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The “model minority myth” was created to drive a wedge between Asian communities and Black, Brown, and working-class white communities in the 1970s. It has continued to define how pan-Asian communities in the United States are seen and treated: resented and perpetually seen as outsiders in the fight for racial and economic justice. It wasn’t always like this.
For nearly two centuries, working-class, pan-Asian immigrants were the majority of migrants coming to the Western Hemisphere: Chinese railroad workers, South Asian busboys in Harlem, Yemeni auto workers in Detroit, Filipinx and Punjabi farmworkers in California and the Southwest, or the indentured servants in British South American and Caribbean colonies. These were all poor, working-class immigrants from across the Asian continent.
Working-class, pan-Asian communities have historically been integrated and in solidarity with Black and Brown communities. For example, in Harlem, New Orleans, and the Central Valley of California, South Asian migrant workers integrated into Puerto Rican, Dominican, Black, and Mexican families and communities for protection against white supremacist violence and economic exploitation.
In California in the 1970s, Chinese immigrant students and families fought alongside Latine families for language access in public schools, which resulted in a favorable Supreme Court ruling.
Japanese and Filipinx farmworkers fought side-by-side with Mexican farmworkers in the largest and most historic struggles to unionize farmworkers.
Southeast Asians fled war and genocide in the 1970s and ’80s and settled in largely Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican communities in Massachusetts, New York, California, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Minnesota, forming shared struggles around equitable education access.
This is a very different reality than the mainstream perception that pan-Asian communities include mostly wealthy business owners, doctors, and engineers who are actively working to assimilate into whiteness. White Americans, particularly within academia and mass media, have perpetuated the model minority myth to weaken the organizing for racial and economic justice by Black and Brown communities and create further roadblocks for working-class Asian people to contribute to those struggles.
The Current Political Moment
We are experiencing the biggest surge in white supremacist, Zionist, and Christian nationalist forces in decades. These forces are joined by multiple Asian right-wing forces emerging internally from our own pan-Asian communities, such as the Chinese American Right and South Asian Hindutva (Hindu supremacists). More and more, Asian communities are becoming a key flank for right-wing forces across the U.S. in a multitude of contentious political issues. Despite Asian communities’ long histories of working-class and multiracial solidarity, these Asian right-wing forces have a dominating influence on public narratives about pan-Asian communities. While Asian conservatism in the U.S. has long existed, groups like the Chinese American Right and South Asian Hindutva have become more effective in how they organize and mobilize Asian communities and more strategic in how they create powerful alliances with white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and Zionist agendas.
There are many examples of these strategic allyships across the nation. White supremacist groups convinced Chinese American plaintiffs to join their Supreme Court case to strike down affirmative action. In California, Hindu supremacists have pushed for the exclusion of caste history and caste-based oppression from textbooks, and urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to strike down a bill that would have banned caste discrimination throughout the state. Christian nationalists have recruited conservative Asian faith-based groups to remove the inclusion of LGBTQ+ friendly curricula from public schools in Michigan. Wealthy Asian landlords have worked alongside corporate real estate lobbyists to end eviction moratoriums in California. Most recently, Hindu nationalists both abroad and in the U.S. have made public their deep ideological and political alliances with Zionist forces in Israel.
The growth of these proto-fascist movements has serious consequences for all people in the U.S., regardless of race, ethnic background, and class, but the connecting line is clear: The most systems-marginalized, the most poor and working-class parts of all our communities are most negatively impacted while also being misinformed and recruited by right-wing formations.
White supremacists, Christian nationalists, and Zionists are once again using pan-Asian communities as the driving wedge against social justice movements, making it more difficult to retain historical, hard-earned, progressive wins. This is once again creating division and hindering progressive organizing and multiracial solidarity. We are the co-directors of Grassroots Asians Rising (GAR), a national network of 34 grassroots organizations rooted in working-class, pan-Asian immigrant and refugee communities. Our member organizers are directly dealing with the ramifications of the right-wing’s growing power. We know that if we want to win the material changes our communities need and deserve, we need to build a movement powerful enough to make justice inevitable.
