“Where do we belong in this unfolding story of America?”

WITH THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC and the Black Lives Matter protests, I am powerfully reminded that Ethnic Studies remains more important than ever¹ and that much more work still needs to be done. COVID-19 and the Civil Rights protests have underscored longstanding inequalities in the United States along the lines of race, ethnicity, immigration and socio-economic status. To examine and compare such forms of historical exclusion and inequality, and to provide research tools to redress current disparities of civil rights among all Americans, Ethnic Studies can be a powerful agent of change.

Current Issues
First, we have seen the discriminatory impact of COVID-19: Black and Latino Americans getting infected and dying at higher rates than whites and in relation to their population. During a May 1, 2020 online panel discussion² by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, fellow CUNY colleagues pointed out that attention had not been on the systemic racial, economic and political inequalities³ underlying these statistics, but rather, blame has been cast onto Black and Latino Americans themselves. Native American communities have also been found to have higher infection and mortality rates.⁴ And, across race and ethnicity, undocumented immigrants fear that their status will put them in jeopardy if they seek health care and report hate crimes of any kind.

Asian Americans who looked like they might be of Chinese descent have been wrongly blamed for COVID-19 and the target of bias and hate crimes. National leaders continue to refer to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu.” In late March 2020, the FBI issued a warning that the nation would see an escalation in hate crimes⁵ based on the mistaken assumption of associating the virus with China (where the outbreak originated in late 2019) and Asian Americans. The warning was borne out.

Second, we have seen the global, national and local protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Mr. Floyd’s death follows in a long line of Black Americans dying in police hands despite calls to change policing.⁶ These types of inequalities and injustices, and the coalition building to mobilize against them, have deep roots in Ethnic Studies as a field, including at Hunter College.⁷ It is this history that led to the founding of Asian American Studies at Hunter College.⁸

Backdrop
The Asian American Studies Program (AASP), an undergraduate curriculum (now with a 12 credit minor), was formally launched at Hunter College in September 1993, with the late Peter Kwong⁹ serving as the inaugural director. The Program’s institutionalization at Hunter was the result of decades of prior work by students, alumni, community activists, faculty and administrative leaders. According to former Associate Provost Shirley Hune, Asian American Studies started at Hunter in 1971 with a single course taught out of Chinese Classics by geography professor C.T. Wu¹⁰ and Hunter student Fay Chiang,¹¹ and offered twice more.

From 1974 to 1984, Hunter’s then Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department, now known as Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies,¹² played a key role in offering that course and sustaining the activism for Asian American Studies. Thanks to founding chair Dr. John Henrik Clarke,¹³ the department offered the course when funds and faculty were available. Funding initially came out of the Black and Puerto Rican Studies adjunct budget and subsequently, from the Provost’s office. Later, as Associate Provost, Shirley Hune was a strong internal advocate for Asian American Studies and garnered the administrative backing that paved the way for the Program’s launch in 1993.

Race and Place: Social Justice, 1980-1993
Asian Asian American Studies at Hunter started after the tumultuous decade of the 1980s, which opened with an infamous case of racialized blaming of Asian Americans and the portrayal of them as forever foreign. The year 1982 saw the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American engineer in Detroit celebrating his bachelor party, who was beaten to death by two unemployed white auto workers. Mistaking him as Japanese, the two white men apparently saw Chin as a proxy for the Japanese automobile companies that they felt had taken away American jobs. The assailants were sentenced to three years’ probation and subject to a $3000 fine. As Renee Tajima-Pena’s recent powerful PBS docuseries¹⁴ shows, African American Civil Rights leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson actively worked with Asian American activists to mobilize to seek justice for this hate crime. And as Frank Wu, the new president of Queens College, recently wrote, the killing of Vincent Chin sparked a new wave of Asian American activism.¹⁵

Violence across Communities of Color
Violence around who is seen as not belonging has a long history in the United States across various groups,¹⁶ including those now popularly seen as white. In the case of American Jews, they are still not fully accepted, as evidenced by anti-Semitism, which is at an all-time high¹⁷ in the last 40 years. In addition to Vincent Chin, the ‘80s also saw three infamous racially motivated killings of Black men as they led their everyday lives in New York City. In each case, the assailants were large crowds of white men.

