Interviewer: Siena Iwasaki Milbauer
When we first reached out to University of Minnesota Professor Jigna Desai, we were planning on talking about Women’s History Month. But on March 16, 8 people, including 6 Asian women, were murdered in Atlanta in an act of hateful and yes, racist violence.
Here at AAOP, we’ve devoted this 2021 Women’s History Month to uplifting the voices of powerful Asian American women as they shared their empowering personal histories. We wanted this month to be full of joyful celebration, but when history is happening before our eyes and within our beloved community, we can’t look away, no matter how painful it might be. It is our duty to raise our voices in this moment, as youth and young Asian people, and tell the stories of our community’s grief and rage.
It is also our responsibility to especially uplift the reactions and stories of specifically Asian women, and Asian folks who do not identify as women but who have lived experiences of misogyny. This moment is deeply traumatic for all of our Asian community, but it has a particular sting for those who can viscerally identify with the people who lost their lives in Atlanta as the result of misogynistic and racist violence.
The following interview with Professor Desai was conducted just two days after the Atlanta killings. We are so grateful to her for being willing to pivot from our original topic to instead reflect upon recent events, and for sharing her wise and vulnerable reactions.
Hi, I am Jigna Desai (she/her). I am a professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. I am an Asian American feminist and queer studies scholar that focuses on media, literature, and culture. More recently, my work has been on transforming K-12 and higher education for students of color.
I want to acknowledge how much we are carrying and holding.
Thirty years ago, I left studying astrophysics because I wanted to impact the lives of girls and women of color, especially Asian American girls and women. I haven’t looked back. As a South Asian American woman growing up in the 70s and 80s, I grew up in a society that not only did not understand my experiences, but did not even acknowledge my existence in literature, popular culture, or schools. The racism and sexism I experienced was simply ignored. Even my women, gender, and sexuality studies courses did not make space for my stories, or the stories of my mother, grandmothers, aunties, brothers, or sisters.
I was also not taught the long histories of anti-Asian violence, hypersexualization, misogyny, war, imperialism, internment, or exclusion. Nor was I taught the ingenuity, care, solidarity, resistance, and amazing stories of our communities. I became an educator and scholar to change that. To hold up a mirror to the amazing Asian American communities I know.
This last year has been devastating for us. COVID-19 has hit BIPOC communities hard with racial disparities in terms of the impact of COVID-19 and access to healthcare. Donald Trump and many Americans have fanned anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 global pandemic in the US by calling it to the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.” This has dramatically increased violence against Asian people, especially elders and women.
As we shared story after story of attacks against our people amongst ourselves, the mainstream media ignored us. Many of us worried about our parents and grandparents walking outside, going to the grocery store, going to work. Many of us worried about how to keep each other safe. The pandemic has also been doubly difficult for women who have done much of the labor in holding and taking care of family and communities. Girls and women have taken care of young people and elders while also working or going to school. We have been afraid of going to school or work because we did not want to bring home the virus to our multigenerational homes with vulnerable and ill elders and disabled people. This year, there has been hope with the arrival of the vaccine, even as we encounter the uneven distribution that makes it difficult for BIPOC communities to access.
Many of us are still hurting and reeling from the murders and violence in Atlanta. As mainstream media tried to tell us that it was not racist and misogynist, we know otherwise.
The media tried to whitewash the loss of Asian lives in Atlanta in many ways. First, they claimed that the murderer’s supposed sex addiction was the cause of the violence. In reality, that the killer went intentionally to an Asian massage spa to kill six Asian women to stop his desires indicates that for him, Asian American women are hypsersexualized and, in his mind, responsible for his desires. This hypersexualization has a long history embedded not only in xenophobia, racism, and anti-immigration, but also war, imperialism, US military presence, and sex tourism in Asia. Some of these histories are captured by the Page Act of 1875, that banned prostitutes and effectively banned all Chinese women immigrants as they were thought to be prostitutes.
It is these racial and gendered structures of violence and harm that undergird what happened in Atlanta. These histories devalue the lives of Asian Americans, and especially Asian American sex workers, wellness and intimacy care workers, and service labor workers. Every single Asian American woman, femme, and nonbinary person I know has experienced some version of this racialized misogyny. It is historical. It is everyday. It is violent. And it resonates across our lives.
Most non-Asian people are trained not to see anti-Asian racism because they assume we are the good docile “model minority.” This myth erases and naturalizes a great deal of anti-Asian racism. We are not taught the long history of American violence against Asian Americans, violence that includes lynchings, mob violence, assault, internment, street harassment, and attacks. This history stretches from anti-Chinese and anti-Indian violence in late 1800s and early 1900s, through World War II and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, to the murder of Vincent Chin, and the violence against South Asian, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Sikh Americans after 9/11.
For our communities, anti-Asian violence should not start or end in a call for more policing. We stop violence by stopping white supremacy and imperialism including police, the military, and ICE. These institutions are part of the problem.
The week of the Atlanta murders also marked the one year anniversary of the murder of Breonna Taylor. During the same week, Biden continued deportations to Vietnam, while sanctions continued against Iran, and white settler colonialism continued to harm and hypersexualize Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit people, and their relations. US racism, militarism, and imperialism continue.
We are not taught that our stories and lives are intertwined. We are also not taught about our long histories of survival, resistance, and solidarity. We have stood up against white supremacy and for each other so many times. Asian American women show up in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and other POC people. Our lives are tied together in these long structures of solidarity and grounded in the intimacies of our everyday lives. I want to celebrate the lives and capacities of us, the work that we do, the work we have done, the care we have for each other. I also want to see each other – not just our sorrow and grief – but also our joys, our laughter, our care, our jokes, our side-eyes, and our stories.
Learn more about Professor Desai’s work with the MN Youth Story Squad:
Alongside her academic work at the University of Minnesota, Professor Desai is the co-founder of the Minnesota Youth Story Squad. As Professor Desai explains:
“We are an organization that believes youth should have opportunities to discuss issues of social justice, including racial, disability, environmental, and gender justice. We use storytelling and activism to do this. We hope that by asking youth who they are, what is important to them, and what change they want to see in the world, we can help make their education more liberatory.
It is important that we feature stories from our own perspectives, tell our own stories, articulate our own experiences: of racism, sexism, joy, mundane things, all of it. Youth don’t often get to share their perspectives. It is transformative and empowering when you realize that what you have to say can change how people think about you, themselves, and society. Telling stories has an impact on the teller and the listener. It can be a transformative exchange.”