“Black, brown and Indigenous people do environmental justice, so what drew you to it?”
It’s a question I often get from classmates and colleagues in my graduate program for environmental studies. While it may seem like an innocuous question, as an Asian American, I understand the assumption on which the question was formed: Asian Americans have never been involved in the movement for a clean and safe environment.
The problem with that assumption, however, is that it’s not true.
Take my grandmother, Soo Boon Kim, for example. She was part of a generation of young Korean women who survived the Korean War and then fled to the United States. Eventually, she ended up working alongside many other Asian immigrant women in sweatshops in the garment industry of Los Angeles. There, she and the other workers were exposed to toxins that poisoned their bodies. But these Asian immigrant women protested their working conditions, and together, became some of the most influential people in the environmental justice movement in the 20th century.
Why don’t more Americans know about them and other Asian American environmental justice advocates? Because our country has long ignored and erased the contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — including in the environmental justice movement.
For example, many history books mention that Chinese immigrants built about 90% of the western part of the Transcontinental Railroad, but what is often left out is that many of those workers also protested the dangers they were exposed to in order to blast through mountains to lay tracks — launching the largest labor strike of the era.
Similarly, Filipino immigrants helped lead the farmworkers’ labor movement, even launching the 1965 Delano Grape Strike for better wages and working conditions, which included a ban on dangerous pesticides such as DDT, in union contracts. But, in many of the official histories of the United Farm Workers, Filipinos are missing: School children in California learn about Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, as they should, but not about Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, who were integral in that struggle as well.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, Asian immigrants were recruited to the U.S. as cheap labor and were put to work in poor or dangerous conditions. Asian immigrant women — stereotyped as docile and apolitical workers who wouldn’t protest — were intentionally sought for jobs where they would be exposed to toxic chemicals. But whether in electronics, garment or textile factories, these individuals organized to achieve safer working conditions in every industry they entered. They, along with the farm workers, made the American workplace a site for environmental justice, broadening and building the movement.
Asian American women were also at the forefront of drawing public attention to these occupational hazards. Young Hi Shin of the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates and Pam Tau Lee of UC Berkeley’s Labor Occupational Health Program were among the Asian Americans at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. There they emphasized the importance of viewing the 1960s anti-war movement through an environmental justice analysis: American wars in Asia exposed the people of Asia to toxins, like Agent Orange, and caused them to seek refuge in the United States. American employers then exposed them to toxic environments in the workplace. These two activists helped us to connect experiences in Asia and in the United States, linking war, labor and environmental justice.
At the 1991 summit, Asian immigrant women advocated for the eighth principle of environmental justice, which “affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment.” Under their guidance, delegates also voted to include this statement: “We call for an end to war, violence, and militarism, because these are among the most environmentally and ecologically destructive phenomena known to humankind, as millions of people of color have perished due to war.”
These activists offered powerful ways of understanding the international dimensions of violence within discussions of environmental injustice.
Even though my grandmother passed away a year before I was born, I see how her life was shaped by war and then by supposed “opportunities” in America that ultimately shortened her life.
Decades after her death, Asian Americans continue to be racialized and stereotyped in the same way: hardworking, docile and apolitical. We are asked whether people like us “belong” in the environmental justice movement.
If we’re ever going to truly reckon with our country’s past, we will need to honor the lives, contributions and legacies of people like my grandma, who helped to make this country a better place. We will need to reject the dominant practice of willful forgetting. Asian Americans are and always have been part of the multiracial fight for equality and dignity, for a future of love and care, and for environments that are clean, safe and peaceful for all. Ignoring or erasing those contributions only makes the movement weaker.
Zoe Lee-Park is a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment.
"asian" - Google News
June 16, 2023 at 06:04PM
https://ift.tt/uqJsyp1
Yes, Asian Americans are in the environmental justice movement - San Francisco Chronicle
"asian" - Google News
https://ift.tt/h4wysCE
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment