Call for Papers (Volume 10)

Critical Ethnic Studies Volume 10: Open Call for Submissions

For this volume of Critical Ethnic Studies, we seek submissions of articles and special documents (syllabi, political education documents, translations, and discussion forums; see below) on any topic related to the field of Critical Ethnic Studies. We especially welcome submissions that address topics, contexts, and locations that are understudied in the field.

Critical Ethnic Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Minnesota Press. Each issue includes traditional peer-reviewed articles as well as several unique types of special documents that offer timely resources for anti-racist teaching, research, and activism: syllabi that outline an emerging field or urgent theme; political education documents that introduce a key historical or contemporary racial justice campaign or movement; translations or other important perspectives essays from the Global South; and forums discussing books, media, events, or key questions in the field. Please see our most recent issues of the journal for examples of these special documents.

Graduate students, independent scholars, and early career scholars are especially encouraged to submit abstracts. Please email 350-500 word abstracts for articles or special documents to justice@criticalethnicstudies.org by February 1st, 2025. Authors whose abstracts are selected for the issue will be asked to submit 5000-7000 word articles by April 15th, 2025.

How the Stop Asian Hate Movement Became Entwined with Zionism, Policing, and Counterinsurgency

by Dylan Rodríguez

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The emergence of the United States-based Stop Asian Hate movement since 2021 has catalyzed various forms of organization and grassroots mobilization, much of which pivots on demands for enhanced policing, expansions of criminal justice and civil rights infrastructures, increased state and private funding, and various forms of state-centered grievance. Stop Asian Hate’s militant, public-facing liberalism has momentarily overshadowed numerous radical projects and networks formed by Asian and Pacific Islander activists in and beyond the U.S., including those engaged in autonomous mutual aid, anti-racist organizing, Black and anticolonial/Palestine solidarity, prisoner support, sex worker solidarity, queer and trans self-determination, and abolitionist community-building. Grassroots organizations like Asian American Feminist Collective, Freedom, Inc., Asian American Pacific Islander Women Lead, Lavender Phoenix, Asian Solidarity Collective, and Butterfly Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network predate the rise of anti-Asian/anti-Chinese animus during the COVID-19 pandemic and the gendered racist terror of the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, engaging in popular education, community care, and direct safety-based intervention in ways that expose and challenge carceral state violence rather than rely on it.

By contrast, Stop Asian Hate’s state-focused liberal social justice orientations hinge on a redemptive political fantasy: a reformed U.S. nation-building project in which police power, criminal jurisprudence, public policy and earnest carceral state actors (including elected officials and prosecutors) strengthen and expand the state’s obligation to protect people of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent from “hate,” “hate crimes,” “hate incidents” and other forms of racial animus.

As with every largescale social movement i have ever studied or directly engaged, the fantasy matters. It guides practical decision-making, short-to-long term strategies, and tactical choices. The organizational affinities and interactions, political priorities, and deep internal contradictions characterizing the formation of two of Stop Asian Hate’s most prominent organizations —Stop AAPI Hate and The Asian American Foundation — raise urgent questions about the stakes and consequences of the movement’s public-facing claims, demands and organizing activities.

Stop AAPI Hate and the Fallacy of “Non-Carceral Solutions”

Founded on March 19, 2020, in “response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Stop AAPI Hate immediately garnered corporate media and philanthropic attention as a national coalition developed by two well established nonprofit organizations (AAPI Equity Alliance and Chinese for Affirmative Action) and the San Francisco State University Department of Asian American Studies.

Developed as “the nation’s largest reporting center tracking anti-AAPI hate acts,” Stop AAPI Hate’s data collection framework reproduces the terms and methods of criminology even as the organization asserts it is “grounded in the belief that we must confront racism at its root with comprehensive, non-carceral solutions.” The coalition’s reporting apparatus atomizes “hate acts” as discrete, individual events and interpersonal encounters, producing a dynamic, evolving database that is cited by police, the U.S. Department of Justice, Congress, and other administrative units of the carceral state. By way of example, FBI agent Susana Mapu, speaking on a 2021 panel alongside one of Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founders, endorsed the latter’s use of the broad category “hate incidents” as a supplement to the narrower juridical concept “hate crimes” by offering a presentation slide exclaiming, “We want to know about both! [R]eport to local law enforcement or FBI (tips.fbi.gov).” Mapu continued, “the reason I say here that we want to know about both is because, as you know, the FBI holds all the data… we want to know about statistics.”

Stop AAPI Hate gathered almost 2,000 “incident reports” of “coronavirus discrimination” during its first two months of research, and its ongoing efforts have attracted financial and political support from foundations, police, state governments, the Biden-Harris administration, well-funded Asian American nonprofits, and numerous celebrities, academics, industry executives and cultural/social media influencers. In addition to receiving $10 million from California’s API Equity Budget “to track, respond, and prevent incidents of racial bias and harm,” the coalition has obtained funding from The Asian American Foundation (see below), Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Kaiser Permanente. Reflecting the entrepreneurial logic of the group’s ascension, two of the coalition’s administrative leaders published a USA Today opinion piece for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month calling on “policymakers, government agencies and others” to invest in “partnerships between government civil rights agencies and trusted community-based organizations” while strengthening “existing protections and enforcement and [passing] new civil rights laws.”

