Content Objective
Primary Sources: The Importance of Historical Thinking and Fact Checking
My curriculum unit will help students to reconstruct American narratives through the lives of Black and Asian Americans. Primary sources such as letters, speeches, news articles, advertisements, political cartoons, law documents, photographs, testimonies, interviews, viral videos, and artifacts will be studied. Students are encouraged to “think” like a historian as teachers guide their “fact checking” in search for the truth. Students will also discuss the relationship between primary v. secondary sources, the philosophical inquiry of what is the truth, how a fact is constructed, how to prove a fact has validity, and other research skills. Students will be given a short timeline of American history with turning point events such as the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Immigration and Nationality Act (1952 and 1965), the Korean War, the Vietnam War and 9/11. After familiarizing students with a brief American History timeline, students will be presented with boxes of treasures, a collection of mainly primary sources. Each box will also have a debatable claim(s) such as “Men should have short hair, and women should have long hair.” Teachers will then relate these primary sources to discuss historical topics such as The Queue Ordinance which forced Chinese prisoners to cut off their hair.
Why Teach American History through Asian American Lives?
Asian American history is often an afterthought, a sidebar or a footnote in our history book Because most textbook authors did not deliberately search for primary sources of Asian Americans, Asian American history is falsely portrayed as a fractured history in our textbooks. “Sanitized narratives” like the Chinese were hard-working people who helped with the transcontinental railroad erased so much anti-Chinese violence, injustice and sentiments during that time; most history books exclude tragedies such as the Rock Springs massacre of 28 Chinese miners on September 2, 1885.18 Racism was also legalized throughout American history. For instance, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790 limiting naturalized citizenship only to “free white men of good character;” the law excluded not only Chinese-Americans at that time, but also women, and all non-white groups.19 In 1868, the 14thAmendment did overturn the decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) to guarantee citizenship to African American men and women.20 But little is known about the landmark decision, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898, 30 years later), that set the precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14thAmendment making a child born in the United States automatically a citizen at birth.21 The U.S. population is becoming more diverse, but how and what we teach our students leave a lot to be desired. Today’s Asian American students need to be supported with tools and knowledge to resist harmful labels and stereotypes such as the model minority myth. Asian American students must be made visible, and that can only happen in a safe, inclusive environment with the support of teachers, students, parents, administrators and law-makers. American students – Native American, African American, Latinx, and white – will all gain from an inclusive, complex, multicultural, and difficult curriculum.
Materials on Asian American history are NOT easy to find and often "buried” and waiting for the fate of being discovered or being discarded. I read an eye-opening article about a Vietnamese American author, Long T. Bui, who wrote a book titled Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory.22 When he was in the U.S. Archive, he was unable to find anything valuable searching with the word "Vietnamese." Then an archivist told him to search the racial slur "gook," only then did he find boxes and boxes of refugee applications which he later used as a “cultural text" to reconstruct the Vietnamese American narrative. In his words, each application was a “microhistory in a small paragraph,” and archives are not just documents, but a political institution that can reinforce racist discourse.23 Asian Americans like the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Nepali and all the “Archival Others” remain as the “absent presence” in historical records until someone digs these documents up.
Who Are Asian Americans?
According to W.E.B. Du Bois, African Americans live with an identity of “twoness” or “double consciousness” with a self that is Black, and a self that is American.24 The term “Asian American” conjures a similar concept of a self that is Asian and a self that is American. Yuji Ichioka, a historian and civil rights activist, coined the term in 1968 to help Americans of Asian descent to galvanize collective political standing and power against unjust laws and treatments.25
Asian Americans politics embrace a pan-ethnic identity, less focused on national-origins and more grounded in a multicultural context. Even though Asian Americans are unlikely to constitute a majority of the U.S. population, Asian American history is also American history. According to the Pew Research Center (2020), Asian Americans come from more than 20 countries, 40 different ethnic groups, more than 100 different languages and dialects, and are now the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group of eligible voters in the United States.26
According the 2017 Census, the Asian American population is only 5.6% of the nation’s population (18.2 million people), but Asian American teachers are less than 3% of the total teaching force.27 Studies have concluded that the lack of Asian American teachers is largely due to the following: some feel inadequate to work with students of different races; some fear discrimination from students, colleagues, and parents; some face parental pressure to secure a high-paying career and; some don’t see that their ethnicity plays an important role in teaching.28 While these studies imply that Asian under-representation in teaching is the result of personal choice, the polarized Black-White way of thinking about race also sends implicit and explicit messages that Asian Americans are mainly invisible in our existing American school systems.
