Anti-Asian violence and US imperialism

Abstract

The early months of 2020 witnessed a spike in anti-Asian violence in the United States, which many commentators attributed to President Donald Trump’s racist remarks calling the coronavirus the ‘Chinese virus’. This essay offers a historical lens through which to understand anti-Asian racism within the current conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic and US racist state violence. It argues that anti-Asian violence should be seen not merely as episodic or as individual acts of violence targeting Asian peoples but as a structure of US settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The first half of the essay examines this history; the second half focuses on Asian American activist organisations that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence: Organizing Asian Communities and Nodutdol, to illustrate their abolitionist visions of justice and how they are finding space to enact these visions in the current moment. The essay ultimately argues for the need to approach the struggle against anti-Asian racism expansively so as to encompass the struggle for decolonisation and Black liberation.