Stop AAPI Hate foregrounds “Narrative Change” as a primary area of mobilization, specifically mentioning the organization’s participation in “hundreds of speaking engagements” with audiences ranging from members of Congress, the Commission on Civil Rights, the United Nations, and the World Bank to a range of “policymakers, students and educators, as well as business, entertainment, and nonprofit leaders.” The unspoken assumption guiding this work appears to be the notion that bureaucratic, administrative, industry, and (carceral) state elites should be the primary audiences and actors for such narrative change.

Responding to a previous version of this article, Stop AAPI Hate asserts that any claim that it is “a ‘police friendly’ organization” is false: “rather, core to its mission is advocating for alternatives to carceral approaches.” Their objection describes the group’s “documented history of championing more comprehensive solutions beyond policing,” highlighting Stop AAPI Hate’s co-signing of a February 2024 public letter opposing expansion of New York’s hate crime laws while quoting the coalition co-founders’ 2022 Time op-ed: “The problem with investing in ineffective solutions like policing is that they keep us from adopting methods that will actually make us safer and that our community actually wants. These methods involve investing in our communities, not in policing.”

Yet, a body of evidence suggests that primary components of Stop AAPI Hate’s work and advocacy are not only passively compatible with the paradigms of the policing and carceral state but are also actively cultivated to contribute to the state’s criminal justice functions. A 2021 KCAL (Los Angeles) television report describes Stop AAPI Hate’s origins “as a clearing house for information because of gaps in record keeping between law enforcement agencies,” with co-founder Manjusha Kulkarni affirming that the police “don’t always share that information with the Department of Justice, with the FBI, and with the state [attorneys general].”

Further reflecting the compatibility of Stop AAPI Hate’s “hate act” data collection with criminal justice and policing frameworks, a Senior Program Specialist with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) cites Stop AAPI Hate’s “collecting and tracking [of] AAPI hate and discrimination incidents during the [COVID-19] pandemic” alongside their discussion of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Relatedly, California Governor Gavin Newsome’s Golden State Plan to Counter Antisemitism highlights a January 2024 event that “focused on the size and scope of hate crime from a data perspective and which included panelists from the FBI, CA DOJ, and Stop AAPI Hate.”

Stop AAPI Hate’s leadership has conspicuously abrogated the group’s stated non-carceral principles in sometimes stunning ways. Kulkarni, during 2022 testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, states her support for new federal hate crime legislation that would expand carceral punishment for “hate crime offenses,” create “federally-funded, state-run hotlines dedicated to receiving reports of hate crimes and other incidents of anti-AAPI discrimination,” and “[provide] victims with guidance on which law enforcement officials and community services groups to contact for further help.” Further, the FBI reports that in summer 2021, as part of a project intended to “address the barriers that prevent people [in Asian/American communities] from reporting hate crimes,” its San Francisco office convened a meeting with Stop AAPI co-founder Russell Jeung, whose “recommendations for addressing the reporting gap” included “[recruiting] more FBI agents and personnel from diverse backgrounds” and using “Asian-language media to encourage reporting.” It is difficult to comport such Congressional testimony and (FBI reported) recommendations with the previously cited Time op-ed.

Reevaluated in the context of such affinities with the carceral and policing state, Stop AAPI Hate’s objection to the previous version of this article lacks factual credibility, if not organizational honesty. Perhaps a more accurate accounting is that the coalition is characterized by persistent, though functional inconsistencies and periodic irreconcilable contradictions between its organizational branding and organizational activities. That is, even as Stop AAPI Hate consistently asserts an organizational commitment to “non-carceral solutions,” its organizational practices—methods, activities, public-facing statements, etc.—often reproduce, reflect, or concretely support carceral and policing state infrastructures.

Thus, Stop AAPI Hate’s virtue signaling of non-carceral principles, engagement in “community healing and/or restorative justice practices,” and rudimentary criticisms of police power ( “blatant racism in police department ranks and officers’ connections to white nationalism”), is significantly undermined by data curation methods, organizational interactions, and public statements that affirm rather than disrupt carceral notions of violence, “hate,” racism, justice, and criminal deterrence. Such severe inconsistencies and irreconcilable contradictions are functional to the extent that they constitute a messy, internally fraught organizational totality that is nonetheless externally coherent (well-branded) enough to build an impressive base of financial support and political clout garnered through engagements with various funding agencies, state officials, peer nonprofit organizations, and corporate media outlets.

Stop Asian Hate’s Zionist/Policing Affinities: TAAF and ADL

Perhaps the most significant 21st century development in the political economy of Asian American organizations has been the lightning-quick emergence of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), founded in May 2021. TAAF garnered over $1 billion in its first year of existence, including influxes from the Ford, MacArthur and Mellon foundations, Bank of America, Etsy, Coca-Cola, Citi Foundation, Merck and Zoom.

Led by a board that includes the founder and chair of Himalaya Capital, the co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts (a global firm managing over $500 billion), the co-founder of Alibaba Group (also governor of the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets and Women’s National Basketball Association’s New York Liberty), the co-founder of Yahoo!, and the CEO of Citadel Securities, TAAF boasts a “five-year portfolio strategy” to distribute grants to “best in class organizations working to mobilize against hate and violence, educate communities, and reclaim our narratives.”