Furthermore, teachers of all races often struggle with issues of cultural appropriations and cultural appreciation. As a teacher, I find it problematic and racist to celebrate "exotic Asian holidays" like Chinese New Year with chopsticks, fortune cookies and costumes without a clear understanding. Don’t get me wrong, I love Lunar New Year. In the past, I had conducted lessons and passed out red envelopes to my students for good luck. Another problem that teachers of all races face is the harmful practice to designate one month to celebrate each group of people of color: September 15 to October 15 for Hispanic Heritage, November for Native American Heritage, February for Black History, and May for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage. Why May for AAPI Heritage month? The reasons are actually quite arbitrary, but were written on a 1992 resolution (Public Law 102-450) passed by Congress. The resolution designates the month of May as “Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month” for these reasons: “(1) on May 7, 1843, the first Japanese immigrants came to the United States; (2) on May 10, 1869, Golden Spike Day, the first transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed with significant contributions from Chinese pioneers…”29 As Professor Kyoko Kishimoto of Ethnic Studies at St. Cloud State University rightly noted that multicultural celebrations that work to exoticize people of color is NOT the same as anti-racist pedagogies that promotes historical thinking and guide students to question the power of authority and how race is used to rationalize inequity.30
#1 Boxing Hair: Queue (辫子) and Dredlocs [unique spelling explained below]
For the 1st box collection of primary sources which include photos, political cartoons and viral videos, I have chosen two distinct hairstyles - the queue and the dredlocs - to set the stage for critical conversations about hair identity politics in American history. Black hair is a controversial topic in our current national discourse of cultural appropriation, appreciation, and policing at work and in school. America has a long history with the mindset that white hair is normal, and black hair must be ironed, flattened, cut down and controlled. Hair is what the world looks at when trying to determine what race you are; it’s a public declaration of identity politics. Therefore, without doubt, hair discrimination is a form of racial discrimination.
The queue - a male hairstyle originally worn by the Manchu in China - is a good example of hair discrimination. In America during the 1800s, anti-Chinese immigrant laws were created to force Chinese men to cut off their queues. To understand why the queue is so political, you need to know that in China, after the Manchus took over and established the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) as the ruling class, any man who refused to wear the queue hairstyles would be executed.31 The new law demanded that men in China must shave the hair on the front of the head every 10 days, while leaving the remaining hair was grown long and braided. The queue policy targeted the Han Chinese (the previous ruling class) to submit to the Qing Dynasty rule. In the 1890s, cutting the queue was an overt act of rebellion against China.32
Similarly, dredlocs is a highly political symbol of black resistance as well as oppression. Because of the negative connotations that matted hair is “dreadful” and un-sanitized, the letter a and letter k are dropped, and “dredlocs” is used; yet the term continues to signify the fear of unholy people as they face “the dreadful power of the holy people.”33 Discriminatory rules against “black hair” were used to ban swimmers with locks from a North Carolina pool, sent employees or students home for violating the dress codes, and “color in” a black teen’s haircut with a Sharpie.34 In recent years, a law known as the CROWN Act is gaining traction to end hair discrimination. More and more people are beginning to understand that when black people wear dredlocs, they immediately face discrimination because the hairstyle is heavily criticized and associated with Rastafarian, reggae music, marijuana, and black culture as negative. But many people still refuse to understand that when white or Asian people wear dredlocs or cornrows, it is a form of cultural appropriation, an act of stealing from a minority culture, especially when white people find the hairstyle stylish while they ignore all of the discrimination black people are often subjected to. In short, black people with dredlocs face discrimination, while white people with the same hairstyle do not. That is why it is considered offensive and even racist when white or Asian people wear dredlocs. Proponents like the writer Andre Kimo Stone Guess states: “Cultural mockery - the exploitation of a culture for the benefit of members of another culture, or to the detriment of the members of the culture itself - is something else and should be called out and avoided at all cost.”35 There is a counter argument that it is acceptable for people of any race to wear dreads, because throughout world history, almost every group of people including Egyptians, Indians, Romans, Vikings, and Celts, had word the hairstyle in their tradition.
