know, explanation. The fact that it goes back to colonization

in the late 19th century, is that right? Yeah, 1998. And like the starting of this particular education program is like, that's incredible. I feel like you've just like telescoped me through history so quickly. And so that, what, created a trend where you just had a large number of Filipino women being being educated. That creates an immigration inflow. Then there's a law that makes that an easier way to immigrate.

You have recruiting and then you just end up with what a pipeline that persists persists to this day. That's actually quite an accurate summary there. This is what I do, Catherine. I talk to academics and I condense what they say into something easy and digestible. It's literally my only skill. I don't come up with the information. I occasionally make a joke, but mostly I just, I'm a good summarizer. You've identified the only thing I'm good at. You really, I mean, that really was like a succinct, all those succinct insights there that point to how this is not something new. And it's also not a historical accident. It's also not solely about individual choices, but also about histories. is like, you know, supports this pipeline in a way because now it's seen as an export.

I don't want to use the word export because we're talking about people, but it's seen as a profitable or beneficial interaction that the Philippines has with the United States. Is that the case? Yes, that's definitely the case. Starting in 1972, then president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos, he pivoted the Philippine economy towards a labor export policy.

So export is an appropriate term to use, but it is the export of human resources as opposed to goods. And one of the things that Marcos observed in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that there was a huge demand for Filipino nurses in the United States and in some European countries as well, but primarily in the United States. And previously, the Philippine government had tried to keep Filipino nurses in the Philippines as a kind of nursing, as a kind of national patriotic duty. But Ferdinand Marcos said, well, if there's this demand, why don't we just meet that demand? And we'll train more nurses and we'll send them abroad. important countries in terms of exporting people overseas to work as overseas contract workers, overseas Filipino workers. And one of the reasons why the government wants to do that is because when they work overseas, it lessens the pressure to provide domestic employment opportunities in

the Philippines. And then when they work abroad, they earn foreign currency and they bring that back to the Philippines in the form of remittances. And remittances is a multi-billion dollar economy. And it really helps the Philippine economy. So it's very lucrative. So some people praise that kind of economy, but many others also criticize it because there's a social cost to have your people being exported overseas. You're separating parents from their children. You are exporting among the best and brightest to work overseas. And today the Philippines still exports nurses, not solely to the United States, but to many different parts of the world but they also promote the migration of domestic workers, seafarers, construction workers

to the Middle East, to Europe and other parts of Asia. So this is an example of how U.S. and Philippine Asian American histories intersect with a global history. know, we are so used to in white America, you know, looking at immigrants as, oh, these are people who are coming here and recently have started coming here and are settling down. Right. And that that's part of what fuels the taking our jobs narrative that you sometimes see or etc. But when you talk about these, I mean, as you say, Filipinos have been coming to the United States to do farm labor for the entire history of there being farms in Texas and Florida and places like that. It literally is what the entire agricultural system has always been based on. But we, for some reason, have this blindness. We, you know, erase the past history, as you say, so that we always look at it as a new phenomenon that's happening now when in fact, like, no, we've actually built our society on this, you know, migrant labor force. And it's very hard that migrant labor force, A, because, you know, especially in the case of

farm laborers, it's often criminalized. But also, it's as you say, it's hard to be an immigrant. We valorize it so much, but it's hard to leave your family, come to a new place. It's isolating. It's, you know, there's all these disadvantages to it and we don't see it for what it is, which is not something new, but a part of American life. Absolutely. And you brought up agricultural labor. That's something that also intersects with many different Asian American histories from the late 19th century into the 20th century. And in fact, during that time period, late 19th, early 20th century, so much of the Asian immigration to the United States was connected to agricultural labor, sugar plantation labor in Hawaii, and also

agricultural migrant labor up and down the U.S. West Coast. And in states like California, Japanese Americans distinguish themselves through the growing of strawberries and snap beans. And Chinese laborers transform tens of thousands of swampland into arable land and also made many agricultural innovations in terms of the cherry industry, the citrus industry. And we don't think about that when we think about their immigration, in part because, as we've been discussing, these Asian American histories and their contributions to the U.S. economy have been neglected and obscured. Yeah. OK, well, we have to take a quick break. We're way overdue. My producer is going to kill me. So we'll be right back with more Catherine Choi. So we're back with Catherine Choi. So I have so many more questions for you. We talked about the long history of

Filipino nurses in the United States. I find it really interesting that around that same time, you know, we had, or over the same period, we had the stereotype of Asian Americans being associated with disease, as you say. That's a really fascinating contrast to me. Where did that stereotype come from? That stereotype has a long history that goes back over 150 years and is as old as the first mass wave of Asian migration to the United States. So in the mid-19th century, when there was a mass migration of Chinese to California after the discovery of gold in Northern California in 1848, and we started to see within just a few decades the association of Chinese bodies with smallpox and Chinese bodies with cholera and Japanese American farmers with typhoid. And so these kinds of diseases, smallpox, cholera,

of diseases, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague, leprosy, would often be used as a rationale by our American politicians to restrict the immigration of Asians to the United States. And this also resulted not only in restrictive immigration laws, but also in the violent treatment of Asian immigrants, Asian Americans in the United States beginning in the second half of the 19th century. So what we're seeing in 2020 to the present moment is hardly new, but really has this longer history. Yeah, something I've been thinking about more is how sometimes certain ideas or images embed themselves deep within a culture, and then they come out in surprising ways i think about this is a weird example but i think about rick caruso right now is running for the mayor of los angeles right and this guy when he runs he is evoking ronald reagan like he looks like ronald reagan he sounds like ronald reagan and he's tapping into a deep thing in you know everyone's

all california blue state right this guy this guy's a Republican he's running, but he's tapping into this deep cultural memory of this man that people loved back in the sixties, you know, 60 years ago. And it just makes me think about how, how certain ideas embed themselves and they can arise again. And I know that's a very strange comparison, but it's just what I think about when you say that, you know, the rise in violence that we've seen, the rise of associating Asian Americans with COVID-19 is like, has been lurking under the surface as something that was able to arise again. I don't know if that makes any sense to you. It makes a lot of sense. And there is that experience and this longer history of politicians using similar rhetoric, similar scripts. And it becomes a way to say,

there's something wrong with this group of people. There's this narrative that they are inferior, they're non-American because they're dirty and diseased. And so there are certain words that remain, that association of filth with ethnic enclaves and Asian American bodies can remain. And even though we don't know where they necessarily come from, we can hear it and it's evoking that longer history and the power of those words. And it comes from politicians, but it also comes from popular culture. And in the late 19th century, early 20th century, a form of popular culture was world's fairs in various cities in the United States where masses of people, you know, the general American public would come and it was a form of entertainment, but also considered a form of education that here are white Americans, European Americans at the top of a racial hierarchy of civilization. And here are examples of other peoples and the ways that they live, which is not as civilized, which are inferior. You see that in World's Fairs, you see it in political cartoons during that time period,

which would depict Asians as a threat to the United States because they threatened white labor and because they were dirty, diseased, and uncivilized. And many of us may not recall these things, right? Yeah. What political cartoons or what world's fairs are you talking about? And yet some of those images can come up in our consciousness. And that's where that history comes from, from politics, from culture, from economic competition. Yeah. I mean, when I, it's just a very silly example, but I grew up watching Looney Tunes,

and Looney Tunes are a cartoon from the 40s, right? And a lot of, and many decades, but the ones I remember watching were 40s and 50s. And what are those based on? They're based on vaudeville in many cases. They're based on vaudeville comedies, stock characters, things like that. Bugs Bunny is a vaudeville character, right? And what were vaudeville comedy acts based on?

The stereotypes of the time. And so these ideas can sort of leech through and you know embed themselves in these in these deep ways that you don't uh you know it's the classic example of of uh mickey mouse descending from minstrel show characters you know and like with the big white gloves right um and these sorts of things, like they can stick around and exert their influence on you in ways that are hard to consciously be aware of, but can still, you know, affect ideas today. Yeah, absolutely. In the book, popular culture is an important realm for the erasure of Asian Americans and Asian American experience and also the perpetuation of misunderstanding. So to give you an example, I mean, you were talking about

cartoons, but when we think about the golden age of Hollywood as another example of popular culture. This was an age where we had Hollywood films where Asians and Asian Americans were erased. They couldn't even play themselves. There was the phenomenon of yellow face where an Asian character would be portrayed by a white person in very exaggerated, almost cartoonish features, the slanted eyes or aspects to make them look extra menacing. And that was how Hollywood saw Asians and Asian Americans. And there were some exceptions, but those were exceptions. And it's still in the 21st century. There have been lots of improvements and a lot of breakthroughs. But representation in popular culture is still a challenge for Asian Americans, even today, what was the, why was the reason that it became to be used? And what are the sort of political ramifications of its use? Because it's a different way of thinking about

this group or these groups than we had had, you know, in the earlier periods that we've been talking about. Yeah, that's a great question. We take this term Asian American for granted today, and it has this popular connotation that, well, Asian American, it's an American of Asian descent. But this is a term that also has a history. It's a history that comes out in the late 1960s. This is a term that was created by two graduate students at UC Berkeley, Emma Gee and Yuji Ichiyoka, in 1968, and when they formed the Asian American Political Alliance. And to identify and call themselves Asian American was very meaningful at that time because prior to the late 1960s, most people would refer to Asian Americans as Orientals.