The presence of Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on TAAF’s board seems to indicate a key political and organizational influence on the foundation’s mission. Described in a philanthropic periodical as “the only non-Asian member of [the] board,” Greenblatt consistently affirms the ADL’s substantial involvement in the creation of TAAF, stating in a 2021 interview with actor Daniel Dae Kim that “we [at the ADL] were so humbled and proud to share our experience and to help incubate The Asian American Foundation.” Greenblatt reiterates at the ADL’s 2024 National Leadership Summit that the organization helped to “to incubate and launch The Asian-American Foundation,” and previously effused in a 2023 social media post, “I’m humbled to serve on the TAAF board and share what the Anti-Defamation League has learned over the years about fighting antisemitism to #StopAAPIHate. #TogetherWeBuild.”

Given the ADL’s relative inattention to building remotely comparable organizational relationships with Asian American groups prior to 2021, it is appropriate to raise the question as to why the emergence of the Stop Asian Hate movement appears to have catalyzed a partial redirection of the ADL’s interest, resources, and public-facing attention to TAAF and other Asian American organizations (including Stop AAPI Hate).

The ADL’s Center for Technology and Society, which indicated a “a dramatic spike in anti-Asian sentiment” in 2020, helped advance a “hate” centered framing of rising anti-Asian violence during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. eJewish Philanthropy describes TAAF’s mission and operations in terms that portray it as an emergent Asian American analog of the ADL, stating that “Greenblatt’s role is primarily to support [TAAF] in its work with existing AAPI organizations whose mission is to fight hate and extremism, such as Asians Americans Advancing Justice and Stop AAPI Hate.” Echoing this depiction, the ADL notes in its 2023 Year in Review that it “accelerated our program to embed investigators from partner organizations alongside the ADL Center on Extremism…. We now host embeds from… TAAF (The Asian American Foundation).”

TAAF, Stop AAPI Hate, and other Stop Asian Hate organizations operationally replicate the ADL’s organizational fixation on “hate” as a primary unit of information gathering, public discourse (common sense-making) and carceral state intervention. As Stop Asian Hate organizations reproduce the ADL’s methods, it is worth raising a key question: What are the consequences of the movement’s organizational attachments to “hate” based victimization frameworks?

Since its founding in 1913, the ADL has functioned as a watchdog organization that ostensibly identifies antisemitic activities and calls on institutional leaders, state officials, corporations, and media outlets to condemn, fire or otherwise disaffiliate from those it deems culpable. Crucially, the ADL endorses a notion of antisemitism closely aligned with the definition adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The IHRA’s conception of the term has faced mounting scholarly, legal and activist criticism for conflating political criticism of Israel and the ethno-supremacist political ideology of Zionism with “antisemitism.”

Criticisms of the ADL’s and IHRA’s conflation of political opposition to Zionism with antisemitism have emerged from a range of scholarly, human rights, free speech, decolonial, Palestinian liberationist, radical feminist, and abolitionist perspectives, and have periodically been covered by global media outlets. Recently, the inaugural conference of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism convened a broad community of scholars, including Rabab Abdulhadi, Emmaia Gelman, Christine Hong, Jennifer Kelly, Sean Malloy,  Alana Lentin, and myself to develop rigorous archival, theoretical and practical responses to demystify this conflation. Gelman, a Jewish anti-Zionist scholar, organizer and teacher, writes in Boston Review, “at a time when it should be easier to see the ADL as a conservative knowledge production agency, a resurgence of concern with ‘hate’ has only consolidated its power.” (The ADL has long defined itself as “the leading anti-hate organization in the world.”) Crucially, Gelman shows how since at least the 1960s,

“the ADL [has] targeted civil rights groups from liberals to revolutionaries…. The ADL also surveilled ethnic representational groups, particularly Arab and black, and Jewish groups concerned about Israeli treatment of Palestinians…. In the present, the ADL has continued to militate against internationalist, intersectional anti-racism, and has used its status as ‘the nation’s premier civil rights organization’ to do so.”

Gelman’s analytic history demystifies Greenblatt’s grandstanding declaration of alliance: “The Asian-American community has been under siege and now it’s the Jewish community…. It’s moments like this when allyship really matters.” Greenblatt’s projection of Jewish-Asian American allyship depicts a coalition of reaction against various notions of “siege,” not limited to hate crimes/incidents. This linkage — both organizational and ideological — enacts an analogy of exceptional victimhood that tethers the figure of the violated Asian American to the ADL’s Zionist notion of Jewishness. Crucially, Greenblatt has infamously asserted that “anti-zionism is genocide,” and “every Jewish person is a Zionist.”

The Stop Asian Hate movement’s frequent affinity for carceral, policing, anti-Palestinian, Zionist, and global militarist frameworks/logics/institutions crystallizes in the bureaucratic infrastructure of TAAF and the organizational collaborations/interactions of Stop AAPI Hate. Given that these are arguably the two most influential organizations in the Stop Asian Hate movement, it is crucial to delineate their relation to each other.