Before I continue to discuss about topics of queue and dredlocs, I want to explain a few important cases involving the rights of Asian Americans. If you ask any American citizen to name such a case, most people (regardless of their racial backgrounds) would have absolutely NO idea. If you ask a high school history teacher, they may cite the famous cases: Korematsu v. United States (1944) or Hirabayashi v. United States (1943); these two landmark cases ruled that mass internment and exclusion of Japanese Americans from joining the military during World War II were both constitutional. 36 In 1983, the Korematsu’s decision was overturned on the basis that our government intelligence agencies hid documents from our Supreme Court; these documents showed no Japanese Americans had committed any acts of treason to justify mass internment. 37 In 1998, Korematsu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2010, California passed a bill to name January 30th Fred Korematsu Day. 38 In 2018, Chief Justice John Robert wrote in his majority opinion for the case Trump v. Hawaii that the Korematsu decision was explicitly repudiated.39 In my words, the Korematsu’s decision was completely racist.
Even less known are the following 4 cases from the late 1800’s: Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan (1879), Tape v. Hurley (1885), Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). All four cases were victories for the rights of Asian Americans as well as immigrants. I have made up a mnemonic for teachers and students to be able to easily distinguish and remember these 4 cases: Ho hair, Tape school, Yick non-citizen rights, Wong natural born citizen. For 4th to 8th grade students, a more challenging way to remember could be: Ho cubic air & queue, Tape “separate not equal” doctrine for schools, Yick writ of habeas corpus non-citizen and 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, Wong jus soli children and 14th Amendment’s the Citizenship Clause, Throughout my unit, I will explain these 4 cases in more details.
Returning to the topic of queue, the case Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan (July 9, 1879, California) was a victory for Chinese American immigrants against hair discrimination. Ho Ah Kow was a Chinese laborer in San Francisco, and one of the first civil rights fighters of racist laws. On July 18, 1879, The New York Times published an article titled The Tale of a Chinaman about the conviction of Mr. Ho who violated the Cubic Air Ordinance.40 This law was established to target Chinese from living in large number; residents must be 500 cubic feet (14,000 L) of air apart to prevent “poisoning themselves by the imperfect ventilation,” and if convicted, the person had to pay a fine of $10 to $50 or be imprisoned for 5 days.41 Because a large number of convicted were Chinese and most chose imprisonment over paying the fine, another law called the Queue or Pigtail Ordinance was passed, under the pretense as a sanitary regulation, forcing prisoners to cut their hair within an inch of the scalp. Mr. Ho failed to pay his fine levied under the Cubic Ordinance; in jail, his queue was cut off under the order of Sheriff Matthew Nunan. Mr. Ho filed for damages citing that the Queue Ordinance had taken away his right to return to China because China’s penalty for not wearing a queue was execution for treason. On June 14, 1879, Circuit Court Judge Stephen J. Field ruled in Ms. Ho’s favor, stating that the law was “unconstitutional” and violated the Equal Protection Clause. Furthermore, the law was NOT done to “promote discipline or health”, but to demean and torture Chinese prisoners. Mr. Ho was awarded $10,000 in damages, and part of the ruling reads: “The cutting off the hair of every male person within an inch of his scalp, on his arrival at the jail, was not intended and cannot be maintained as a measure of discipline or as a sanitary regulation.”42
More importantly, the case Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan served as precedent for another important landmark case Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886, San Francisco) about a Chinese laundromat. Yick Wo v. Hopkins was the first case where the Supreme Court ruled that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but then administered in a prejudicial manner is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment regardless of citizenship.43 Yick Wo (益和) was a laundromat owned by a man named Lee Yick who immigrated to California in 1861, not a U.S. citizen. After 22 years of operating his laundry facility, Lee Yick was told that he could not continue to run his business in a “wooden” building without a city permit.44 Even though two-thirds of the wood-structure laundromats were owned by Chinese, NO Chinese was granted a permit while virtually all white applicants got a permit. Lee Yick continued to operate his business without a permit; he was fined $10, but refused to pay the fine which led to his imprisonment by the city’s sheriff, Peter Hopkins. Lee Yick sued for a writ of habeas corpus (wrongful imprisonment).45 In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court ruled that laws with discriminatory intent were unconstitutional. The case Yick Wo v. Hopkins had little application for almost 65 years after its ruling, and it was NEVER used to counteract segregation legalized by the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Jim Crow laws in the South. However, since the 1950s, this landmark case Yick Wo v. Hopkins has been cited in over 150 Supreme Court cases to strike down attempts to limit the rights of Blacks.46
Similarly, the landmark case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) ruling was based on the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Mr. Wong was born in the United States but his parents are not U.S. citizen. Because his parents were not employed by the Emperor of China, the U. S Supreme Court in the opinion of 6-2 majority established the concept of jus soli which grants citizenship to anyone who is born on the soil of the United States, including children of non-citizen parents. 47 In recent years, there were many legal attempts to overturn the United States v. Wong Kim Ark because of the fear that U.S-born children of undocumented immigrants would help more undocumented immigrants to gain legal status to remain in the country.