In 1982, Willie Turks¹⁸ was killed in Gravesend, Brooklyn where he and fellow MTA workers went to get a late night snack after work. In 1986, Michael Griffith¹⁹ was killed in Howard Beach, Queens when the car he and his friends were riding in broke down—they had just picked up their paychecks for construction work. In 1989, Yusef Hawkins,²⁰ a teen, was killed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn while there looking at a used car that was for sale.

In the early 1990s, the spotlight of police brutality against Black Americans was joined by tensions between Korean American immigrant merchants in largely poor and Black communities, and Black American customers: the 1990 boycotts²¹ of the Korean-owned Red Apple markets in New York City organized by African Americans and Haitian immigrants; and the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest²² following the acquittals of four white Los Angeles police officers caught on video brutally beating Rodney King, an unarmed and restrained Black man. The targeting of L.A.’s Koreatown and the extensive property damages suffered there were attributed to the videotaped 1991 shooting death of Latasha Harlins,²³ a Black 15 year old girl, by Soon Ja Du, a Korean storeowner, who accused Harlins of shoplifting, which later was found to be false. Du was sentenced to probation, community service, and a $500 fine. The civil unrest was a turning point for Los Angeles Korean Americans,²⁴ who felt that the police had abandoned Koreatown and its businesses, in favor of protecting the city’s wealthier and white neighborhoods. Afterwards, the Korean American community worked to build coalitions with the Black community and to build political activism in the United States.

In June 1993, came the grounding of the Golden Venture ship in Queens, and the revelation of undocumented Chinese labor migrants from Fujian, China,²⁵ being smuggled into the country.

This was the backdrop of race relations, economics and social justice in the thirteen years prior to the founding of Asian American Studies at Hunter College. And if they seem similar to what we are seeing in the world now, they are. Despite all the many strides our nation has made from 1993 to 2020, we have not moved far enough from the conditions that gave rise to the inequalities and injustices of nearly thirty years ago.

Coming of Age: From Exclusion to Civil Rights
These events were part of my coming of age as a teenager, college student and young working professional when they occurred. I am the child of working-class Chinese immigrants, and our family’s lives in America had been shaped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first, but not the last, federal legislation to exclude labor migrants by national origins and effectively, race and ethnicity; and later, the gradual opening up of the United States, thanks to the Civil Rights Movement which gave rise to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. From a young age, I moved in multiple social worlds and was already “woke”: Manhattan’s Chinatown, where I was born, my older brothers were raised, and my mother was a garment worker; our new home in Eastern Queens, where many of our neighbors were Holocaust survivors and my schoolmates were Jewish, Italian, Latino, Black and Asian; and Phillips Academy, a private boarding school where I was a scholarship student.²⁶

These national and local events deepened my understanding of inequality and injustice and further sparked my interest in creating a more just world. Back then, there was no Ethnic Studies in my East Coast schools, and I turned to finding out whatever I could on my own. I learned that the world was still seen in black and white terms, and in quite incomplete ways. I became a journalist and youth magazine editor, and then an academic and research funder, because I wanted to tell, and support the telling of, stories that typically are never told. Perhaps, not surprisingly, my books—Compelled to Excel,²⁷ Keeping the Immigrant Bargain²⁸ and Writing Immigration²⁹—have all focused on immigration, race, ethnicity, gender and social class. While teaching, I make sure to incorporate crucial pieces of Ethnic Studies from a comparative lens, even if the courses are not listed as Ethnic Studies per se.³⁰

1. Teaching and Learning Ethnic Studies
Ethnic Studies is comprised of three domains. First is curriculum. At Hunter, students take classes in Asian American history, Civil Rights and the law, public policy, mental health, Muslim diasporas, literature and the arts. They learn from our adjunct faculty,³¹ who are prominent writers, up and coming visual artists, Civil Rights leaders and leaders of community nonprofits, and mental health practitioners. All are deeply connected to Asian American communities, and some have their students do fieldwork in these communities.