And the problem with Orientals was that it really commodified Asians and Asian Americans as things like Orial vases or rugs. It sounds like a foreign car. You know, it sounds like we repair all cars foreign and domestic. It's like that's a type of thing. You can go to an oriental restaurant or an oriental grocery store. It doesn't sound like a, it sounds consumerist rather than a type of person. Yes.

And it also, right, it speaks to something exotic or something other. Yeah. But if it wasn't Oriental, there would be racial slurs like, quote unquote, Jap or gook. And these were purposefully used with the intent to harm and to demean and to make Asians naming Asian Americans, and often in derogatory ways, and we are going to name ourselves. We're going to claim an identity that brings our various groups together, because by that time, there were more Asian Americans who were born in the United States rather than immigrants by the mid-20th century. And even though their parents, that immigrant generation, they may not have seen eye to eye.

I'm Chinese, I'm Japanese, I'm from this province, I'm from this prefecture. But their children were going to school together. They were growing up as Asian American, and they understood that the United States was their home, but they were facing serious employment discrimination. and bullying in their schools. They were observing that no one knows about Asian American history. Yeah. Even World War II internment, which we might take for, of Japanese Americans, which we might take for granted today. That was not taught in the post-World War II immediate period. in the post-World War II immediate period.

And these second-generation Chinese, Japanese, Filipino-Americans realized that they shared more in common with one another. And they were demanding a recognition of their American-ness, but also their Asian-American-ness. So I didn't realize that, that the rise of that term indicates a shared identity in a way among folks from those different backgrounds. Is that right? That's right. That's right. Because really prior to that time, Asian-Americans, meaning these groups, these very diverse groups, they didn't necessarily see themselves as sharing a common history or identity. They were coming from different places. They spoke different languages.

And yet they found themselves being treated in very similar ways. And unfortunately, in racist and discriminatory ways. And they realized by the 1960s that, you know, this strategy where Japanese Americans used to say, well, we're not like Chinese Americans, so don't treat us like that. That strategy wasn't working anymore. And even during World War II, if you were Asian American, but you were not Japanese, people were wearing buttons. I am Chinese. I am Korean. I'm Filipino. Because Americans couldn't tell Asian Americans apart. And they realized they had these similarities and they had to speak up against anti-Asian violence and hate and racial injustice overall. Yeah, that's fascinating. So now, because it's still important to keep those specific identities as well, but there's also like a real value in recognizing, yeah, that shared struggle and those shared touch points.

And also, I imagine the shared experience of growing up in America as a second or third generation immigrant that you'd like, hey, that's actually something new. That's not something that is, or that is something that's specific to America, right? That experience of growing up in Los Angeles as the children of Asian immigrants and like, okay, well, our parents are from different countries, but we actually do share a common experience that would be useful to talk about, right? Yes.

Yes. And that's what they realized when they started to be in similar spaces and especially in college classrooms. And I should also add that they were also this pioneering group of Asian Americans with Asian American referring to a political sensibility of racial justice were very much influenced by the black freedom struggle, by the Chicano movement and the American Indian movement. And so this term Asian American is a term of identification, but also came out of political struggle for racial justice in the 1960s that was connected with those movements and international movements of decolonization as well. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because, you know, the experience of Black Americans is, you know, always sort of in the back of my mind as we have these conversations, as I'm sure they are for you too. And I'm curious if there were, you know, moments of solidarity

between, you know, the Asian and Black communities in, you know, the period of the civil rights struggle of the 60s and et cetera? Are there intersections of those struggles? Absolutely. So we now have ethnic studies today. It came out of struggles in the late 1960s when newly defined Asian Americans were in solidarity with the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front

at universities and colleges like San Francisco State College and University of California, Berkeley. And they were in solidarity that we needed to have a curriculum that was inclusive and that was relevant to the communities in which our institutions live and serve. And I point out in the book that that Asian Black solidarity didn't just happen in 1968 and 1969, that there's actually also a 150 plus year history of that solidarity as well. Going back to 1869 with Frederick Douglass's speech, supporting Chinese immigration to the United States and supporting the naturalization of Chinese immigrants here. It goes back to African American soldiers who were in the US military, who were colonizing the Philippines and recognized, some of them recognized that

what they were doing was not democratic. And they could see parts of their experience in the colonization of the Philippines and Filipinos who were struggling for their own independence against Spain. We see this during Japanese-American internment when some Japanese-Americans who were interned, one oral history I really enjoyed listening to was of a Japanese American young man who was incarcerated in California. And a Black family who his family had lived next door to came, the Marshalls, they came to visit him in his relocation center to bring his family apple pie a la mode. It was a very hot day and they had to give him and his family the apple pie a la mode through a fence. But they did it out of friendship.