Stop AAPI Hate states in response to the original version of this article that it “has not received funding from TAAF… since 2022 and does not have a working relationship with TAAF.” The coalition does not dispute, however, that it obtained at least $1 million from TAAF as part of what Reuters describes as “the largest-ever philanthropic effort to support the AAPI community.” As of this writing (April 9, 2024), the ADL-supported TAAF continues to list Stop AAPI Hate and AAPI Equity Alliance as “grantees” on the “community partners” section of its website. (AAPI Equity Alliance is one of Stop AAPI Hate’s “founding organizations,” and Kulkarni is its Executive Director). Further, while neither the current nor earlier versions of this article make specific claims about the ongoing status of Stop AAPI Hate’s connection to TAAF, it is beyond dispute that Stop AAPI Hate has benefited from a substantial financial and collaborative relationship with the foundation, including organizational co-authorship of Documenting AAPI Hate Codebook. The opening page of Codebook acknowledges that “TAAF and the [Stop AAPI Hate] coalition are collaborating to facilitate the documentation of AAPI experiences through multiple sources of data and methodologies.”

TAAF’s Advisory Council boasts current and former high-level administrators and staffers of the U.S. global counterinsurgency apparatus, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Council on Foreign Relations member X. Rick Niu, three-time National Security Council appointee Farah Pandith, Hoover Institution Fellow and George W. Bush administration appointee Lanhee Chen and former World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, among others.

While it does not feature a similar group of advisers, Stop AAPI Hate has quietly collaborated with and received backing from organizations that repress critics of Israel and people participating in Palestinian solidarity. The ADL supported a successful California State Assembly Bill (AB 2448) principally sponsored by Stop AAPI Hate, while joining Stop AAPI Hate in support of the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act. Notably, the ADL cites and praises Stop AAPI Hate in its March 2021 letter to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Justice as an example of a “community-based organization” engaging in “collaborative efforts” to collect vital “hate” data.

Stop AAPI Hate has also benefitted from a substantive financial and research relationship with Davis Polk, a corporate law firm that made national news in October 2023 for rescinding offers of employment to Harvard and Columbia University law school students due to their criticisms of Israel’s mounting genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Davis Polk provided significant pro bono legal research to support Stop AAPI Hate’s 2023 civil rights report, with one Davis Polk attorney contributing an additional $10,000 in private donations. The law firm openly boasts of its support for Israel, noting that it is “a firm of choice for Israeli companies pursuing opportunities around the world, and for international companies doing business in Israel.” Davis Polk was also one of 24 firms that signed a public letter to U.S. law school deans demanding action against “anti-Semitic activities,” including “calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel.”

Objecting to the description of its connection to the law firm in a previous version of this article, Stop AAPI Hate contends that its “relationship with Davis Polk is mischaracterized,” asserting that the firm “began providing limited pro-bono support to Stop AAPI Hate well before it took actions to rescind offers from Harvard and Columbia University law school students. The coalition has not received support from Davis Polk since October 2023.” [emphasis added]

Available evidence supports the characterization of Stop AAPI Hate’s connection to Davis Polk as both substantive and sustained, however. Stop AAPI Hate’s assertion that it only benefited from Davis Polk’s pro bono contributions “well before” the firm retracted the students’ job offers is also curious, if not deceiving, since the coalition concedes that it received “support” from the Davis Polk until, and possibly through, the same month in which the employment retractions caused a stir in the corporate news cycle.

Further, Davis Polk’s 2022 “Racial justice pro bono update” describes how it “partnered with… Stop AAPI Hate to create a tool kit of resources for use by government leadership and school districts across the country…. School districts wishing to implement Asian-American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs will also utilize the resources we contributed.” A self-identified “AAPI lawyer” who was an associate in Davis Polk’s litigation practice elaborates, “through Davis Polk’s partnership with Stop AAPI Hate, I have worked on two projects so far—one focused directly on addressing anti-AAPI hate and the other centered on promoting ethnic studies.” The law firm’s list of 2022 “Pro Bono Award honorees” highlights another attorney whose “work for Stop AAPI Hate” included “an in-depth analysis of local discriminatory laws, which will aid in the organization’s pursuit of legislative and judicial measures at the federal level.” Additionally, the firm’s 2023 “Pro Bono Matters” report boasts that the awardee “directed the firm’s donation to Stop AAPI Hate.”

Responding to an earlier version of this article, Stop AAPI Hate asserts that it “is not pro-Zionist, does not have a relationship with the ADL, and does not ‘tacitly comply with the ADL’s positions.’” The coalition’s correspondence directs attention to its public support for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as its statements regarding “egregious acts of hate against the AMEMSA [Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian] community—from the horrific murder of Wadea Al-Fayoume and the attack on three Palestinian students in Vermont, to egregious comments from Rep. Brian Mast and an Islamophobic headline from the Wall Street Journal.” Stop AAPI Hate also emphasizes co-founder Kulkarni’s decision to withdraw from Duke University’s “Combating Hate & Bias” event in November 2023 over concerns that other speakers (including Greenblatt) opposed the call for a ceasefire.

While it is beyond dispute that Stop AAPI Hate constantly signals anti-racist/anti-hate virtues in press releases, public statements, and many organizational activities (including its carceral/criminological data collection practices) it also has a history of sharing platforms with entities—including carceral state, Zionist, and pro-Israel organizations—that abrogate such avowed principles and commitments.

