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.

We see two women, wearing headscarves, from behind, who are embraced with their hands raised in a peace sign.

MAF | Abolitionist V. Reforms Tool

The Muslim Abolitionist Futures (MAF) Network is working towards building a world where we all live with dignity, freedom and justice. MAF’s goal is to abolish the “Global War on Terror (GWOT).” GWOT is a system of death and destruction that exists through policies, programs, and laws that target Muslim communities, communities racialized as Muslim, and more broadly Black and Brown communities targeted under the false guise of national security.  

This tool was developed by the Muslim Abolitionist Futures Network’s Abolition and Policy Working Group that is led by Muslims for Just Futures. Muslim Abolitionist Futures is a network of grassroots organizations across the country, and is co-anchored by Muslims for Just Futures, Vigilant Love, HEART Women & Girls, and Queer Crescent. The goal of this tool is to support organizations, collectives, groups, and community members committed to moving with abolitionist values in their policy advocacy efforts. The intention is to support groups and community members discern the type of policies that expand and further entrench the Global War on Terror, and the type of policies that can move us toward its abolition. The hope is to share a framework for policy objectives and oversight demands that move us toward our collaborative vision of abolition to the “Global War on Terror.”

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:

Digital Projects on the Black Experience

Please view below a list of digital projects on the Black experience: 

  1. Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History 
    University of North Carolina 
    https://vimeo.com/stonecenter 
  1. The Black Bibliography Project 
    https://blackbibliog.org/ 
  1. eBlack Champaign Urbana 
    http://eblackcu.net/portal/ 
  1. Digital Black Bibliographic Project 
    https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/175142 
  1. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman in live motion 
    https://www.upworthy.com/frederick-douglass-harriet-tubman-in-live-motion 
  1. Civil Rights Movement Archive 
    https://www.crmvet.org/ 
  1. Digital Harlem 
    http://digitalharlem.org/ 
  1. Digital Schomburg 
    https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/schomburg/digital-schomburg 
  1. Black Past Digital Archives 
    https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/digital-archives/ 
  1. Mapping Police Violence 
    https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ 
  1. Digital slave voyages 
    https://www.slavevoyages.org/ 
  1. ASALH Digital Projects listed in Fire! 
    https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/stable/10.5323/fire.4.1.0134#metadata_info_tab_contents 
  1. Digital Black History 
    https://digitalblackhistory.com/ 
  1. One million truths 
    https://www.onemilliontruths.com/ 
  1. Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library 
    https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/slavery-abolition-emancipation-and-freedom 
  1. Black Stories Matter 
    https://www.tmiproject.org/blackstoriesmatter/ 
  1. Penn State Digital Projects and Exhibits 
    https://digblk.psu.edu/ 
    https://libraries.psu.edu/about/libraries/special-collections-library/digital-projects-and-exhibits 
  1. Digital Archives in the Black Past 
    https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/digital-archives/ 
  1. Black Craftspeople Digital Archive 
    https://blackcraftspeople.org/ 
  1. Colored Conventions Project 
    https://coloredconventions.org/ 
  1. The Black Press 
    http://blackpressresearchcollective.org/ 
  1. Howard University – Black Newspapers 
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/02/27/howard-university-digitize-archives-black-newspapers-history/6882445001/ 
  1. Clark Atlanta University 
    https://www.cau.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/doctor-philosophy-humanities/The-Center-for-Africana-Digital-Humanities.html 
  1. University of Nottingham 
    https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/c3r/research/digital-projects.aspx 
  1. The digital abolitionist 
    https://www.thedigitalabolitionist.com/ 
  1. Las Vegas 
    http://digital.library.unlv.edu/aae 
  1. Center for Black Digital Research 
    https://digblk.psu.edu/ 
  1. Umbra Search: University of Minnesota 
    https://www.umbrasearch.org/ 
  1. Digital Projects Amistad Research Center 
    https://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/digital-projects 
  1. James Baldwin Digital Resource Guide 
    https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/chez-baldwin/digital-resource-guide 
  1. The Project on the History of Black Writing 
    https://projecthbw.ku.edu/ 
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.

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.

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.

Scene on the Radio | Seeing White

Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it’s an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017.

See the trailer below and listen to the entire series HERE

NBC News | 100 AAPI-led Actions Against Racism & Violence

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have reported surges in hate incidents, crimes and violence since 2020, often related to racist scapegoating because of  the pandemic. As a result, AAPIs have spurred their own communities and other leaders and industries to take action. From local fundraisers to rallies to national legislation to systemic changes in schools, AAPIs and others are developing solutions to increase visibility and fight racism. NBC News, courtesy of writers, Angela Yang, Kimmy Yam, Claire Wang, Brahmjot Kaur, has compiled 100 of the ways legislators, teens, artists, schools, athletes and many others nationwide have stepped up to fight hate and increased attacks.

View the interactive website and links to articles and news stories here.