To deepen our collective understanding about the growing contingents of right-wing forces within Asian and Asian American communities, GAR has facilitated conversations for organizers to share their experiences. Through this, we uncovered the vast infrastructures of right-wing forces and seen how far their influences have reached within Asian communities. Many organizers raised concerns about the prevalence of right-wing ideas in our communities through in-language content, local ethnic media, and cultural and religious community spaces. These are the spaces that many people flock to in order to build relationships and have a strong sense of belonging.
According to Pew Research Center, Asians are predicted to be the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing the size of the Latine population. Working-class, pan-Asian communities are rapidly growing in critical battleground states such as Michigan, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Various right-wing forces have already begun organizing in working-class, pan-Asian communities, including Christian nationalists recruiting from Asian churches, temples, and mosques and the Republican Party building “community centers” in ethnic enclaves with the hopes of swaying elections.
There are few grassroots organizing groups made up of directly impacted people leading and directing the work of providing social services or engaging in advocacy and policy in pan-Asian communities. This void is currently being filled by the Asian conservative and right-wing forces peddling a proto-fascist agenda.
Organizing is the clearest and most consistent tool we have at our disposal to change this dynamic, but it is also the method of systems change that has had the least investment. The ecosystem for community organizing in working-class, pan-Asian communities has to grow and meet the needs of the demographic trends across the U.S. Otherwise, we are left responding to one crisis after another, and with weak infrastructure for leaderful and powerful movements.
If we want to build a multiracial democracy, which is needed now more than ever, our movements must support base building that addresses working-class, pan-Asian issues. In fight after fight, we are witnessing the use of pan-Asian communities to advance right-wing and proto-fascist agendas. Building shared working-class interests is how we can build unified fronts for a multiracial democracy. If we don’t, progressive causes will continue to lose.
As a network, GAR is committed to nationally uniting local organizations to grow our capacity to effectively organize working-class, pan-Asian communities. This includes developing resources for in-language political education to raise political consciousness; building up strong, local organizations committed to building working-class membership bases; and establishing political and strategy alignment in working-class pan-Asian communities.
Asian Americans have a history of working-class struggles, anti-war movements, solidarity, and powerful organizing. With Asian communities growing across the U.S., we must remember our history of organizing for working-class interests and solidarity, and return to the roots of our working-class, migrant, pan-Asian communities. We must take continued action in the current political moment we find ourselves in.
Our ancestors grounded themselves in their working-class interests when they built meaningful relationships and mutual solidarity with Black and Brown working-class communities and won important racial, immigrant, education, and economic protections that we all continue to benefit from. Let’s remember and continue this legacy.
| Roksana Man has been organizing with Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) since 2003, when members of her family and community were detained and deported through Special Registration. Since then, Roksana has been a youth organizer, organizing working-class, immigrant Desi youth in New York City public high schools, fighting to end the school-to-prison/deportation and low-wage-jobs pipelines. She later served as DRUM’s director of strategy and training, leading racial, immigrant, and education justice campaigns, and the political education and organizing trainings of organizers, leaders, and DRUM members. From 2016–2022, Roksana served as a board member of United We Dream, and currently sits on the advisory board of the Immigrant Justice Network. Roksana is the national co-director of Grassroots Asians Rising, which she leads with the firm belief that it is the responsibility of our movements to center the leadership of impacted, frontline communities to direct and lead change. Roksana is a Bangladeshi-born immigrant raised in New York City, and the proud daughter of a domestic worker and a taxi driver. |
| Cathy Dang has organized in the labor movement and community-led development for nearly two decades. While serving as the Executive Director of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, she developed a robust organizational infrastructure to lead campaigns on housing justice and played a critical role in shaping national alliances toward building greater political alignment on racial, gender, and economic justice. Dang is currently the national co-director of Grassroots Asians Rising, a national network of organizations building the power of working-class pan-Asian communities. She has been a freelance consultant to various organizations and foundations, building their capacity through one-on-one coaching for organizers, facilitation on strategy and organizational models, and program development. She is originally from Ridgewood, Queens, New York, and Los Angeles, and is a daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugee parents who raised her in their nail salon in downtown Brooklyn. She speaks English and Cantonese. |
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