We can’t talk about anti-Asian racism without talking about anti-Palestinian racism

 

On the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, Asians in Canada must reaffirm solidarity with Palestinian brethren

This Asian Heritage Month, we must urgently remind ourselves that — in the words of novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen — Palestine is in Asia. 

As Asians in the settler-colonial nation of Canada, this simple fact has profound implications for our reflections, histories, and collective obligations in this moment. We cannot in good faith discuss anti-Asian racism without reckoning with the ongoing 19-month-long Western-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians — a West Asian people so dehumanized and discriminated against that those supporting their collective rights in Canada have faced unprecedented criminalization, surveillance, expulsion, administrative reprisal, and workplace repercussions. To excise Palestinians from Asian diasporic demands for justice is to betray the principles and struggles that necessitated organizing around the Asian Canadian identity in the first place. This is because, at least in part, anti-Palestinian racism is anti-Asian racism.

Indeed, Asian ethnic studies (and frameworks like Orientalism that we use to make sense of the lived experiences of Asians in the diaspora) would not exist in the way that they do without the intellectual work of scholars and activists who resisted anti-Palestinian racism and colonialism. It is therefore an urgent task to excavate the deep historical, cultural, political, and legal ties between the social construction of anti-Asian racism and anti-Palestinian racism in the Western imagination. Further, we must reckon with the obligations that flow from that knowledge, at a time when the most brutal colonial violence imaginable is being enacted on the Palestinian people in their homelands by the state of Israel, ultimately aimed at their forcible displacement and demographic replacement.

Whether of the Asian American or Asian Canadian variety, Asian ethnic studies owes an enormous intellectual debt to Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said and his 1978 magnum opus, Orientalism.  (more...)

We can’t talk about anti-Asian racism without talking about anti-Palestinian racism