Q&A: Scott Kurashige explores the history of anti-Asian racism in the US

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked an upsurge in anti-Asian hate and violence in many parts of the United States. But that spike did not occur in a vacuum, UCLA alumnus Scott Kurashige says: It followed decades of prejudice, fear and discrimination directed at Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S.

Kurashige's newest book, "American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism," explores this long and difficult history with a keen eye to how much of this history has played out in California. A respected scholar and community leader, he earned his master's in Asian American Studies, as well as master's and doctoral degrees in history from UCLA.

His past writings have explored the history of Japanese Americans in places like Los Angeles and Detroit - his 2008 book, "The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles," won awards from the American Historical Association and the Association for Asian American Studies. In his latest book, he explains the role Anti-Asian hate has had in shaping American history and politics - and how Asians and Asian Americans have organized to survive and overcome hostility and discrimination.

Kurashige spoke to UCLA Newsroom about his new book, the insights it offers and how UCLA shaped him as a scholar and activist.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Prejudices and biases targeting various groups can be similar and different. How is anti-Asian racism both like and distinct from bigotries against other groups?

The rise of the United States as an empire has involved acts of conquest and structures of domination that have been tied to the perpetuation of a white supremacist racial hierarchy. This has manifested in distinct ways, including the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples to establish and expand the nation's territory and the coerced migration of enslaved Africans to supply essential labor for its economic development. The stereotype of the "model minority" - as a disciplined subject meant to assimilate into U.S. capitalism and the dominant culture - cuts across the experience of all groups but has particularly shaped the image of Asian Americans as a group since the mid-20th century. Yet, the image of Asians as "perpetual foreigners" persists as part of an overlapping form of xenophobia endured by Latino, Arab and Muslim Americans. Antisemitism has been at the heart of conspiracy theories - whether portraying Jews as subversives spreading communism or as capitalists secretly ruling the world - that are analogous to the "yellow peril" image of Asians threatening national security both from outside and inside the U.S. borders.

What do you think non-Asians misunderstand most about Asian Americans?

This misunderstanding starts with the sad reality that most Americans generally have not learned anything substantive about Asian American history - or even worse, they learn only misinformation and stereotypes. This is beginning to change in California with new ethnic studies requirements in public schools. Even though I grew up in a diverse and relatively liberal section of Southern California, I never had any meaningful exposure to Asian American Studies throughout my K-12 education.

My book is about histories that have not simply been missing or forgotten but systematically erased from the official record, [which] leads to a pattern of denial. For proponents of U.S. empire, expansion into Asia through violence has been essential, yet the projection of the U.S. as a benevolent ruler, a unique force chosen by God to spread freedom and democracy, has necessitated covering up countless civilian massacres and erasing the atrocities from history. This erasure and denial then carries over to the experience of Asian Americans. When anti-Asian violence and hate incidents arise, there is a recurring pattern of gaslighting - either it didn't really happen, or if it did, it was not racially motivated.

And finally, with rare exceptions, we never learn about the long history of Asian American activism and resistance, so we tend to view Asian Americans as a passive model minority.

Anti-Asian racism is a national phenomenon, but in some ways, California plays an outsized role in its history. What has made the state such an important part of the story?

California's economy would reportedly rank fourth-largest in the world as a country. There's no doubt that the seizure of land from Mexico and Native American nations to admit California into the union was pivotal to the rise of the U.S. as a global power. That level of development - mining, railroads and agriculture in the 19th century, and service and tech industries in the 20th century - necessitated large inputs of labor, much of which has been recruited from Asia. But from the state's earliest history, development has gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth, particularly through the exploitation of Asian and other workers of color denied fundamental rights, such as voting, citizenship and union representation.

Is the anti-Asian racism people are enduring today significantly different from past periods or are we seeing old patterns played out in the same ways?

For more than two decades after California's admission into the U.S., Chinese Americans were not only banned from becoming naturalized citizens - they were banned from testifying in court against white people. The same law applied to Black and Native Americans. So this was effectively a license to kill, and racist violence was rampant. Eighteen or more Chinese immigrants were lynched from one gruesome night of mob violence in the Los Angeles massacre of 1871.

Thankfully, we have had civil rights movements and new laws to promote equality, but we have also seen these policies and the progress they have generated come under assault at both the state and federal level.

What does history tell us about what is most effective to overcome anti-Asian racism?

Public pressure and scrutiny can definitely make a difference in individual cases. Ultimately, the type of systemic change necessary to end anti-Asian racism - and all forms of oppression - requires sustained and protracted grassroots organizing, establishing healthy communities and building multiracial solidarity to change not only our policies and institutions, but our human values and relationships. I devote the final chapter of the book to a closer look at a group in Philadelphia named Asian Americans United that provides a stellar example of this difficult work that has evolved not over months and years, but decades.

What can educational institutions like UCLA and individual readers do to counter the resurgence of anti-Asian racism?

Education is absolutely essential to manifesting this type of systemic change. And it needs to happen through transformative changes in our curricula and pedagogy, which was the original sweeping mission of ethnic studies in the late 1960s, and through individual learning and interpersonal conversations. Ultimately, social change requires connecting ideas to practice, so I designed this book to help advance the type of dialogues necessary to prompt reflection and action.

In the book, you recount your own activism at UCLA. How did your time there impact your understanding of these issues and your professional trajectory?

I was blessed to have amazing teachers at UCLA - groundbreaking scholars like Yuji Ichioka, Don Nakanishi, Kyeyoung Park and Glenn Omatsu, without whom the field of Asian American studies as we know it would not exist today. But UCLA was also the foremost university in the 1990s where someone like me prioritizing comparative, intersectional and transnational studies could find experts on Asian, Black, Latino and Native American history. LA and America were rife with interethnic tensions in this era, and my research agenda was shaped by the imperative to counter sensationalistic notions of "Black-Asian conflict."

Student activism at UCLA put forward some outstanding models of multiracial solidarity that carried into their work off campus. From 1997 to 2000, I worked closely with three incredible USAC presidents who were successively Black (Kandea Mosley), Asian American (Stacy Lee) and Chicano (Mike de la Rocha). They exemplified the new leaders who shifted California from a conservative state dominated by white politicians to a progressive state with policymakers reflecting a nonwhite majority.