While the coalition denies any “relationship” with the ADL, Stop AAPI Hate (and TAAF) openly acknowledge the ADL for “[providing] invaluable feedback” on a major working document published in 2021 (the aforementioned Documenting AAPI Hate Codebook). The “TAAF x Stop AAPI Hate Working Group,” which includes all three Stop AAPI Hate co-founders, acknowledges “the colleagues and organizations who have provided invaluable feedback for this working document,” specifically referencing the Anti-Defamation League and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Relatedly, Stop AAPI apparently consents to ADL chapters’ online usage of Stop AAPI Hate’s logo and published resources, including its National Report.

Over a year after Stop AAPI Hate’s founding, the coalition participated alongside the ADL in a May 2021 event titled “A Community United: a National Convening Against Anti-AAPI Hate.” Co-hosted by the National Association of Attorneys General President and the District of Columbia Attorney General, the conveners listed Kulkarni and Greenblatt on the event program as co-panelists for a session themed “The Rise of Online AAPI Hate & Its Real World Impact.” (ADL Senior Vice President and Chief Impact Officer Adam Neufeld took Greenblatt’s place at the live event.)

In January 2024, about two months after issuing its support for a ceasefire in Gaza and weeks after Kulkarni declined to participate in the Duke University event, Stop AAPI Hate nonetheless joined the ADL and TAAF as “community partners/sponsors” for a “Hate Crimes Summit” hosted by 17 separate “government partners,” including the FBI, Department of Justice, the Oakland and San Jose Police Departments, six separate district attorney’s offices, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the California Attorney General’s Office. A featured panel seated Choi alongside an FBI special agent, the executive director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, and a coordinator from the California Attorney General’s Office.

Responding to a previous version of this article, Stop AAPI Hate contends that “Choi’s remarks [at the Hate Crimes Summit] were specifically to demonstrate to a law enforcement-based audience how Stop AAPI Hate’s data does not support carceral approaches, consistent with Stop AAPI Hate’s long-established positions.” This rebuttal does not address the substance of the analysis offered here, however. Even as Stop AAPI Hate consistently asserts and insists that its work and methods are non-carceral, the organization’s data collection practices remain entirely compatible with criminological and carceral policing approaches, including liberal and reformist ones.

By way of example, in addition to previously mentioned examples, the U.S. Department of Justice website prominently lists Stop AAPI Hate, the Anti-Defamation League (San Diego), San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, San Diego Police Department, and FBI in a resource document titled “Who should I call if I experience a hate incident?” Further indication of the carceral congruence between the ADL’s and Stop AAPI Hate’s data gathering methods surfaces in the ADL’s 2021 “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents,” which states, “law enforcement agencies should use data from the FBI, Department of Education and NGOs such as ADL and Stop AAPI Hate to anticipate where hate incidents are most likely to occur and to proactively contact community members and institutions to strengthen relationships and collaboration.”

Such cooperative interactions, collaborations, and methodological affinities with policing, carceral, and Zionist entities serve to undermine Stop AAPI Hate’s declared commitment to “confront racism at its root with comprehensive, non-carceral solutions.” Stop AAPI Hate makes mission claims, public statements, and assertions of principle that are contradicted or otherwise discredited by many of its affiliations, activities, and organizational interactions.

Rejecting/Abolishing Stop Asian Hate

AAPI Women Lead (AAPIWL), a feminist antiviolence group based in Oakland, and the San Diego organization Asian Solidarity Collective (ASC) offer dynamic examples of anti-racist, abolition oriented, Black solidarity aligned grassroots projects that largely reject the Stop Asian Hate movement’s liberal demands for recognition from the carceral state. ASC, for example, refuses siloed, multiculturalist definitions of anti-racism, framing its work as an ongoing effort to “engage Asian Americans to be liberated from anti-Black racism, model minority myths, internalized colonialism, and white supremacy.” Similarly, AAPIWL emphasizes shared “histories of violence” when addressing anti-Asian racism, emphasizing that “most of us came to these lands (as guests of indigenous cultures) because of racialized, colonial wars.” Echoing ASC’s mission, AAPIWL contends that “we cannot continue to use frameworks or strategies that will continue to harm any community of color. This is solidarity.”

While both groups are relatively new, my substantive experiences with them as an invited collaborator and organizational participant (i recently joined the Board of AAPIWL) directly contrast with Stop AAPI Hate’s affinities for police power and the carceral state, as well as TAAF’s embrace of U.S. militarist, corporate racial capitalist, and Zionist figures. ASC and AAPIWL demonstrate a commitment to political study, grassroots organizing, and other collective activities that nourish a politics—and collective identity—of insurgency and revolt among people whose ascribed racial and gendered identities denote passivity, docility, and assimilation, as well as antiblackness and compliance if not alliance with police power.

By way of example, AAPIWL’s Intergenerational Participatory Action Research project directly challenges the “hate” and “hate crime” centered framings of the Stop Asian Hate movement by conceptualizing “racial and gender violence across Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities” as simultaneously “systemic, institutional, and interpersonal.” As the first national, community-driven effort of its kind, this grassroots study constructively displaces and decenters Stop AAPI Hate’s criminological, police-friendly approach to understanding (and stopping) anti-Asian violence.

Unlike ASC, AAPIWL, and other radical collectives confronting anti-Asian violence, Stop AAPI Hate, TAAF and other Stop Asian Hate organizations are actively constructing an extra-state, liberal-reactionary ensemble through their initiatives and campaigns. Such efforts reflect a key political logic structuring the Pentagon’s larger strategic definition of counterinsurgency: “political reform should be started as soon as feasible, even if the insurgency is still ongoing.”