Wrestler Andrew Johnson (Dredlocs Controversy): In 2018, the world watched the humiliating haircut of a high school wrestler Andrew Johnson, and overnight he turned into a symbol of hair discrimination and racial injustice. Johnson, a 16-year-old mixed race American was given an ultimatum before a wrestling match by a white referee: Cut your dreadlocks or forfeit. A white female trainer cut off Johnson’s hair. This racially charged moment was caught on video and soon went viral on Twitter and other social media. The referee Alan Maloney told Johnson and his coaches that dredlocs are “unnatural.”48 The rulebook says: “hair, in its natural state, shall not extend below the top of an ordinary shirt collar in the back; and on the sides, the hair shall not extend below earlobe level; in the front, the hair shall not extend below the eyebrows.”49 In a photo of Johnson just before the match, he did not violate this rule. A state civil rights investigation is underway. Even though Johnson identifies himself as Puerto Rican rather than black or white, mixed-race identities are often determined by how the world see them.50
Above: photos of artworks by Lisa Yau, the author of this YNI curriculum unit. Left (1998): a collage depicting the intimacy of a Chinese man braiding another Chinese man’s queue. Center (2020): five shoe boxes labelled with the social issues: 1) Hair; 2) Race; 3) Gender; 4) Hate, 5) Problem. Right (1998): a collage depicting the exotic objectification of a Chinese woman and her lotus feet. The practice of foot binding originated among upper class court dancers in the 10th century China, popularized during the Qing Dynasty and ended in the early 20th century.51
#2 Boxing Race: Letters from Saum Song Bo and Robert Leon Bacon
The 2nd collection is labelled “Boxing Race” and focused on citizen activism with public letters, political cartoons, photos of public spaces, and law documents. Letters like Saum Song Bo’s and Robert Leon Bacon’s were acts of resistance against human injustice in America. These acts of resistance motivated future generations to use letter campaigns, sit-ins, marches and protests throughout U.S. history.
In 1885, Saum Song Bo wrote a letter to the editor of The Sun with the following sentiments: “…the word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese. I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a Statue of Liberty.”52 The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, but its pedestal needed public funding. Fundraising advertisements urged citizens to donate money to this national symbol of freedom. Three years prior, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which stopped all Chinese from immigrating to the United States. Saum Song Bow as an American citizen of Chinese descent thought the public request was an insult to Chinese American citizens. He went on to argue how Chinese Americans were being discriminated against in regards to their citizenship rights, education opportunities, and career options. Since U.S laws and the majority of its people excluded the rights of Chinese Americans, he argued America could claim the Statue of Liberty (the stature) as a symbol of freedom for all (the idea); the stature is a false pretense. Towards the end of his letter, Bo also criticized the French, who donated the Statue of Liberty to the U.S. for colonizing Vietnam, home of the Annamese and Tonkinese people. Bo wrote: “What right have the French to deprive them [Annamese and Tonkinese people] of their liberty?”53
During this time in the 1800s, violent acts against Chinese Americans were common and under reported. For instance, on October 24, 1871, a mob of around 500 white and mestizo persons entered Chinatown and attacked, robbed, and murdered Chinese residents; the massacre took place on “Negro Alley” in Los Angeles, and is arguably the largest mass lynching in American history.54 After hearing that a policeman was shot and a rancher was killed by a Chinese, an angry mob gathered and hanged an estimated 20 Chinese immigrants (some were already shot dead).55 Ten men were prosecuted for the crimes, and eight were convicted of manslaughter, but the convictions were overturned due to technicalities.56
Seventy years later, on December 2, 1955 (one day after Rosa Parks’ famous civil protest against bus segregation), Robert Leon Bacon wrote a similar letter to Virginia’s Governor Thomas B. Stanley exposing America’s hypocrisy in its claim of democracy.57 Bacon outlined how legal segregation set by Jim Crow laws in the South denied him from enlisting in the Virginia National Guard, prevented him from going to restaurants and hotels of his choice, and forced him to sit at the rear of a bus OR face being arrested, jailed and fined by a judge.58 He couldn’t look at a “white girl” without the fear that she might scream “rape” OR he would be “lynched, beaten up, arrested or electrocuted” for being black.59 In his powerful words: “Virginia is the home of presidents but it is not the home of democracy. It is the home of white supremacy. The colored people (most of them) can hardly live decently in the South.”60