Students learn of the diversity in the Asian American population, and how Asians have long been part of America³² and landmark policies establishing birthright citizenship and the right to supplemental language instruction in public schools for English language learners; and have pushed back against the deprivation of their rights through denaturalization, lack of documentation status, and racialized and/or religious targeting, e.g., Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the internment of Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children during World War II; and the profiling and denial of rights that Arabs, Muslim Americans and South Asian Americans, mistaken for being Muslim, went through in the wake of 9/11³³ and the 2017 Travel Ban.³⁴ They learn to situate the experiences of Asians in the United States alongside fellow people of color and white ethnics, who have been and/or continue to be excluded. Our courses are intended to be of general interest and value to all of Hunter’s student body.

This type of content should be taught in other settings as well. The current Pre-K-12 pipeline does not serve its students well, for instance, in state standards and resources for teaching the Civil Rights Movement.³⁵ Community-based organizations serving adults should have Ethnic Studies too. Adults, both U.S.- and foreign-born, could and should learn this history. Many working-class and poor immigrants often do not have time to learn about the history of any group of people in the United States, including their own.

2. Research Matters
Stories have been told about Asian Americans, their education and mobility for decades.³⁶ But to deepen our knowledge base of Asian Americans, research must have high quality datasets with Asian Americans in them, and researchers should be supported in conducting rigorous policy-informed comparative analyses. With economist Raj Chetty’s³⁷ work, we see how thoughtful analyses of big data have debunked the causes typically seen as driving the black-white mobility gap—in fact, it is not genetics, nor lower rates of marriage or higher levels of single parenthood among Black Americans. Researchers confirmed that neighborhoods³⁸ matter—that Black and White children do not grow up in neighborhoods with similar structural conditions. In fact, Black Americans “are five times as likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods as white Americans.”³⁹ What are the long-term neighborhood effects on the outcomes of Asian American children, and how do they compare to those for Blacks, Whites and Latinos and Native Americans?⁴⁰ Does this vary by Asian and Latino subgroup, by Black and White immigrants? How can comparative findings help us identify the problems and the policy strategies to address them?

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, some are asking how they benefit from racial inequality without being racist.⁴¹ This question might finally be getting the attention that it deserves. What is that benefit, and how does it play out differently according to race, ethnicity, social class and gender? What are the limitations of this benefit, for whom and under what conditions?

CUNY and Hunter⁴² faculty have been doing groundbreaking work that inform or intersect with these questions, on both ends of the economic spectrum among Asian Americans, a highly economically bifurcated group.⁴³ This work includes how post-1960s Indian immigrants and their descendants have formed a powerful identity and community⁴⁴ in New York City; the revitalization of New York City’s Chinatown;⁴⁵ the evolution of a new global immigrant neighborhood⁴⁶ in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; undocumented immigrants;⁴⁷ sex workers;⁴⁸ nail salon workers;⁴⁹ and the bamboo ceiling⁵⁰ and professional isolation⁵¹ confronting the highly educated, including among the U.S.-born.

This work also includes a report on gaps in Asian American leadership at CUNY⁵² itself—a picture that has notably changed in the past year. The appointments of S. David Wu⁵³ and Frank Wu⁵⁴ as the respective presidents of Baruch College and Queens College, and the late Allen Y. Lew⁵⁵ as vice chancellor (who served for several months before passing recently of COVID-19), are the first Asian Americans to serve in these positions.

3. Public Engagement, Policy and Partnerships
This is where Hunter College’s recently launched Asian American Studies Center⁵⁶ is situated—a hub for community- and policy-driven research, the arts, student enrichment, and community engagement. The public should hear the stories⁵⁷ of our communities, not only in the sciences and social sciences, but also in the arts and humanities, which provide evocative expressions of Asian diasporic cultures and politics, and what it means to live life as an Asian American in its many facets.

