Anti-racism resources to support Asian Americans: Books

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings."

Sixteen of Minnesota’s best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in Minnesota. Minnesota communities struggle with some of the nation’s worst racial disparities. As its authors confront and consider the realities that lie beneath the numbers, this book provides an important tool to those who want to be part of closing those gaps.

This book is the first transnational history of Chinese migration to the Americas. By focusing on the fluidity and complexity of border crossings throughout the Western Hemisphere, Young shows us how Chinese migrants constructed alternative communities and identities through these transnational pathways.

The Color of Success tells of the transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities". By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype,The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically-charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.

Contagious Divides charts the dynamic transformation of representations of Chinese immigrants from medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Examining the cultural politics of public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco, this book looks at the history of racial formation in the U.S. by focusing on the development of public health bureaucracies.

Here is a history of the social and cultural movement that knit a hugely disparate and isolated set of communities into a political identity--and along the way created a racial group out of marginalized people who had been uncomfortably lumped together as Orientals. The Asian American Movement was an unabashedly radical social movement, sprung from campuses and city ghettoes and allied with Third World freedom struggles and the anti-Vietnam War movement, seen as a racist intervention in Asia.

Kang traces how "Asian women" have been alternately distinguished and effaced as subjects of the traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women.

Model-Minority Imperialism links geopolitical dramas of twentieth-century empire building with domestic controversies of U.S. racial order by examining the cultural politics of Asian Americans in fiction, film, and theatrical productions.

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation.

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Forcing us to confront this history, America for Americans explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America.

This book examines the childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and aging stages of Asian Americans to help researchers and practitioners offer better services to this ethnic group. Psychosocial Aspects of the Asian-American Experience will help you understand the ethnic and cultural diversity within the Asian-American population and offers both quantitative and qualitative research that may impact social policies and social services for Asian Americans.

Discusses the impacts of racial crime, exploring the relationship between the physical or verbal acts to issues of ethnic identity, civil rights of immigrants, Internet racism, sexual violence, language and violence, economic scapegoating, and police brutality. This work offers suggestions for combating hate crime.

Writing from a variety of perspectives, the contributors to this book expand the concept of community to include sites not necessarily bounded by space; formations around gender, class, sexuality, and generation reveal new processes as well as the demographic diversity of today's Asian American population.