And sometimes those very mundane moments of friendship are really quite extraordinary and historically significant and remind us that even though our communities are often pitted against one another, that there's another way of reimagining both our past, present, and future. Yeah, I was going to say that those stories are so important because it's been the strategy of white supremacy in America to pit groups against each other. That's part of the, in my understanding, and you tell me if you disagree, but that's part of the origin of the model minority myth is to contrast and say, look, you know, contrast one group with another and say, hey, these folks are lazy, these folks are doing it right, et cetera, while still trapping both in stereotypes. And, you know, solidarity can be the antidote to that, ideally.

be the antidote to that, ideally. Yes. The model minority, which became popular also around this time period of the late 1960s, early 1970s, it came about by exactly pitting Asian Americans against African Americans and saying that Asian Americans are a model minority who don't complain, don't ask for government help, and in contrast to Black Americans. And it's not to say that there isn't any tension between Asian American and Black communities. There are, and we need to continue to talk about them and work through them. to talk about them and work through them. But what you're talking about, this strategy of divide and conquer, is a longstanding strategy. And we see this with not solely Black Americans and Asian Americans,

but we see this with various groups of Asian Americans, white Americans, Mexican Americans in agricultural labor. Yeah. So to try to control wages, you bring in another group and you pit them against one another. So they're fighting against one another as opposed to a kind of solidarity that recognizes that there are broader forces working towards their common exploitation. I mean, divide and conquer is the tool of those in power always, right? Whether it's, I mean, you just knitted so many things together, whether it's in labor struggles,

in racial equity struggles, like pitting groups against each other and saying, no, don't team up because you don't really get along. You actually hate each other. You know, the people organizing the labor union, oh, they're, you know, they're, oh, they, they're racist, they're, et cetera. You know, they're trying to create those divisions and wedge people. That is the strategy, no matter what dimension you're looking into. And solidarity is always the cure. I think solidarity is a cure and it's so so hard, though, to get to that point. of our histories and our experiences not being viewed as part of the American experience, always sort of at the outside looking in. And I hope my, my books and my research and the research of Asian American historians, Asian American studies, scholars, librarians, archivists,

and community organizers and journalists. We've been working really hard these past couple of years to challenge this. And do you feel that we're seeing movement on that front? I mean, I feel that, you know, I've seen more and more tellings of these histories. We've seen more and more depictions of them in pop culture, which is, I think it's easy to overrate progress in pop culture as representing progress in society at large. I think that does happen. Oh, hey, we got some pretty, we got two or three good movies. The problem's solved. Probably not, but you know, it's progress nonetheless and very important. And I don't know, have you, do you feel that, that we are starting to see progress in telling these histories? that I think so many different groups of people in various media education,

various industries in the government are proceeding with a sense of urgency, personal urgency, family urgency, community, national urgency. I know I wrote this book because I'm concerned. I'm really concerned about the kind of world and the kind of United States of America we're leaving our children and future generations. And one way to get to this solidarity is to confront these histories. And sometimes these histories are uncomfortable, but then sometimes when you look at themes of solidarity and friendship and working together,

there are also these moments and spaces of joy and hopefulness. Yeah. And those are things we really need done more than ever. That's a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much for that. The book is called Asian American Histories of the United States. You can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books or wherever books are sold. Catherine, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was so wonderful having you. Thank you. It was such a pleasure to be here. Well, thank you once again to Catherine Choi for coming on the show.

If you want to pick up her book, once again, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And of course, if you want to support the show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. That's patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And I want to thank everyone who supports the show at the $15 a month level. That's Adrian, Alexi Batalov, Alison Lipperado, Alan Liska, Ann Slagle, Antonio LB, Aurelio Jimenez, Beth Brevik, Brayden, Brandon Sisko, Camu and Lego, Charles Anderson, Chris Staley, Courtney Henderson, David Condry, David Conover, Drill Bill, Dude with Games, L, I mean M, excuse me, Hillary Wolkin, Jim Shelton, Julia Russell, Kelly Casey, Kelly Lucas, Lacey Tyganoff, Lisa Matulis, Mark Long, Miles Gillingsrood, Mom Named Gwen, Mrs. King Coke, Nicholas Morris, Nikki Battelli, Newyagik Ippoluk, Paul Mauck, Rachel Nieto, Richard Watkins, Robin Madison, If you want to join their ranks, head to patreon.com. Of course, I want to thank our producer, Sam Rodman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song,

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