Archives

A graphic showing the relations between organizations, artists, and works in the Asian-American Art Activism community

VAAAM | Asian American Art Activism Relational Map

The Virtual Asian American Art Museum (VAAAM) is a multi-year, inter-institutional digital humanities project initiated and led by the following major partners: the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Libraries, Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution, Bowdoin Art Museum, San Francisco State University, DePaul University, Tome, Artl@s/BasART, and Japanese American Service Committee in Chicago.

Co-curated by Yvonne Fang and Alexandra Chang, the Asian American Art Activism Relational Map is an ongoing project to visualize the interconnections and collaborative nature of Asian American art movements and the ongoing landscape of Asian American art activism. Learn more and see the map at this link.

If you’d like to add a resource to this map, fill out the survey here.

Two people are laying on their sides, heads resting on their hands as they stare at the camera. They are surrounded by the words "Feeling Asian: Youngmi Mayer and Brian Park"

Feeling Asian | Asian-American Studies 201

Feeling Asian is a weekly podcast hosted by Youngmi Mayer and Brian Park, two Asian Americans with plenty of feelings about sex, dating, survival, self-worth, and everything in between. Named a top podcast of 2021 by CNN and featured on Apple and Spotify’s homepages, Feeling Asian offers a healthy and compassionate space for Asians, Asian Americans, and Asians in America to be themselves without feeling as if their time is a fleeting moment. New episodes are released every Wednesday.

This episode features guests Dr. Russell Jeung (Professor at San Francisco State University, Founder of Stop AAPI Hate) and Anuradha Vikram (Curator and Faculty at UCLA, Co-Founder of Stop DiscriminAsian), who speak to event or timeline in Asian American history that has become misunderstood or revised along the way.

A graph showing that new Americans occupy only 4% of legislative seats

NAL | State of New American Representation: State Legislatures in 2022

This report continues the work first presented in the State of Representation 2020, created by New American Leaders as the first documented research examining immigrant representation in state legislatures by ethnicity, political party, and gender. Following an extensive data review and feedback from New American policy makers, this new report presents five recommendations that will not only help close the representation gap for New Americans and other underrepresented groups, but improve representation and policies for all communities.

Read the press release at this link and see the report below:

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Protestors wearing masks hold up signs reading "STOP AAPI HATE"

Stop AAPI Hate | 2 Years and 1000s of Voices: What Community-Generated Data Tells Us About Anti-AAPI Hate

Chinese for Affirmative Action, AAPI Equity Alliance (formerly the Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council), and San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020.  

The report looks at the nearly 11,500 hate acts reported to the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center between March 19, 2020 and March 31, 2022, and includes findings from a 2021 national survey Stop AAPI Hate conducted in partnership with Edelman Data & Intelligence.

Key findings of Two Years and Thousands of Voices include:

  • Non-criminal incidents comprise the vast majority of the harmful hate acts that AAPI community members experience. 
  • Harassment is a major problem. Two in three (67%) of nearly 11,500 incidents involved harassment, such as verbal or written hate speech or inappropriate gestures.
  • AAPI individuals who are also female, non-binary, LGBTQIA+, and/or elderly experience hate acts that target them for more than one of their identities at once.
  • One in three (32%) parents who participated in the Stop AAPI Hate/Edelman Data & Intelligence survey were concerned about their child being a victim of anti-AAPI hate or discrimination in unsupervised spaces and on the way to school.
  • Hate happens everywhere — in both large cities and small towns, in AAPI enclaves and in places where AAPI communities are few and far between.

The report also lays out Stop AAPI Hate’s approach to addressing anti-AAPI hate: education equity, community-driven safety solutions and civil rights expansion. 

Read the press release at this link and see the full report below.

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NYT Op-Docs | MINK! — My Mom Fought For Title IX, but It Almost Didn’t Happen

Fifty years ago, on June 23, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX, the 37-word snippet within the Educational Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex “under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”  

As the first woman of color elected to Congress, Ms. Mink — and her path to office — was influenced by the discrimination she experienced in her personal and professional lives. Many doors were closed to her as a Japanese American woman, and she became an activist and later a politician to change the status quo.  

In “MINK!,” Wendy Mink narrates her mother’s groundbreaking rise to power and the startling collision between the personal and political that momentarily derailed the cause of gender equity in America. After Ms. Mink’s death in 2002, Title IX was officially renamed the Patsy Takemoto Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

A graphic of two photographs with their edges torn, both depicting people holding books, above the words "SAADA Social Media Creators Workshop: South Asian American Digital Archive"

SAADA | Social Media Creators Workshop

On May 21, 2022, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) brought together fourteen social media creators at HAPPYMONDAY Studio in NYC to engage with the archive and create new content based on stories from SAADA.  

Learn more here.

OCA-GH & AALDEF | Amicus Brief on Texas Redistricting

In 2011, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), together with pro bono counsel Kaye Scholer LLP, filed an amicus brief in Perry v. Perez on behalf of the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) Greater Houston Chapter urging the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm a Texas district court’s interim redistricting plan after the Department of Justice (DOJ) contended that the Texas state legislature’s plan diluted the voting power of Asian Americans and other people of color.

AALDEF’s amicus brief in Perry v. Perez contends that the district court’s intervention was necessary because of significant evidence that the state legislature’s PlanH283 discriminates against Asian Americans, including:

  • Vietnamese American representative Hubert Vo’s district was merged with another district represented by Scott Hochberg. The House Redistricting Committee told Hochberg it intended to give him an advantage over Vo. The Asian American, Latino, and African American bloc of voters who have elected Vo since 2004 was dispersed.
  • PlanH283 greatly reduced the Asian American population in District 26 – where it is highest in the state – while doing nothing to offset the loss to Asian American representation. The district court noted this reconfiguration made District 26 “irregularly shaped” and “may have been an attempt by the State to intentionally dismantle an emerging minority district.”
  • Representative Beverly Woolley, who led the redistricting process in Harris County that led to PlanH283, excluded minority representatives from the process. She told them, “You all are protected by the Voting Rights Act and we are not. We don’t want to lose these people due to population growth in the county, or we won’t have any districts left.”

Following a trial in January 2012, the three-judge district court in Washington, DC denied Section 5 preclearance on August 28, 2012 in a lengthy and mostly unanimous opinion. In its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow Texas to put its congressional, state senate and state house redistricting plans into effect because they have not been precleared under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. (co-counsel Kaye Scholer)

Read the brief below, and see the press release at this link.

Amicus_Brief_for_the_Org._of_Chinese_Americans_Houston_Chapter

Pew Research Center | What It Means To Be Asian in America

In the fall of 2021, Pew Research Center undertook the largest focus group study it had ever conducted – 66 focus groups with 264 total participants – to hear Asian Americans talk about their lived experiences in America. The focus groups were organized into 18 distinct Asian ethnic origin groups, fielded in 18 languages and moderated by members of their own ethnic groups. Because of the pandemic, the focus groups were conducted virtually, allowing us to recruit participants from all parts of the United States.

This approach allowed the Pew Research Center to hear a diverse set of voices – especially from less populous Asian ethnic groups whose views, attitudes and opinions are seldom presented in traditional polling. The approach also allowed it to explore the reasons behind people’s opinions and choices about what it means to belong in America, beyond the preset response options of a traditional survey.

You can view the additional 30-minute video documentary produced below. See the data essay written by Pew Research Center, and read what participants had to say in their own words at this link.