The Stop Asian Hate movement effectively advocates a form of populist criminology that calls for an inclusive, aggressive, equity-oriented response from the domestic warmaking state. This amounts to a reformist mandate to re-legitimate antiblack, colonial, carceral state violence in a moment of crisis. In this sense, Stop Asian Hate represents an early-21st century Asian Americanist equity grievance that looks to the state as its arbiter, protector and militarized authority figure.

The Liberal Counterinsurgency of Feelings

Just as importantly, Stop Asian Hate fabricates and projects a canonical set of liberal reactionary feelings. Liberal feelings work to pacify, narratively rationalize and politically domesticate actual and potential forms of insurgent, insurrectionist, abolitionist and anti-state imagination and activity. More creepily, liberal feelings groom the Asian/American subject as an ideal inheritor of a 21st century liberal multiculturalist “dream”: a civilizational fantasy that solicits identification with — if not active participation in — U.S. nation-building as a legitimate, reformable, redemptive global project.

Dylan Rodríguez is a professor in the Department of Black Study and the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where he co-directs the Center for Ideas and Society; an inaugural 2020 Freedom Scholar; past president of the American Studies Association; and former chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, winner of the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press). Follow Dylan on X at @dylanrodriguez and Instagram at @dylanrodriguez73.

Recognizing Genocide in Our Classroom

by Sophia Azeb

* Presented at a teach-in for teachers (faculty and students) at UC Santa Cruz on October 24th, 2023

What the last 2 weeks have inexorably demonstrated is that the post-colonialists will not save us.

For myself, it is through Black studies and Black study where the possibilities of our collective liberation can be realised. Black studies is after all a pedagogy of liberation, and public education must be first and foremost in service to the public good. To my mind, the global anticolonial uprising demanding an immediate end to the genocide perpetrated upon Palestinians by the state of Israel; an immediate end to the siege on Gaza and state-sanctioned settler pogroms of Palestinians in the West Bank, and an immediate end to the Israeli occupation and 75 years of the Nakba constitutes The Public Good.

Katherine McKittrick has lately and frequently reminded us that “anticolonial theorising is a mode of living,” which I understand to mean, in part, that anticolonialism is a theory of practice and a practice of theory which moves us ever nearer to the horizon of decolonisation. It has never been more apparent to me than now how the long practice of extractive citation has excised from the study of anticolonial theory that many of us are actively theorising for our lives.

Though I am not a scholar of Palestine, my Palestinianness informs every part of my commitment to Black studies. With that context, I’d like to share some approaches I have used in my classroom this quarter to directly address this genocide, part of the ongoing Nakba that Jennifer historicized for us all.

Unfortunately, I have prior experience with the urgent need to address state-sanctioned racial violence in the classroom in the absence of any administrative acknowledgement or support in the face of such violence, because the structure of US policing - so often in congress with Israeli Occupation Forces through official channels (In the midst of the movement to Stop Cop City, Atlanta’s city government praised the participation of local police in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program with the IDF) - is such that we are as desensitised to the police murders of Black and Indigenous and Latinx [and on, and on…] peoples as we are to the daily trauma and violence meted upon the people of Palestine, Haiti, Congo, African migrants in north Africa and Europe, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and far too many other imperialist cartographic imaginaries to name.

Avenues into these conversations? Pre-empting common questions

Q1: Why single out Israel?

A1: Because the U.S. state offers a singular form of support to the Israeli state, in the form of billions of dollars per year and an alibi for every violation of international law, to the extent that at least 37 states have enacted or attempted to enact laws, executive orders, and resolutions specifically targeting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

A2: Because oppressive regimes are always interconnected: we have only to look at the US’s greatest allies for evidence of that. The Israeli state exported anti-riot vehicles and arms to during the global embargo and boycott of the apartheid state; Guatemalan state forces that carried out the genocide of Mayan peoples were armed and trained by the Israeli state - the “Galil” assault rifle was standard issue in the Guatemalan army by 1980; the Israeli-made bullets, rifles, and grenades exported to Rwanda during the genocide of Tutsi civilians by Hutu militias in 1994 made the slaughter of 1 million Tutsi peoples in 100 days possible. Indeed, just a month ago we collectively witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh by Azerbaijan, directly enabled by Israeli arms sales. Indeed, Azerbaijan today secures 70% of its military arsenal from Israel, one of numerous colonial regimes and authoritarian nations – including many in the Arab world – reliant on Israel’s booming arms trade. Israel is, in fact, not singled out at all. Its influence throughout the globe is one that magnifies the displacement, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of other colonised and racialised people, including in the U.S.

Q2: Didn’t Palestinians in Gaza vote for Hamas? Why don’t the Palestinians employ nonviolent means of resistance? Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Why don’t they leave?

A1: This one has way too many moving parts to adequately handle all at once - namely that many, successive Israeli governments have used Hamas to their advantage (Netanyahu’s political bloc begin only the most recent among them) - but if we must fetishize non-violence so that Palestinians are appropriately deferent enough to deserve to live and move and love freely, without their olive trees razed; water wells poisoned; homes stolen or destroyed; ancestral villages planted over with pine trees to be forgotten, bones deliberately broken; tortured in military detention without charge, shot as they march towards the barrier - not a border, according to the Oslo accords – between Gaza and the homelands many of the people living in Gaza now were forced from. Leave Gaza? How? And only to become refugees twice over?

