Rallying banners: How did the terms ‘ESEA’ and ‘Asian American’ take root?
By Amy Phung
The US
Against a backdrop of historical discrimination, notably the incarceration of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and US colonisation of the Phillipines, the term Asian American first came into usage in 1968 when Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka needed a term for their student organisation to bring together activists of East and South East Asian descent. It eventually led to the formation of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA).
The Asian American community truly began to galvanise after the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man, by two white men who racialised him as Japanese. The violent attack came from the belief that the decline of the automotive industry in Detroit was the fault of Japanese car manufacturers, whose advancing production was seen as a threat. The two men only received a $3,000 fine and served no time for Chin’s murder. His wedding was due to take place that month.
Racialised violence towards Japanese Americans coupled with the fact that the two murderers incorrectly racialised Chin as Japanese, revealed the common ground on which the Asian American community stood. It didn’t matter how you identified, a target was on your back. Protests arose across the US as Asian Americans spurred into political action in reaction to the light sentencing received by the two white men.
The Asian continent encompasses a wide range of countries, 48 to be exact. The term Asian American, as it pertains to its current day usage, is ineffective in representing the varied experiences of the vast ethnic backgrounds of those who identify as Asian. As a result, it can contribute to the erasure of certain communities in political discourse. A call for solidarity by all Asian Americans for the Sikh community in light of the April 2021 shooting of eight Sikh workers at a Fedex facility in Indianapolis highlights the erasure that South Asian communities feel in the US.
Credit: NBC News
Notably, however, Kamala Harris was seen as flying the flag for Asian Americans when she gained the seat of Vice President in the latest US presidential elections, bringing the term back into recognition for those of South Asian heritage. The term Asian American Pacific Islander similarly acts as a rallying banner for political organising but can flatten the varied struggles of distinct communities.
The UK
The flipside of this is the perception of ‘Asian’ in the UK that defaults mainly to those of South Asian descent. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan communities garner a higher visibility in the UK landscape whilst East and South East Asian people suffer exclusion as a result, notably on channels such as the BBC Asian Network which caters primarily to South Asian representation. The reasons for this erasure are wide-ranging, not least the centuries-long British empire-building that increased migration of South Asians to the UK. According to the latest available data, in 2016 the UK's ESEA community was about a third as big as the UK's South Asian community*. Geographic dispersal also plays a huge part, including by virtue of those in the East and South East Asian restaurant industry needing to spread out across the country to reduce competition. This has left East and South East Asians more prone to isolation and less able to organise as a community.
Another example is the deliberate government dispersal policy in 1978 of the Vietnamese Boat People (including Viet Hoa, ethnically Chinese people who lived in Vietnam) which stated that, ‘refugees were not to be allowed to cluster in large numbers in particular localities. Dispersal was to be a central component of the resettlement process.’ This meant that some 22,000 Vietnamese boat people, their lives upended and suffering the trauma of their escape from conflict, were separated and housed in smaller numbers across the UK. ‘...The policy of dispersal is now almost universally regarded as mistaken, despite its initial attraction... It has left many Vietnamese isolated from compatriots to whom they can relate and from whom they can draw support.’1
So we come to March 2020 when news breaks of a ‘China Virus’, the term that was first used to describe the virus by mainstream media before COVID-19 began gaining traction. We witnessed political dog-whistling from former US president, Donald Trump, who mockingly used the term ‘Kung Flu’, Nigel Farage tweeting, ‘Christmas cancelled, thank you China’, and the widespread and unnecessary use of East and South East Asian faces in COVID-19 reporting by various mainstream news outlets.
As we saw in the inevitable rise in attacks against the East and South East Asian community in the UK, sinophobic racism does not discriminate. This is shown in the case of Aldarico Jr Velasco, a Filipino nurse who was verbally abused by a patient who called him, ‘a f*cking Chinese c*nt.’
The scapegoating we see happening time and again towards marginalised communities in the wake of economic upheaval is exacerbated by underreporting in mainstream media.
