Like most kids, my world view and political analysis was almost entirely informed by my parents. I grew up with a curious sense of how race worked in the world. To my dad, we were on top of the racial hierarchy. His idea of racial order in the United States put other People of Color at the bottom, followed by white people, and he had Asian Americans at the top of the list. He would take great pride in being a “model minority.” In his eyes, Asian Americans are the smartest of any group, the hardest working, and the most desirable employees. For many years, I bought into this. My life was consumed with living up to the ideals of being an Indian-American woman. I was a part of my school’s state winning math team, I excelled in school, and I spent my weekends taking classical Indian music and dance lessons. (और ज्यादा…)

The AAPI community has long been painted as uniformly apolitical. We do not learn about Grace Lee Boggs, Richard Aoki, Larry Itliong, or Yellow Power movements in our textbooks. We are taught, if it is even included in our class syllabi, that Chinese and Filipino workers came to America looking for a better life and eventually, through hard work and determination, bootstrapped up and got it; that Japanese Americans resignedly but peacefully entered internment camps and were released from them three or four years later in much the same mental state; that it was mostly white American college students and not radical Asian American organizations that vocally, visibly, and powerfully opposed the Vietnam War. Although we learn little about black radicalism and organizing, we learn even less about AAPI radicalism and agitation for change. (और ज्यादा…)