Asian American Histories of the United States

Ten years ago this week, a white supremacist gunman entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek, and shot ten people. Six people were killed on August 5, 2012, and they were part of Wisconsin’s Indian immigrant community. This was no random act of violence. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, targeted acts of violence directed at Sikhs increased significantly. Still, the FBI did not begin to collect data on anti-Sikh hate crimes until 2015. That decade of heightened hostility went largely unmarked by federal data and ended in a massacre.

Dr. Catherine Ceniza Choy says that this pattern of violence and erasure is critical to understanding the histories and experiences of Asian Americans. But there is also a third element to this pattern — resistance. 

Dr. Choy is a professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California Berkeley. We speak with her about her new book, Asian American Histories of the United States, which upends cultural narratives about Asian Americans, highlights overlooked identities, and catalogs stories of resistance in these communities across the decades.