I am so privileged to work with groundbreaking scholars and practitioners who are aiming to change the structures that govern so much of all of our lives.
As I have commented in previous blogs, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) in the US are seen as having the trappings of economic, political, and social success. While there are of course ample examples of important and successful AANHPIs (just to name a few in California in the public sphere, Secretary of Government Operations Agency Amy Tong, US Representative Judy Chu, PhD, California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, PhD, and the NHPI advocacy organization EPIC), there are also large groups within the AANHPI population that are experiencing vulnerabilities, such as unstable and low quality housing, uncertain employment, marginal air quality, and violence.
As with many structural factors, these challenges intersect with racism. When we think about racism, AANHPIs might not immediately come to mind. We might instead consider anti-Black racism, linked with the long-term consequences of slavery, including inconsistent and unstable property rights (Thomas Mitchell's work is especially insightful and has significant policy implications), discrimination in education and housing, and other impacts. We might also consider the vitriolic debates surrounding anti-immigration and immigrant rhetoric, which tends to focus on Latinx/e populations, especially as they relate to the concept of "borders" and "environment" (Laura Pulido's work provides incisive critique and provides new ways of seeing, plus she has a very cool website).
We have seen that AANHPIs are subject to many of these pressures, actions, and rhetoric and have been singled out during particular historical moments -- for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the entry of Chinese workers into the US until 1943 (see Ronald Takaki's classic work) and the perhaps less well known "the Mahele" or Land Division Act of 1848, which basically altered property rights from collective to individual in Hawaii (Beth Tamayose, PhD and I wrote about this in an article published in 2014). The rise of anti-Asian and anti-AANHPI hate incidents and violence is one stark example about how AANHPI individuals, families, and communities have experienced targeted verbal and physical assaults.
This brings me back to the work I do with so many brilliant and committed scholars and practitioners. In a recent paper, pediatrician and scholar Dr. Joyce Javier (photo above), now at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, and I tackled the issue of pediatric training and how to build in elements to combat anti-AANHPI racism to train the next generation of pediatricians.
In our paper published recently by Academic Pediatrics, we discuss US policies that have punished, excluded, or incarcerated AANHPIs, how AANHPI racism affects pediatric training (using the Racial Formation framework), and why this issue is important for workforce recruitment for pediatricians. We then make a number of recommendations, including increasing the number of AANHPIs who become pediatricians, reducing "microaggressions" in medical schools and in clinical settings, and incorporating ethnic studies and AANHPI history in medical student courses and continuing medical education (for example, UCLA Asian American Studies Center is working on a multi-media textbook that will be released in 2025). This multi-media textbook is part of a larger effort to transform K-12 education across the US.
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