Teachers may want to explain the origin of the term “Jim Crow” and how it refers to laws that restrict Black rights. In the early 1830s, the white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice was propelled to stardom performing as “Jim Crow,” a fictional caricature of a clumsy, simple minded black slave.61 Jim Crow’s popularity eventually died out, but in the late 19th century, the phrase became a blanket term for anti-black laws after the Reconstruction. Jim Crow laws included restrictions on voting rights, bans on interracial relationships, and supported clauses that allowed businesses to separate the black and white customers. The 1896 landmark case Plessy vs. Ferguson gave Louisiana the right to require different railroad cars for blacks and whites. This decision led to segregated schools, water fountains, restaurants and bathrooms. “Separate but equal” was eventually overturned in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education, but Jim Crow’s legacy would continue in the Southern states until the 1970s.62
Remarkably in 1885 (when anti-Chinese sentiments were exorbitant, 9 years before Plessy vs. Ferguson, and nearly 70 years before Brown vs. Board of Education), a Chinese-American couple named Joseph and Mary Tape sued a principal named Jennie Hurley for refusing to admit their 8-year-old daughter Mamie to an all-white school in San Francisco. The less well-known but landmark case, Tape v. Hurley (1855), went to the California Supreme Court, the Tape family won and desegregated schools in California.63
#3 Boxing Gender and Intersectionality: Afong Moy and Henry “Box” Brown
For the 3rd box of primary sources, students will discuss the themes of gender and intersectionality using the narratives of Afong Moy and Henry Brown. I have included a suggested list of illustrations, newspaper articles, a fictional narrative by the author Maxine Hong Kingston based on her Chinese American experiences, excerpts of Henry “Box” Brown’s autobiography written with the help of a Boston publisher, and a children's book about Brown. When speaking about gender, it is vital that teachers expand the discussion to include the “intersectionality” framework. The concept of intersectionality will help students to identify the advantages and disadvantages felt by people due to a combination of factors like race, gender, age, class and marital status.
A person’s social and political identities creates a unique mode of discrimination and privilege. For example, an Asian American woman might face discrimination from starting her own business that is due to combined factors of her race, gender, age, class and marital status. An LGBTQ identified person with disabilities may face oppression at the cross section of their identities, and not just as an LGBTQ separately from their disabilities. Intersectionality comes from an understanding that identities, privilege, and oppression are intimately connected and cannot be segmented from each other. Advantages work in a similar way; the privileges of a wealthy, heterosexual, white male are compounded in our society to give the person every asset imaginable. Even though there are armies of movements to address social injustice, climate changes and education reforms, these smaller movements have not morphed into “a mass movement” that unite people across lines of identities. “Intersectional mass movements” address systems, not just a specific issue like gender, but rather how people can change the dynamics of power and privilege to serve a multifaceted constituency.
The public life struggle of Afong Moy is a great starting point to discuss how women have to face gender inequality and the commodification of their femininity on a daily basis. From 1815 to 1840, Chinese immigrants were mainly men; some sources suspected woman prostitutes accompanied these men through illegal channels.64 In 1834, Afong Moy, at age 16, was the first recognized Chinese woman immigrant to the United States; she travelled across oceans from Guangzhou to New York City.65 The traders Nathaniel and Frederick Carne used her as an advertisement to increase sales of their Chinese furnishings; they hoped that an exotic Chinese woman with her unusual hairstyles, clothing, language, and four-inch lotus feet would attract public interest. Upon her arrival, The New York Sun and the New York Daily Advertiser identified Moy as “Juila Foochee Chin-Chang King,” the daughter of a wealthy man named “Hong Wang-Tzang Tzee King.”66 After one month, she adopted the name “Afong Moy.”