More focused conversations and research partnerships with communities, policy makers, and practitioners will facilitate more effective policies and practices to reduce inequalities. These kinds of collaborations will shed light on what researchers and students should know about Asian American communities to better work with, give back to and serve them; and how we can build the broad coalitions across different New York constituencies to rebuild our city post-COVID-19 along more equitable lines. As a friend and colleague recently said, this is the slow, even mundane and yet, critical work involving politics, advocacy, compromises, organizing infrastructure and government that leads to transformative social change.

Ethnic Studies As a Call to Action
As humans, we all have a need to belong and to be seen and heard. Where do we belong in this unfolding story of America? Where do we want to belong? What will we do to ensure that everyone belongs? We are all responsible for whether the post-1965 Civil Rights strides will actually lead to conditions of equality. We all need to do the work to build an America where everyone has documentation status, can all feel safe and respected, and have the opportunity to achieve success—regardless of our race, ethnicity, national origins, religion, gender, sexual identity; or when we or our parents happened to come here, how much wealth or income or education our parents possess, and where they get to live and work.

Ethnic Studies is pivotal to this call to action. Ethnic Studies offers all our communities both the research tools and learning opportunities to “write ourselves” into the unfolding history of America’s promise from pain, pandemic and protests, and to move us all forward into a better future.