A2: Oh, why bother: the answer to the question “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi” is always “The Israeli Occupation Forces killed them,” or tried to, or targeted their home to indiscriminately murder their family, or…

Q3: What about women/queer and trans people/Black folks/[insert marginalised community here]? They couldn’t walk around Gaza! They are far safer in Israel.

A1: According to whom? What preconceived notions or stereotypes are you relying on for these assumptions? There have been Black people in Palestine for hundreds of years, and Afro-Palestinians are as impacted by the Israeli occupation as any other of their fellow Palestinians: Fatima Bernawi was the first Palestinian woman to be arrested and incarcerated for her revolutionary (read: militant) organising. Bernawi was a Black woman. Indeed, so many Palestinian women were guerrilla fighters before entering the realm of politics, Leila Khaled and Rasmea Odeh notably among them. Palestinian women have always been the center from which our collective struggle for Palestinian liberation emanates, for instance innovating and practicing a sonic technique known as “Trawidah,” or “malulah”; a method and genre of singing that communicated key terms and information to fellow revolutionaries, refugees, and lovers by encrypting them with additional consonants to safely communicate with their compatriots beginning in the Great Palestinian Revolution of 1936. And Queer Palestinians can and have spoken for themselves, so I will simply share a few pinned notes shared on the Queering the Map app, from Gaza and the West Bank (and all historic Palestine), after the Israeli onslaught began:

One pin along the sea marks “a place where I kissed my first crush. Being gay in Gaza is hard but somehow it was fun. I made out with a lot of boys in my neighbourhood. I thought everyone is gay to some level.”

And another, south of Jerusalem: “Being out doesn’t mean anything to me. I wish to see Haifa I wish to see the village my parents had to leave I wish to see my brother who got killed I wish to be free but my freedom is beyond being out it’s being Palestinian first and foremost. God have mercy on my brother and my Palestinian siblings.”

And another, in Gaza: “I’ve always imagined you and me sitting out in the sun, hand in hand, free at last. We spoke of all the places we would go if we could. Yet you are gone now. If I had known that bombs raining down on us would take you from me, I would have gladly told the world how I adored you more than anything. I’m sorry I was a coward.”

These celebrations, lamentations, calls for justice and dreams of freedom sound not so different from the many and divergent structural and interpersonal realities of being Black, queer, and a woman in the U.S. – or, indeed, in Israel itself.

Q4: Finally, why bring this into the classroom at all?

A1: Because we can not not. Our faculty, staff, and students have had either no or the worst sort of victim-blaming acknowledgement from our administrators, as reflective of most other students and staff throughout the U.S. higher education system. Palestinians and Arab and Muslim peoples - or anyone mistaken as any of these peoples, or anyone in solidarity with these peoples - are being doxed, unhired, fired, suspended, blacklisted, questioned by police and the FBI, beaten, shot at, run over by cars, and stabbed to death by their landlord. Allah yerhamo Wadea Al-Fayoumi: you were only 6 years old and we failed you.

A2: Less emotively? A NYT headline changed three times on the day Al Ahli hospital in Gaza was deliberately annihilated by the Israeli military, and with it at least 500 people among the thousands seeking medical care and shelter inside of the hospital and on its grounds.

The first iteration read, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say”

The second: “At least 500 dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say”

The third: “At Least 500 dead in Blast at Gaza hospital, Palestinians say”

“Palestinians Dead, Palestinians Say”: this is basic grammar. This is the grammar of the unhuman, of genocide. Palestinians die, Israelis are killed. We can each of us recall a dozen equivalent grammatical obfuscations in the aftermath of state-sanctioned murders of Black and Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada, and probably in the last few months or weeks. This is the genocidal grammar that insists there are “NO HUMANS INVOLVED,” as Sylvia Wynter reminds us. We are witnessing mass baptisms among Palestinian Christians in Gaza, in case their children are stolen from them by Israeli airstrikes; toddlers so dehydrated and starving they do not have the energy to cry or scream when brought to a hospital with broken femurs; pregnant women undergoing caesarean sections without anaesthesia; men in the West Bank rounded up and tortured by settlers and the IOF and openly, publicly posted and broadcast by the perpetrators of this violence, just 20 years removed from Abu Ghraib. NO HUMANS INVOLVED.

The abstractions, derailment, and false equivalencies relied on by those who have long defended the settler colonial ethno-state formation of Israel is laid bare in open letter collectively composed by writers including John Berger, Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Eduardo Galeano, Christ Abani, Gore Vidal, and Toni Morrison, published in The Nation on August 18, 2006 during the so-called “Second Lebanon War” and shortly after the so-called “2006 Gaza-Israel conflict.” This latter “conflict in Gaza” (the grammar of genocide again) was reported to have been sparked by the capture of an Israeli soldier by “Palestinian militants” on June 25, 2006. But of course, that’s not what began this particular “unprovoked” meeting of unequal forces. A day prior, on June 24, 2006, Israeli forces had abducted 2 civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. This was reported almost nowhere in the West. Thus, “A Letter from 18 Writers” insisted:

That this ‘kidnapping’ was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systemic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in the face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last 70 years…Each provocation and counter provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations, and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic, and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

Toni Morrison’s co-authorship is of particular relevance for me, as a Black studies scholar and instructor of Black studies courses. What does Palestine have to do with a gen ed course on “Approaches to Black Studies?” And perhaps the most common question I must pre-empt with my students, colleagues, administrators, and peers is indeed something like, “What does Black studies have to do with Palestine at all?”

For myself, and in deference to Toni Morrison, the answer is simple. In tracing an African American “literary archaeology” from slave narratives and abolitionist treatises through contemporary Black fiction in her 1995 essay, “The Site of Memory,” Morrison insists that in her fiction, when confronted with “’proceedings too terrible to relate’ to a non-Black audience, she instead inhabits the position that “the act of imagination is bound up with memory.” Her novels are about the pursuit of truth, rather than fact. The responsibility of Black authors – for Black peoples – while narrating the historic truths of anti-blackness, is to “trust my own recollections…and the recollections of others” alongside “the act of imagination.”

Morrison continues, “the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot. So if I'm looking to find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn't write it (which doesn't mean that they didn't have it); if I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left...then the approach that’s most productive and most trustworthy to me is the recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not from the text to the image.” Very much like Palestinians in diaspora (all of us, distinct and divergent in our attempts towards collectivity as we are) who can recite every inheritance and its theft – every displacement, every law, every incursion, every dispossession, every massacre, every onslaught – from generations before our own consciousness comes to being, because of the generations who lived so our being was assured, Morrison affirms “these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own life…the images that float around them – the remains, so to speak…surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth.”

            It is through and with the relational practice of Black study as Morrison exemplifies it that a series of truths emerges in the face of so many lies: the lie that we do not exist, the lie that we did not cultivate our land, the lie that we did not welcome our kin who came as refugees fleeing from genocidal European antisemitism, the lie that we do not love our children, the lie that we have no history… there is no satisfactory way to end this essay (which began as a small portion of a powerful teach-in), and so I will end it with what I know to be true: Palestine, Haiti, Sudan, Congo, Tigray, Yemen, Hawaii, Kashmir, West Papua - and all my kin I am too ignorant to know better of – we will be free. “My grandparents lived the Nakba, my parents lived the Naksa, and I WILL LIVE THE LIBERATION.”

ASA Academic & Community Activism Caucus Statement on Gaza, Palestine, and Israel, the United States, and Canada

The genocide underway in Palestine is unbearable, torturous, a hellscape. We are incandescent with rage and pain. In North America, Europe, and Australia, the institutions of civic life – legislators, media, universities, non-profits – have openly declared themselves for the dehumanization of colonized people, and for ethnic cleansing. The Israeli military decimates Gaza, then denies or attacks reporting to destabilize public knowledge of what it is doing. Palestinians reporting their own agony from the ground, scholars who provide context, and anti-genocide protesters are censored and vilified. In these ways, comparisons to 9/11 are apt, and we are reminded that four million people were killed using much the same rationales that, later, were admitted as lies.

In this moment also, revolt is everywhere. Countless protesters, certainly numbering millions, have filled the streets to demand an end to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the decolonization of Palestine. Palestinian reporters are publicly schooling news anchors who ask only “what about Hamas?” Student organizers are no longer only teaching each other about Palestine, but leading a movement that centers decolonization. Thousands of scholars have signed letters refuting the racist statements of their institutions.

We send solidarity to Palestinians who are trapped under the control of a relentlessly violent state that is supported by other world powers. We celebrate the rising international movement against ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and for decolonization. We grieve the dead and the deaths to come, and we are filled with outrage at the colonial contortions of discourse that instrumentalize our pain – using expressions of grief over Israeli lives to fuel genocide, and claiming grief over Palestinian lives as evidence, unimaginably, of antisemitism. In doing so, we amplify the calls to stop Israeli- and US-fueled violence that come from Palestinian, Jewish, Indigenous, Black, antiracist, queer, disability justice, climate change, and other movements across the world, including inside the state of Israel.

As scholars of American studies, we must emphasize the role of the United States and Canada in enabling Israeli militarism and apartheid. The deep alliance and co-construction of these settler states has produced $244 billion in US aid to shore up Israel’s economy as it pours funds into settlements and military repression. It has also produced a North American political culture in which post-WWII notions of racial justice have been mined and stripped, perversely, to brand opposition to settler colonial violence as “antisemitism.” The U.S. Senate, the White House, and the Canadian government denounce student protests against genocide as “hate” and “terror”. College presidents have organized themselves as a constituency against faculty and students protesting war. Student organizations are labeled “terrorist” as lobby groups pressure university administrators to attack them. The reverberations of this soft power project are felt especially painfully now, as our news feed is filled with the dehumanization of Palestinians, the lionization of Israeli military assaults, and the US’s seemingly limitless material support for the latter.

We uphold, with intent and urgency, the importance of refusing popular consent for US, Canadian, and Israeli actions – as our Association has done for a decade, since endorsing the boycott of Israel with the overwhelming support of its membership. Refusing is a matter of life and death for five million people in Palestine and six million Palestinian refugees awaiting their return home as international law guarantees. Refusing is resistance to colonialism and war. Refusing is life against death.

We reaffirm our commitment to the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, to decolonization, and to liberation for all people in Palestine.