In the beginning, Moy was basically voiceless because she could not speak English, and had to communicate through an interpreter. Nonetheless, she was overwhelmingly well received by the general public as the promoter of Chinese goods, a trendsetter for hairstyles and new fashion, and a lucky name for winning horses. She travelled from city to city across the country, met President Andrew Jackson at the White House, and moved in high society.67 But her fame was short-lived. Moy’s cultural exceptionalism was increasingly objectified by the public who paid 50 cents a ticket to see her sitting on a throne of costly materials set against a fake oriental scene.68 For 17 years, she gradually transitioned from being a marketer of goods to a public spectacle, comparable to a billboard, a theater performer, and a circus act. She was no longer a human, but became an object of Chinese-ness, a Western perception of an exotic East and a symbol of commodification of femininity for future Chinese American women. Moy’s last recorded public performance was in April 1850; some sources claim that she married a Chinese man, and left the United States to tour Europe.69
At age 33, Henry “Box” Brown escaped from slavery in a brilliant and magical act of resistance. Many elementary school children may already be familiar with this famous slave narrative, but most people don’t know the fact that Brown had to move to Europe fearing he might be recaptured after the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1850, a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway enslaved people.70 Brown was a 19thcentury slave in Virginia who arranged to have himself mailed in a wooden crate to abolitionists Passmore Williamson, James Miller McKim, William Still, Cyrus Burleigh, and members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Starting on March 29, 1849, Brown’s box travelled for 27 hours by wagon, railroad, steamboat, wagon again, railroad, ferry, railroad, and finally delivery-wagon arriving on March 30th at the headquarters of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society.71 Even though the box was labelled with “handle with care” and “this side up,” Brown was thrown and placed upside-down numerous times, but he survived the trip, avoided detection, and escaped from slavery.72
In some odd pairings, both Moy and Brown were public figures during their times with very powerful and unique narratives. Brown’s experiences became a popular slave narrative in elementary schools. After his historical escape from slavery, Brown decided to publicize his experience. Some abolitionists agreed that this would encourage other innovative escapes. Others like Frederick Douglass heavily criticized Brown for not keeping his escape confidential, and possibly jeopardizing innocent lives of slaves who decided to use the same method of escaping. Shortly after his escape, Brown appeared before the New England Anti-Slavery Society Convention in Boston, and later toured the region performing his story. In 1849, Brown published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, with the help of Charles Steams, a Boston publisher.73 In 1850, Brown performed publicly a one-man show titled "Mirror of Slavery” with a moving panorama about slavery. After the passing of the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1850, Brown moved to England and lived there for 25 years. In 1875, Brown returned to the United States with his new English wife and daughter.74 While Moy became an accidental performer, Brown chose to perform as a magician to make his living. As part of his stage act, he emerged from the original box in which he had traveled to freedom.
