Eunhae Han’s Reviews > Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family > Status Update

I told you that we are settlers, not necessarily colonizers, but we can definitely act like colonizers. We have to watch out for that and try not to behave in colonizer ways. I felt myself uncomfortably and uncertainly pushing back against the label "colonizer."

Grace Lee Boggs pointed out, "You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be, and you do choose how you want to think." How will Asian Americans choose to be, think, and, I would add, act when confronting racism that targets Asian Americans and other people of color?

What people believe about the nature of a given problem informs the solutions they choose to address it. In

Instead, they believe that the problem of racial inequalities and disparities lies with individual behaviors among people of color. It's an assimilationist perspective that avoids questioning social, political, and economic systems and norms.

in the United States, he thought, "Wow. People might call me a 'Chink' or make fun of me, but they don't beat me anymore. Wow, this is heaven" He gladly accepted verbal assaults over physical violence.

Cathy Park Hong called minor feelings, which "occur when American optimism is enforced upon you,

These racialized sentiments have led to tragic violence. In 1989 a White gunman, who had expressed a hatred toward Vietnamese people, killed five children (Sokhim An, 6; Ram Chun, 8; Oeun Lim, 8; Raphanar Or, 9; and Thuy Tran, 6) and wounded thirty others in the schoolyard at Stockton, California's Cleveland Elementary School,

the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, numerous "Alien Land Laws" that barred Asian Americans from purchasing and owning property, anti-miscegenation laws outlawing interracial marriage between Asians and Whites, and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

White patriarchal ideologies OF US citizenry can also be traced to the 1871 mass lynching of eighteen Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, the racist and misogynist 1875 Page Act that banned Chinese women from immigrating to the US