Anti-Asian Violence and Acts of Community Care from the 1980s to the Present: An Interview with Vivian Truong

Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao

Today on the Blog, Gotham’s editor Hongdeng Gao speaks with Vivian Truong, author of “From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City” and a core committee member of the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project. Truong discusses segregationist and police violence against Asian American, Black and Latinx residents in southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s and the cross-group, cross-issue movements that developed in response to such violence. She reflects on how the artifacts and oral histories in the A/P/A Voices project reveal intensified forms of anti-Asian violence against various A/P/A groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as valuable approaches to community care and community archiving.

You observe in your journal article that hate crimes and policing were “interconnected forms of state-sanctioned removal” deployed against residents of color in southern Brooklyn in response to racial anxieties in the late 20th century. Could you briefly tell us how this removal came about and how it affected Black, Latinx and Asian American New Yorkers?

New York City became “majority minority” for the first time in the 1980s. Neighborhoods that were almost entirely white experienced this demographic change as an intrusion of people of color into their communities. Two of the most prominent cases of racist violence in this era were the killings of young Black men, Michael Griffith in Howard Beach in 1986 and Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst in 1989. Griffith and Hawkins were both were attacked by white youth for crossing racial boundaries into a white neighborhood.

The First Two Paragraphs of a Flyer Distributed in Bensonhurst in 1987. Source: Mini Liu Papers, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities Archive.

My article examines the segregationist campaigns that occurred in this decade when Chinese and Korean Americans began to move into some of these same neighborhoods. Asian Americans faced backlash against their supposed “takeover” of southern Brooklyn, specifically Bensonhurst, Gravesend, and Sheepshead Bay. These campaigns included the distribution of thousands of anti-Asian flyers, boycotts and vandalism of Asian-owned businesses, and physical assaults on Asian American youth.

I argue that segregationist violence against New Yorkers of color in the 1980s, and the police violence that would escalate under Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration in the 1990s, were both forms of managing and removing the growing presence of these communities.

The sentiment underlying these instances of racist violence in the 1980s was that the police were not doing enough to protect white New Yorkers from the people they deemed threatening or undesirable. This sentiment fueled vigilante violence that was either ignored or explicitly endorsed by Mayor Ed Koch’s administration. When Giuliani took office in 1994, the police were empowered to enact the removal of people of color from the city’s spaces through the implementation of broken windows and zero tolerance policing.

In what ways was the anti-Asian violence at this moment part of a long history of racialization and state violence in Asian American communities. In what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic amplified this violence?

I wrote this article before the pandemic, and even then there were multiple cases of anti-Asian violence just in southern Brooklyn. Someone spray-painted seven buildings in Bensonhurst with anti-Asian slurs in 2018, and in 2019 a white man, claiming that Chinese men mistreat women, entered a Chinese buffet in Sheepshead Bay and killed three Asian immigrant workers with a hammer. The pandemic is a moment in which anti-Asian violence has intensified, but this violence has been a consistent part of Asian American history for over a century.

Of course, Asian Americans have primarily been understood as the successful, assimilated model minority since the mid-20th century. But the model minority narrative hasn’t replaced the older “yellow peril” tropes of Asian Americans as diseased and invasive threats to the nation — it’s just made these more overt forms of racism less visible.

How did community members and organizers respond to the growing racial violence against people of color in southern Brooklyn at the time? What lessons can we learn from the acts of community care and multiracial coalitions that emerged?

One of my favorite moments from this history is a protest that occurred on April 25, 1995. It was organized in response to Giuliani’s city budget that would slash funding for social services while continuing to bolster the police force. A multiracial, cross-issue coalition came together and blocked traffic at four major bridges and tunnels into Manhattan at rush hour. The National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights (NCPRR) and Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) protested police brutality at the Manhattan Bridge, CUNY students came out against cuts to education at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, ACT UP and healthcare workers advocated for HIV/AIDS treatment and hospital funding at the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and homeless advocates for housing and employment at the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Photograph of a protest outside of the Brooklyn District Attorney's office in 1995 after the death of Chinese American teenager Yong Xin Huang. Source: CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities Archive.

The protest was just one month after the police killing of 16-year-old Chinese American Yong Xin Huang in Sheepshead Bay. Huang was shot in the back of the head while playing with a toy gun in his friend’s backyard. His mother and sisters were at the protest alongside Black and Latinx family members of other young men who were killed by the police. His death, and the more recent police killings of Asian Americans including 19-year-old Christian Hall, show that police brutality is also a form of anti-Asian violence.

I see the protest on April 25, 1995 as a predecessor to recent movements that have challenged city budgets as moral documents, and called for the defunding of police departments and redirection of resources to what actually creates safe communities: housing, healthcare, employment, education, and social services. In terms of what we can learn, I’m reminded of Audre Lorde’s statement in 1982 when she reflected on lessons from past movements: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The April 25 protest put this idea into practice, highlighting how the success of one struggle for justice depended on the success of others.

Tell us about the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project. What was the impetus behind starting this project and what are its goals?

The A/P/A Voices project began in April 2020 with a group of scholars, artists, and cultural workers who were connected with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. At the time, New York City was the epicenter of the first wave of the pandemic. News stories implicitly or explicitly framed Asians and Asian Americans as the source of the contagion. We realized the need for members of our communities to be able to tell their stories on their own terms.

