Announcements

1. Announcements • Papers back Tues • Midterm study guide available Tues • No class Th 1/3 • Midterm Exam T 10/15 • Community Engagement Papers! • Describe event • Relate to key themes, questions, readings of class • How does this event present a sense of Asian American identity and community? How is it an attempt by Asian Americans to make home in San Diego?

2. Who Killed Vincent Chin? Yellow Power

3. Politics & Identity • Identity Politics  • Your social identity determines your politics • Continuing logic of racialization  ALL people of color are the same • Politics of Identity  • Challenging logic of racialization  we are working together in response to hegemony • Choosing to identify with each other and work together in political projects because of shared social positions and experience

4. Politics of Identity • From Oriental to Yellow Power to Third World Front • SFSU strikes as moment to (re)create Asian American identity • Rejecting being labeled as Oriental • Oriental as term that implies all Asians are the same • Embrace of black power model • But not all Asians are “yellow” • Recognition of solidarity with other minority groups because of issues of center & periphery • Third World Front

5. Third World Alliances • 1st world – developed capitalist nations; US & Western Europe • 2nd world – developed socialist nations; USSR & PRC • 3rd world – newly decolonized, developing/underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, & Latin America • Third World Front  recognition that racialization internationally and capitalist expansion affects domestic racial hegemonies Representatives from AA movement, Black Panthers, & Raza Movement asserting TWLF

6. QUESTION 1 Who was Vincent Chin? Why was his life and death pivotal to Helen Zia’s decision to become a political activist in the Asian American community?

7. Who was Vincent Chin?

8. Justice for Vincent Chin • Holding Ebens & Nitz accountable • Discrepancy of punishment for white plaintiffs versus African American (Zia 60) • Insisting on diversity of Asian America • Not all Asians are the same (Zia 63) • Engaging in situational political mobilization (66) • “American Citizens for Justice” de-emphasizes it as solely an “Asian” concern • Rejecting silence & asserting that Asian Americans experience racism • Disrupting the black-white paradigm (Zia 72) • Analyzing relationship between anti-Asian violence & the economy (75) • Another version of ethnic antagonism

9. Deindustrialized Detroit “At first, the companies blamed the workers for incompetence and malaise, for wanting too much in exchange for too little. The workers, in turn, pointed to decrepit factories and machines that hadn’t been upgraded since WWII,profits that had been squandered and not reinvested in plants and people. The government was faulted for the usual reasons. Before long, however, they all found a common enemy to blame: the Japanese” (Zia 57) • Cheap Chinese workers from 1880s vs cheap Japanese cars of 1980s = racialization and capitalism

10. 1970s-80s Backlash • Economic cycle of boom & bust blamed on radical movements of 1960s; lower profits blamed on: • Increased protections & wages for workers • Too much democracy for Americans versus decrease in corporate power • “The ensuing corporate campaign was a ‘one-sided class war’: plant closures in U.S. industries and transfer of production overseas, massive layoffs in remaining industries, shifts of capital investment from one region of the country to other regions and other parts of the globe, and demands by corporations for concessions in wages and benefits from workers in nearly every sector of the economy” (Omatsu 66)

11. Who killed the Asian American movement? • According to Glenn Omatsu, who are Asian American neoconservatives and what role did they play in diminishing the Asian American Movement? • “Are the ideas of the movement alive today, or have they atrophied into relics – the curiosities of a bygone era of youthful and excessive idealism?” (Omatsu 57)