While our Asian American counterparts have benefitted from longer term organising and a higher population density (the UK’s ESEA community, as a proportion of the overall population, is about half the size of the US’s ESEA community*), the need for a geopolitically accurate descriptor to unite East and South East Asians suffering the increased onslaught of physical and verbal abuse arose around the time that we started campaigning these issues. It didn’t look like anyone had used it before but the acronym ‘ESEA’ fit perfectly. besea.n was born.
I view the term ESEA as a call to action. It’s not just a catch-all but a reminder that every word in the acronym has equal standing. The latest census and just about every data collection questionnaire generally shows “Chinese” and “Asian-other” as the only two available categories to choose if you are someone of East or South East Asian descent. This article will shed further light on why we need more accurate and comprehensive data collection. As advocates of fair representation, it’s important we don’t contribute to the continued erasure of other East and South East Asian communities besides Chinese in our usage of this term.
The best policy is to either be specific, or be intentional by inviting all members of the ESEA community to the table whenever this term is used. We must also recognise that Central Asians can also be racialised as ESEA and therefore affected by the racial profiling of our communities.
An additional benefit of using the terms ‘Asian Americans’ and ‘ESEA’ is to do away with the previously common but outdated usage of ‘oriental’ to define people living in ‘the Orient’, generally regarded as North Africa and Asia. Whilst it is generally acceptable to describe objects as oriental, applying this to people plays into the history of exoticism, misrepresentation and dehumanisation. Scholars such as Edward Said determined that the construct of ‘orientalism’ was one of the drivers that justified colonisation of numerous countries by the British empire that, at its largest point, covered 25% of the world. Unbelievably, London’s Metropolitan police continue to use the term ‘Oriental’ in data collection due to the fact they do not include East and South East Asians as ethnicities in their Crime Reporting Information System. Although we want to believe we are over the heady days of pillage and kidnap by British imperialism, we are still feeling the effects of the hangover.
The false dichotomy that labels the West as civilising and superior whilst everything else is inferior is deeply embedded in the fabric of our consciousness, fuelling ignorance and enmity to this day.
The racism suffered by various members of the ESEA community is varied, unique and intersectional, with sinophobia only one part of it. The history of colonialism and imperialism that continues to harm communities is rooted in exploitation. Capitalism relies on the dehumanisation of our communities for the financial gain of the top 1% who hold control and power over our largest institutions. By continually presenting the existence of systemic racism as a debate rather than a truth, the beneficiaries of capitalism are able to continue to exploit and thrive. This was most starkly demonstrated by the recent Sewell report, which completely disregarded the systemic racism suffered by our community laid out in our collective response with other ESEA organisations. In fact, the Sewell report posits a falsehood that the perceived ‘success’ of Chinese and South Asian communities in the UK shows that we are entering a post-racial society and that the UK should be seen as a ‘model of racial equality’. My use of Chinese is intentional because par the course, South East Asian and other East Asian communities are almost completely erased from the report.
Shows such as Bling Empire that celebrate opulence can risk playing into the narrative that East and South East Asians are part of a privileged subset with hardly any exploration in popular media examining the racism and high unemployment that is suffered by Asian Americans. The one-dimensional portrayal exacerbates the view that ESEAs and Asian Americans are not prone to oppression and are therefore often overlooked in anti-racism discourse.
The ‘model minority’, a term coined by sociologist William Petersen in 1966 to wash over the discrimination faced by Japanese-Americans in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, was a myth deliberately created to gaslight Black communities into believing their hardships and traumas were down to personal and cultural failings rather than systemic racism, as comprehensively evidenced in Ava DuVernay’s film, 13th. The Sewell report demonstrates that the model minority myth continues to be used to weaponise ESEA and South Asian communities against the black community here in the UK.
Despite being a construct and false in its assertions, the myth can be upheld by members within and outside the ESEA community. Since it is predicated on anti-blackness, it is something we must acknowledge and push back on wherever we see it exulted. The supposed ‘protections’ afforded by believing ESEA successes are achieved through hard work alone, completely ignoring the discrimination faced by marginalised communities on a systemic level, serves to uphold the systems of oppression that hold us all in place.