We’ve expanded from our initial focus on New York to collect over sixty oral histories and more than seventy digital artifacts from across the country. These interviews and artifacts document the experiences of Asian/Pacific Americans during the pandemic. We’re partnering with the NYU Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives to house and preserve these materials long-term. We’ve also organized two public events, “On Community Care” and “Mending in Ongoing Crisis,” that brought together participants of the project to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on Asian/Pacific American communities. At this point, our project has begun to shift from documentation to engaging these materials in the development of curriculum and an exhibition to share these stories with broader audiences.

What has been the project’s approach to memory work? How do you see your role in the documentation process?

I’ve been part of a core committee of artists and scholars, including Tomie Arai, Lena Sze, and Diane Wong, and A/P/A Institute staff, Laura Chen-Schultz and Amita Manghnani, who have coordinated the project since its beginning in April 2020. We’ve had to grapple with what it means to be documenting an ongoing crisis. When we began the project, I don’t think any of us imagined that the pandemic would continue into 2022, much less that we would be experiencing the highest number of cases and hospitalizations two years later.

Our project has required a rethinking of the purpose of memory work, from preservation for an undefined point in the future to the relevance of this project for the present. We’ve tried to move beyond documentation for documentation’s sake to be more attentive to process. How can oral history and archives contribute to building community and relationships in an era of isolation? Can they help us slow down to process and understand the ongoing pandemic in the midst of a constant inundation of information? Might they provide an avenue to confront the grief that’s upended our lives despite the push to “return to normal”?

Tell us about the range of stories and artifacts in the collection. Are there any stories or artifacts from the collection that you think are particularly noteworthy and provide unique insight into the impact of the pandemic on A/P/A communities in New York City and other parts of the country?

A poster submitted by artist Monyee Chau as one of the artifacts for the A/P/A Voices project. Source: "Resilience poster in support of Chinatown, Filipinotown, Japantown, and Little Saigon," 2020; Monyee Chau; A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project; NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

The oral histories and artifacts in the collection include the perspectives of healthcare workers on the front lines; street vendors in New York; community members organizing mutual aid efforts; artists, documentary filmmakers, and poets creating art in response to the pandemic; advocates for sex workers and tenants fighting eviction; and more.  

They show the human stories behind the numbers we’re constantly inundated with — the charts and data on cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This is particularly important for Asian/Pacific Americans who have a fraught relationship with numbers and data. Asian/Pacific American organizers and activists have long fought for disaggregated data by ethnicity because of all that this broad category obscures. For instance, aggregate numbers don’t show the effects of the pandemic on Filipino nurses who have staggering rates of illness and death in comparison to the general American population. The numbers also don’t show all the ways that Asian/Pacific Americans have responded to the pandemic and organized for the survival of their communities and beyond.

One oral history from the project that encapsulates the need for these stories is Crystal Baik’s interview of Tavae Samuelu, Executive Director of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC). Samuelu spoke about the deaths due to COVID-19 that were devastating Pacific Islander communities. She recalled meeting with elected officials who demanded numbers as a precondition for aid. She stated, “how fucking dehumanizing to have to measure your suffering. And, you know, that sometimes people's response is that your numbers aren’t big enough.” Even as people have been fighting for accurate data to illustrate the effects of the COVID-19, our project highlights the need for other approaches to documenting the crisis.  

What kinds of community care efforts emerged in response to the pandemic and the movement for Black Lives and are represented in the collection? What has surprised or stood out to you?

One thing that’s fascinated me during the pandemic has been the creation of the category of the “essential worker.” I didn’t realize how I had taken it for granted as an embedded part of our everyday vocabulary until Kabzuag Vaj of the Madison, Wisconsin organization Freedom, Inc. asserted in our project’s first public event that community organizers are essential workers. We’ve seen that reflected over and over in the interviews and artifacts in the collection. Community organizers have been coordinating mutual aid, distributing PPE and groceries to vulnerable community members, pushing for rent cancellation and extensions of the eviction moratorium so tenants don’t lose their homes, and fighting for low-wage workers who’ve lost their jobs. They’ve done this in the face of all of the neglect and harm that city, state, and federal policies have inflicted over the past two years.  

In some of the interviews I conducted, community organizers recalled practices of community care in the George Floyd protests in summer of 2020. These practices manifested in large and small ways, from the broader goals of ending police violence and investing in communities, to protesters offering each other masks and hand sanitizer to protect each other, even when these were resources that were being hoarded. They showed how these protests in the Movement for Black Lives provided glimpses of the world we want to build.

How do you see the A/P/A Voices project having an impact both inside and outside academia? Where do you see it going?

I see the impact of the A/P/A Voices project as both methodological and content-based. Methodologically, it’s been exciting to be part of a larger effort to rethink oral history and community archiving in a moment that especially calls for a reconsideration of these practices. In terms of its content, the project has documented the human experiences and agency of Asian/Pacific Americans behind the numbers and data. I hope the project will reach a wider audience as we begin to build curriculum and an exhibition from the collections. Broadly, I’m drawn to Arundhati Roy’s idea of the “pandemic as portal,” thinking of this era as a time to reevaluate the conditions that led us to this crisis and decide what we want to learn and bring with us into the future.

Vivian Truong is an Assistant Professor of History at Swarthmore College. She is a community-engaged historian whose research and teaching interests include Asian American, urban, and social movement history. Truong’s current research project examines Asian American and multiracial movements against police violence in late 20th-century New York City.

Hongdeng Gao is a History PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines how Cold War geopolitics and grassroots activism in New York City improved access to health care for under-served Chinese New Yorkers in the late 20th century.