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Notes

[1] Vivian Louie, “Asian-American studies, more vital than ever: Coronavirus is a moment we should be learning,” New York Daily News, May 19, 2020, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-asian-american-studies-more-vital-than-ever-20200520-hc7ym7tf4fdmdjy63s2d5wbaje-story.html.
[2] Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, The Discriminatory Impact of COVID-19: The Pandemic’s Role in Highlighting Entrenched Racial Inequalities in the U.S., May 1, 2020, http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/events/discriminatory-impact-covid-19/.
[3] Anthony P. Browne, “Coronavirus, a black plague: Early evidence is that the pandemic is hitting African Americans especially hard,” New York Daily News, April 7, 2020, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-coronavirus-a-black-plague-20200407-sho64w6jhrc7fco5exyntrvnmu-story.html.
[4] Randall Akee, “How COVID-19 is impacting indigenous peoples in the U.S.,” PBS News Hour, May 13, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-covid-19-is-impacting-indigenous-peoples-in-the-u-s/.
[5] Josh Margolin, “FBI warns of potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid coronavirus,” ABC News, March 27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warns-potential-surge-hate-crimes-asian-americans/story?id=69831920.
[6] The Civil Rights Implications of “Broken Windows” Policing in NYC and General NYPD Accountability to the Public (New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2018), https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018/03-22-NYSAC.pdf.
[7] Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies, Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/afprl/about-us.
[8] Asian American Studies Program, Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/aasp.
[9] Peter Kwong Memorial (Asian American Studies Program), Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/aasp/people/aasp-faculty/peter-kwong-urban-affairs-and-planning.
[10] Charles Heatwole, “Dr. Cheng-Tsu Wu: A Remembrance,” Department of Geography and Environmental Science – Hunter College/CUNY, February 12, 2020, http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/memorials/cheng-tsu_wu.html.
[11] Richard Sandomir, “Fay Chiang, 65, Poet Who Championed Asian-American Culture, Dies,” The New York Times, October 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/obituaries/fay-chiang-65-poet-who-championed-asian-american-culture-dies.html.
[12] Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies Webpage, Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/afprl.
[13] Dr. John Henrik Clarke Memorial Webpage, Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/afprl/dr.-john-henrik-clarke.
[14] Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, “The Asian Americans” — Sneak preview with Renee Tajima-Pena, May 8, 2020, http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/events/asian-americans-sneak-preview-renee-tajima-pena/.
[15] Frank H. Wu, “How the racist killing of Vincent Chin sparked the Asian-American movement,” South China Morning Post, June 20, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3089541/how-racist-killing-vincent-chin-sparked-asian-american-movement.
[16] Edited by Elliot R. Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan M. Kraut, From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era (NYU Press, 2007), https://www.garygerstle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/gerstleImmigrantAsThreatToAmericanSecurity-FromArrivalToIncorporation.pdf.
[17] Johnny Diaz, “Anti-Semitic Incidents Surged in 2019, Report Says,” The New York Times, May 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/us/antisemitic-report-incidents.html.
[18] Dinah Prince and Don Gentile, “Willie Turks, a black MTA worker, was pulled from a car and killed by a white mob in 1982,” New York Daily News, June 23, 1982, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/willie-turks-killed-white-mob-brooklyn-1982-article-1.2261162.
[19] Robert Gearty and Don Gentile, “Michael Griffith dies fleeing a white mob in Howard Beach in 1986,” New York Daily News, December 21, 1986, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/michael-griffith-died-fleeing-white-mob-howard-beach-1986-article-1.2917533.
[20] Ralph Blumenthal, “Black Youth Is Killed by Whites; Brooklyn Attack Is Called Racial,” The New York Times, August 25, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/25/nyregion/black-youth-is-killed-by-whites-brooklyn-attack-is-called-racial.html.
[21] Claire Jean Kim, “No Justice, No Peace!”: The Politics of Black Korean Conflict,” Trotter Review 7:2, A Special Issue on the Political and Social Relations Between Communities of Color (William Monroe Trotter Institute, 1993), https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1114&context=trotter_review.
[22] Anjuli Sastry and Karen Grigsby Bates, “When LA Erupted In Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots,” NPR, April 26, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots.
[23] Angel Jennings, “How the killing of Latasha Harlins changed South L.A., long before Black Lives Matter,” The Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0318-latasha-harlins-20160318-story.html.
[24] Kyung Lah, “The LA riots were a rude awakening for Korean-Americans,” CNN, April 29, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/us/la-riots-korean-americans/index.html.
[25] Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor (The New Press, 1999), https://thenewpress.com/books/forbidden-workers.
[26] Vivian Louie, “Why We Do This Work,” Asian American Matters: A New York Anthology (Asian American and Asian Research Institute – CUNY, 2017), https://aaari.info/assets/2020/07/2014-CUNY-FORUM-Vivian-Louie.pdf.
[27] Vivian S. Louie, Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity among Chinese Americans (Stanford University Press, 2004), https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6284.
[28] Vivian Louie, Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012), https://www.russellsage.org/publications/keeping-immigrant-bargain.