#4 Boxing Hate: Activism from Mothers of Vincent Chin and George Floyd
For the 4th box of primary sources which include photos, posters, collages, and viral videos, students will focus on how activism and mass movements are often a by-product of hate, xenophobia, and racial injustice like the murders of Vincent Chin and George Floyd. More specifically, their tragic deaths were instrumental in uplifting their mothers, brothers, relatives, friends as well as the nation to become activists for much needed social change. The June 23, 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, 27 years old, galvanized the first Asian American Movement, and one of the leading activists was his mother, Lily Chin. Vincent Chin was a Chinese-American who was beaten to death by Ronald Ebens and stepson Michele Nitz, two white auto workers in Detroit during the decline of the Big Three (automobile manufacturers: General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US).75 Ebens and Nitz assumed Chin was of Japanese descent, using racial slurs as they attacked him with a baseball bat. Chin was taken to the hospital and died 4 days later due to brain injuries. In 1983, Ebens and Nitz pleaded guilty and were sentenced with a fine of $3,000 and three-year probation, and no jail time.76 After the shocking verdict, Lily Chin met at her son’s former workplace with lawyers, representatives from the city’s Chinese community and a Japanese-American at a community meeting. While Vincent Chin’s fiancée withdrew from public life, Lily Chin attended meetings, marches, protests, and spoke publicly to thousands of people at press conferences, community gatherings, rallies, demonstrations, and television interviews. Lily Chin was often featured on newspapers, flyers and posters holding a picture of her son with the following quote: “I hope no other mother will have to suffer as I have. Justice for my son is justice for all Asian-Americans and minorities.”77 Lily Chin has been referred to as the “Rosa Parks of Asian Americans” for her activism. On June 22, 2020, the Asian American Salute Frontline Heroes (AASFH) live-streamed an award ceremony to recognize two heroes, Zach Owen and Bernie Ramirez for defending the Cung Family from being stabbed, a hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic.78 The award was named the Lily and Vincent Chin Advocacy Award and a panel discussion of Asian American activists spoke about the brutal killings of Vincent Chin and George Floyd, and how both moments continue to sustain a mass movement against racial hate and discrimination.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, 46 years old, was murdered while being arrested by the Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin who restrained Floyd by pressing his knee on the dying man’s neck. Floyd’s last moment was caught on video; he was pleading for air and repeatedly cried out: “I can’t breathe,” and “Momma! I’m through.”79 The June 15, 2020 cover of Time Magazine was inspired by Floyd’s mother, Larcenia Floyd as well as all Black mothers. Larcenia Floyd, died in 2018, was a mother of five children, worked at a burger stand and served as a leader in her neighborhood. The cover features an image titled Analogous Colors depicting a black mother holding a silhouette of a child that the artist Titus Kaphar made by cutting into the canvas.80 The names of 35 black men and women who were killed by police or racial brutality were printed on the iconic red frame surrounding the image. This special issue includes a special report dedicated to the nationwide protests erupted in the wake of Floyd’s murder. Kaphar told Time: “In her expression, I see the black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies… I paint a black mother… eyes closed, furrowed brow, holding the contour of her loss.”81 According to Civil War battlefield records, hospice nurse reported that almost every dying soldier called “Mommy” or “Mama” with their last breath, sometimes referred to their nurses as mothers.82
After the 8 minutes and 46 seconds video of Floyd being murdered by police brutality went viral, the world took to the streets with a month-long series of protests against social injustice. Scholar Ibram X. Kendi uses the phrase “movement v. moment” to describe this moment of history with echoes of our past.83 At that time, I was constantly worrying about the fate of four black students (all boys) whom I was still teaching remotely. Every year I have addressed the issues of race and racism in my classroom, but I know I have to do more and better. My curriculum unit puts the issue of race and racism at center stage as students investigate and construct American History through a magnifying lens looking closely at the plights of Asian American men like Vincent Chin and Black men like George Floyd as well as Asian American mothers like Lily Chin and Black mothers across America. I believe children should be taught to speak out against racial injustices by studying the lives of the marginalized people unlike or like themselves.
#5 Boxing “The Problem”: Double Consciousness & the Model Minority Myth
The 5th/last box of primary sources is designed for a whole class collaborative inquiry. Students will investigate writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and the historical 1966 article titled “Success Story: Japanese American Style” to contextualize the false narratives: “The Negro Problem” and Asian Americans are the “model minority.” The goal is to have students summarize the curriculum unit, revisit previous learned ideas, and identify a collective social issue (“The Problem”) that every single member of the class wants to take actionable steps toward. This inquiry process is based on a service-learning program from Need in Deed (NID), a Philadelphia non-profit organization, where students will brainstorm a list of social issues, do in-depth research, agree on ONE problem through debate, and pair with a community partner (experts of the social issue) to architect a service-learning project.84 For each debate, teachers should choose a strategy (Socratic seminar, Philosophy Chair, mock trial, etc.) that the class is familiar with. For the past three years, I had started the NID inquiry on the first day of school, and engaged students to work on it collaboratively throughout the academic year. Examples of service-learning projects from NID include: food drives, letter campaigns, public murals, published books, and informational videos.
