On July 23, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris reached the threshold of Democratic National Convention delegates that she needed to become the party’s de facto presidential nominee. In the two days since President Joe Biden had ceded the nomination, a diverse party had become re-energized around the 2024 race and its second, historic, multiracial nominee. While Harris would not be the first woman, or the first African American, at the top of the Democratic ticket, she would be the first Black woman and the first Asian American woman. The daughter of immigrants, a Jamaican father and a South Asian mother, Kamala Harris will make history in her own right.

It’s a sweet moment. Harris’s political achievement is a signal that Asian Americans have arrived in United States politics. Significantly, if she is elected, Harris will take office in January 2025, exactly 60 years since Hawaii’s Patsy Takemato Mink became the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman to be sworn in to Congress.

Yet, Harris’s elevation coincides with another surge in anti-Asian hate. While the United States has a long history of vilifying immigrants from Asian nations and their American descendants, that xenophobia was purposefully revived by former President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, who have targeted China and its people as an economic and physical danger to the United States.

By 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged communities, Trump and his allies labeled it a “Chinese virus” and the “Kung Flu,” reviving old tropes about immigrants, and specifically Asian immigrants, as carriers of disease. Chinese scholars and scientists have been targeted. In 2023, when he was competing with Trump for the Republican nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed discriminatory legislation that, among other things, prohibited Chinese nationals from purchasing real estate, a painful reminder of pre–World War II discrimination that rendered all Asian immigrants as perpetual second-class citizens.

Not coincidentally, random, violent attacks on Asian Americans have surged in the United States. One of the first things the new Biden-Harris administration did in 2021 was to strengthen federal hate crimes laws, with special attention to Asian American victims of violence.

But you can’t tell this political story without also talking about over a century of Asian American activism. Immigrants and their descendants made themselves visible by building vibrant, physical communities that welcomed generation after generation of newcomers from multiple nations. From these communities, they fought back against racism and discrimination in the courts, formed unions, volunteered for military service, raised families, claimed the right to education, made art, mounted demonstrations, and formed businesses.

One activist who documented this Asian American history in pictures until his death from COVID in 2021 was New York City photographer Corky Lee. A college history major and graduate of the city’s public education system, Lee began life as a conscientious objector and housing organizer. For almost fifty years, Lee documented New York City’s Chinatown, mostly in black and white. Hundreds of Lee’s photographs—Asian Americans living, working, striking, celebrating, protesting, and taking part in every activity that occurs in a now-shrinking part of the city—are now available, along with accompanying essays, in Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (Clarkson Potter, 2024). It’s edited by the artist Chee Wang Ng and my friend Columbia University historian Mae Ngai.


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