Thread by @nhannahjones

Last night's shooting & the appalling rise of anti-Asian violence stem frm a sick society where nationalism has again been stoked & normalized. Anti-Black & anti-Asian racism & violence run in tandem in the U.S. Both grps were brought here for labor but never meant to be citizens

Even as this country was recruiting Chinese men to come do the labor white workers would not, they barred Chinese women from entering the U.S. in order to ensure the men would not settle and start families in America.

Then this nation passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to prohibit Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. altogether. This nation's most egregious racist laws and racist Supreme Court rulings targeted Black and Chinese people because of the believe both were unassimilable.

We had to get an amendment to the Constitution to guarantee Black Americans citizenship in their own country, and Chinese Americans had to take a case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to have their own citizenship recognized. law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/t…

If you look at racial real estate covenants -- provisions placed on homes that restricted ownership by race -- they almost always restricted two races: Black and Asian.

And, of course, during World War II, Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps but German Americans were not. And German prisoners of war were allowed to eat in restaurants in the American South that Black Americans soldiers home on leave were barred from.

Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act and explicitly racist immigration policy, the Asian population in the United States stayed relatively low until after the Civil Rights Movement and then we saw large numbers entering the U.S.

And what has followed -- in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and Black demands to dismantle white supremacy -- has been an enduring an attempt to use Asian immigrants and Asian Americans as a wedge against Black Americans.

But the truth is that Asian Americans are only held up as a model to justify inequality and injustice visited upon Black Americans, but are seen by many white Americans as a problem and forever foreign otherwise. In other words, our struggles have always been tied together.

I stand with my Asian-American brothers and sisters, just as so many of you have stood with us. I grieve. We must own all of this history -- ALL OF IT -- and determine to fight for a truly multiracial democracy where we all can be free.