In American history, the term “Negro” was used to denote persons of Negroid heritage (an outdated historical grouping of people indigenous to Africa). Students should be made aware that the term can be considered offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral depending on what region of the United States and world it is used. In his essay Strivings of the Negro People (1897), W. E. B. Du Bois asks the question: “How does it feel to be a problem?”85 Throughout most of American history with a few exceptional moments, the Black community is often depicted as “a problem of self-infliction.” In another essay The Talented Tenth (1903), Du Bois suggests education can be part of the race problem: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.”86 The Atlantic Archive produced a great short video with animations for a younger audience and excerpts from the essay Strivings of the Negro People; the full essay is also included in the website.87 Du Bois wrote about the internal conflict of black people; his idea of double consciousness and “two warring ideals in one dark body” are synonymous with terms like Asian American, African American, Latin American, Native American and other hyphenated names. People of color like Asian Americans have to deal with the tension and conflicts with two different consciousness – the Asian self and the American self. In a white dominant society, people of color are compounded with the additional burden and accusation that “You are THE Problem.”
The term “model minority” was first coined by sociologist William Petersen in his 1966 article for The New York Times Magazine titled “Success story: Japanese American style.”88 The article highlights the educational and financial success of Japanese Americans, relative to other immigrant groups. The harmful conclusion was Japanese Americans were able to overcome discrimination as a whole. In addition, the Model Minority Myth puts a racial wedge among minority communities forcing them to compete against each other over crumbs produced by racist policies. For example, the 1992 LA race riot between blacks and whites decimated the Korean American community. By the time the riots ended, 63 people were killed, 2,383 injured, more than 12,000 arrested, and property damage was estimated to be over $1 billion, much of which disproportionately affected Koreatown.89 People of color are forced to fight over a SMALL and LIMITED portion of the BEST opportunities in the areas of jobs, where their children can go to school, admission to universities like Harvard, power and leadership roles in the government, the ability to secure business and mortgage loans to determine where they can work and live, or just the peace of mind to be able to walk home safely.
The Model Minority Myth can lead teachers to assume ALL Asian American students are whiz kids who study hard and do well on their own. This misconception falsely portrays Asian American students as having NO academic, social and emotional needs. In fact, Asian Americans are also failing in schools, being harassed, profiled by the police, confronted with a school-to-prison pipeline as well as a school-to-deportation pipeline. The Model Minority Myth is a blanket solution; it over-simplifies the complexity and diversity of Asian Americans. Any evaluation that lumps together the achievement of the 48 ethnic groups labeled Asian-Americans will give a false picture. High achievement scores in a group can mask the issues of individual students who are struggling. People of Asian ancestry, especially the economic disadvantaged, continue to face discrimination, harassment and prejudice - just as it’s been over the past two centuries when the first wave of Chinese stepped foot in America in 1815. Asian Americans exist in a society that the majority see them all as ONE, looking the same, and being the same. Some may think: “it’s getting better,” but Asian Americans are still very much invisible on television, film, popular culture, political representation and in our school leaderships. In Philadelphia, according to a 2014 report by a consortium of Asian-American organizations, about 41% of Cambodians, 33% of Chinese, and 31% of Vietnamese are in poverty. In contrast, according to an estimate by the Census Bureau (2006-2010), the poverty rate for Philadelphia as a whole is about 25%.90 In addition, an estimated 47% of Asian-Americans, or more than 43,000 people, have limited English proficiency. Chinese (61%) and Vietnamese (58%) have higher rates of limited English proficiency than other ethnic groups in the city.91
As an Asian American, the prevailing narrative of the Model Minority Myth has become my lifelong “Problem.” In order to establish meaningful personal connections and a high level of trust in the classroom, I have found that it is critical and necessary to create a safe environment where risk-taking, being vulnerable, and willingness to learn from failures are appreciated, encouraged, and honored. I have written a poem with the title How to Be American: Lessons from Mother and Father as a dedication to my parents: Siu Yu Yau and Lai Ying Lee who taught me how to deal with being “The Other” in a white-dominated society. My poem was inspired by songs such as The Shireles’ Mama Said, Luka Graham’s Mama Said, Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, as well as youth culture like “Yo Momma” jokes to include expressions ranging from filial piety, to love, to defiance.
Mama Said we’re heading to
America, where everything’s fine
high on a jumbo plane
flying up, up, up… the sky
Papa Preach books are
Gold, keep them crisply folded
know your place, rise to the top
don’t breathe a sound, study hard
Mama Said we live on Race Street
where girls can dream
boys wear boots with hats and suits
and Chinatown has its own school
Papa Preach don’t work in a restaurant
keep your hands soft
and your head bowed low
we lost our country, but now we’re home.
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