[29] Marcelo Suarez-Orozco (Editor), Vivian Louie (Editor), Roberto Suro (Editor), Writing Immigration Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue (University of California Press, 2011), https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520267183/writing-immigration.
[30] Shirley Hune, “Demographics, Geographies, Institutions The Changing Intellectual Landscape of Asian American Studies,” Asian American Matters: A New York Anthology (Asian American and Asian Research Institute – CUNY, 2017), https://aaari.info/assets/2021/01/2017-Asian-American-Matters-Shirley-Hune-2.pdf.
[31] Asian American Studies Program Faculty, Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/aasp/people/aasp-faculty.
[32] Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon & Schuster, 2015), https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Making-of-Asian-America/Erika-Lee/9781476739403.
[33] New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights Implications of Post-September 11 Law Enforcement Practices in New York (New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2014), https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/sac/ny0304/ny0304.pdf.
[34] South Asians Americans Leading Together, Communities on Fire: Confronting Hate Violence and Xenophobic Political Rhetoric (South Asians Americans Leading Together, 2018), https://saalt.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Communities-on-Fire.pdf.
[35] Southern Poverty Law Center, The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States (Teaching Tolerance, 2014), https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/publications/teaching-the-movement-2014.
[36] Vivian Louie, “The Hidden Story of What Drives Success: Institutions and Power,” CUNY FORUM 2:1 (Asian American and Asian Research Institute – CUNY, 2014), https://aaari.info/assets/2020/07/2014-CUNY-FORUM-Vivian-Louie.pdf.
[37] Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce and Kevin Quealy, “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” The New York Times, March 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html.
[38] William Julius Wilson, “Don’t ignore class when addressing racial gaps in intergenerational mobility,” Brookings, April 12, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/04/12/dont-ignore-class-when-addressing-racial-gaps-in-intergenerational-mobility/.
[39] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “What Is Owed,” The New York Times, July 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage.
[40] Louie, Keeping.
[41] Reihan Salam, “What White Privilege Really Means,” Slate, December 17, 2014, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/12/criming-while-white-the-problem-with-our-conversation-about-white-privilege.html.
[42] Affiliated Faculty in Asian American Studies, Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/aasp/people/affiliated-faculty.
[43] Rakesh Kochhar and Anthony Cilluffo, Income Inequality in the U.S. Is Rising Most Rapidly Among Asians (Pew Center Research Center, 2018), https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/07/12/income-inequality-in-the-u-s-is-rising-most-rapidly-among-asians/.
[44] Madhulika S. Khandelwal, Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City (Cornell University Press, 2002), https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801488078/becoming-american-being-indian/#bookTabs=1.|
[45] Kenneth J. Guest, “From Mott Street to East Broadway: Fuzhounese Immigrants and the Revitalization of New York’s Chinatown,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 7 (1): 24-44 (Brill Academic Publishers, 2011) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324920748_Gentrification_and_the_Future_of_Work_in_New_York_City%27s_%27Chinatowns%27l.
[46] Tarry Hum, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park (Temple University Press, 2014), http://tupress.temple.edu/book/1228.
[47] Amy Hsin, https://sites.google.com/view/amyhsin/home.
[48] John J. Chin, Lois M. Takahashi, Yeonsoo Baik, Caitlin Ho, Stacy To, Abigail Radaza, Elizabeth S.C. Wu, Sungmin Lee, Melanie Dulfo and Daun Jung, Illicit Massage Parlors in Los Angeles County and New York City: Stories from Women Workers (2019), http://johnchin.net/Article_Files/MP_Study_10.11.19_FINAL.pdf.
[49] Jin Young Seo, Ying-Yu Chao and Shiela M. Strauss, “Work-Related Symptoms, Safety Concerns, and Health Service Utilization Among Korean and Chinese Nail Salon Workers in the Greater New York City Area,” Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health 31:3 (Asia-Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health, 2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1010539519840255.
[50] Margaret M. Chin, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder (NYU Press, 2020), https://nyupress.org/9781479816811/stuck/.
[51] Yung-Yi Diana Pan, Incidental Racialization: Performative Assimilation in Law School (Temple University Press, 2017), http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009258.
[52] CUNY Asian American Leadership Initiative, Asian American Leadership in CUNY and Higher Education: Findings, Recommendations & Accountability (Asian American and Asian Research Institute – CUNY, 2016), https://aaari.info/16-05-09caalireport/.
[53] The City University of New York, “CUNY Appoints Next President Of Baruch College,” The City University of New York, February 3, 2020, https://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2020/02/03/cuny-appoints-next-president-of-baruch-college/.
[54] The City University of New York, “CUNY Names New Presidents for the Graduate Center And Queens College, Interim President for Hostos,” The City University of New York, March 30, 2020, https://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2020/03/30/cuny-names-new-presidents-for-the-graduate-center-and-queens-college-interim-president-for-hostos/.
[55] Sam Roberts, “Allen Lew, a Virtuoso Builder of Public Works, Dies at 69,” The New York Times, July 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/obituaries/allen-lew-dead-coronavirus.html.
[56] Message from the Director Vivian Louie (Asian American Studies Program), Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/aasp/about/message-from-the-director.
[57] Public Events (Asian American Studies Program), Hunter College/CUNY, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/aasp/the-center/public-programming/public-events.