Subscribing to the model minority myth is not a safety net, it is a cage that the ESEA community are now using our collective voice to counter, but it isn’t the first time. When Chinese sailors, who settled in Liverpool after serving in the British Merchant Navy on behalf of the Allied forces during the Second World War, began protesting for better working conditions, they were forcibly deported. Many had families, with children waking up into broken families after their parents were taken in the night. The lack of education around the history of ESEAs in the UK, the ignorance of the abuse and injustices towards not just ESEAs but all marginalised communities, creates a divided nation where inter-community tensions flourish, turning attention away from the exploitation that we all suffer from. Emma Dabiri writes in What White People Can Do Next: ‘As the rich get richer, the rest of us will be left in increasingly precarious situations… It is crucial to connect the dots between the origins of global capitalism, colonialism and the invention of race. Doing so highlights the fictitious nature of race, as well as revealing the motivations and incentives behind its creation and upkeep.’
Constantly debating whether racism exists and the grind culture that exhausts us conveniently gives us no time to address the fact that billionaires have increased their wealth by over a quarter during the pandemic. As they swim in combined fortunes of up to £7.8 trillion, businesses have closed and frustrations exacerbated by lockdown have increased the abuse, harassment and murder of members of the ESEA community. Black and Asian NHS staff, who make up 21% of the workforce, ended up constituting 63% of the deaths due to COVID-19 during the first lethal months of the pandemic. More Filipino healthcare workers have died in the UK than in the Philippines, with research shown by Kanlungan revealing that they are often tasked with the most risky work in COVID-19 healthcare.
Investigations are underway regarding the government’s lack of transparency around rewarding Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) contracts. Reuters reports: ‘The National Audit Office said last year there had been a lack of transparency and a failure to explain why certain suppliers were chosen, or how any conflict of interest was dealt with, in procurement deals between March and the end of July worth about 18 billion pounds ($25.23 billion). Opposition politicians have accused the government of running a “chumocracy” with contracts, including for the purchase of what turned out to be unusable PPE, and appointments made to those with family or business links to those in power… The Good Law Project, a campaign group, and three opposition politicians brought a judicial review seeking information about undisclosed deals with firms that had no medical procurement expertise and, in some cases, delivered defective protective equipment.’
It’s hard not to draw a line between the dehumanisation of marginalised communities and the funnelling of funds meant for the protection of the most vulnerable towards the most powerful and wealthy.
I woke up this morning and, against better advice, checked social media. When I saw the video of an Asian American man being punched in the face at a ‘White Lives Matter’ rally in Los Angeles, I thought about Grace Lee Boggs. She was a Chinese-American social activist and feminist, who once said, ‘Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings… Instead of trying to resurrect or reform a system whose endless pursuit of economic growth has created a nation of material abundance and spiritual poverty… we need to build a new kind of economy from the ground up.’ ~ The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs
How far have we come since her death in 2015, that violent white supremacist rallies still happen, Black men are brutally murdered by law enforcement, police officers photograph and share images of murdered Black women, Muslim people are still treated as terrorists, and elderly Asians are abused? How can we recover from this state of extreme ‘spiritual poverty’, as Boggs called it? While every instance of interpersonal racism and other forms of identity-based violence should be recognised and called out, we must remember that the systems that hold them in place exist to exhaust all of us and are designed to keep us weary, dependent on convenience and focussed on what is directly in front of us, and not on the matter at hand, that billionaires should not exist. The wealth they have amassed and government complicity in their upkeep is at the cost of our livelihoods, our environment and our humanity.
*Data Sources: American Community Survey 2019 and the Annual Population Survey 2016. An undefined margin of error must be taken account when considering population data due to insufficient disaggregated data. Credit to Dr. Bernice Kuang, PhD in demography and social statistics for obtaining these statistics.
Thanks to Sandra Yee for advice on article content.