Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression

Drawing from a broad range of articles, speeches, short stories, pamphlets, sermons, debates, laws, public statements, Supreme Court decisions and conventions, this documentary history demonstrates the persistence of a humanist, if not an anti-racist, pulse in American society in the face of discriminatory government policy and prevalent anti-Asian ideology and treatment.

Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination.

Seema Sohi traces how Indian labor migrants, students, and intellectual activists who journeyed across the globe seeking to escape the exploitative and politically repressive policies of the British Raj, linked restrictive immigration policies and political repression in North America to colonial subjugation at home. In the process, they developed an international anticolonial consciousness that boldly confronted the British and American empires.

For the first time, voices of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have been brought together to discuss the multidimensional impact of racial crime in their lives and through their work as attorneys, teachers, community activists, students, or business professionals.

The 'yellow peril' is one of the most long-standing and pervasive racist ideas in Western culture-indeed, this book traces its history to the Enlightenment era. Yet while Fu Manchu evokes a fading historical memory, yellow peril ideology persists, WC animating, for example, campaign commercials from the 2012 presidential election.
Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic.

The book depicts the 'double consciousness' of many Asian Americans--experiencing racism but feeling the pressures to conform to popular images of their group as America's highly achieving 'model minority

This booklet dives into the long history of racist policies that have impacted Indigenous, Black and racialized communities in the province over the last 150 years since BC joined Canada.

Anderson charts the construction of Chinatown in the minds and streets of the white community of Vancouver over a hundred year period. She shows that Chinatown -- from the negative stereotyping of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its current status as an "ethnic neighbourhood" -- has been stamped by changing European ideologies of race and the hegemonic policies those ideas have shaped. The very existence of the district is the result of a regime of cultural domination that continues to exist today.

Using critical race, feminist, anti-colonial, and cultural geographic theory, Mona Oikawa deconstructs prevalent images, stereotypes, and language used to describe the 'Internment' in ways that masks its inherent violence.

Collected over a period of years by the Women's Book Committee of the Chinese Canadian National Council these voices are the first to chart the journeys of Chinese Canadian women. "...a pioneering book." - Times-Colonist, Victoria

A century has passed since the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver. Its arrival was a direct challenge to Canada’s immigration laws, which barred immigrants from India – yet the nearly four hundred Punjabi passengers on board the ship had been promised equality with all other British subjects, and they arrived to claim that right. For two months, the passengers were harassed by immigration officials and endured extreme physical hardship, until finally they were forced to return to India. The Voyage of the Komagata Maru is still the only comprehensive historical account of the Komagata Maru incident – a story of immigration, empire, politics, and human rights, which Canadians increasingly recognize as a critical moment in this country’s history.

Bittersweet Passage is a moving account of the Japanese Canadian struggle to come to terms with a painful history. It is also the story of the author's own odyssey to rediscover her family's past in both Japan and Canada and as a key figure in the movement to win redress from the government

In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession.

helly D. Ikebuchi uses the concept of domesticity as a tool for examining the history of Chinese and Japanese immigration in BC. In doing so, she expands our understanding of the complex interplay of gender, race, and class in the province during this time period.

See Chapter 7: Robert Menzies, “Race, Reason, and Regulation: British Columbia’s Mass Exile of Chinese ‘Lunatics’ aboard the Empress of Russia, 9 February 1935

Ward draws upon a rich record of events and opinion in the provincial press, manuscript collections, and successive federal enquiries and royal commissions on Asian immigration. He locates the origins of west coast racism in the frustrated vision of a white British Columbia and an unshakeable belief in the unassimilability of the Asian immigrant.

This work traces several generations of Chinese “brokers,” ethnic leaders who acted as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of Canada. At the time, most Chinese could not vote and many were illegal immigrants, so brokers played informal but necessary roles as representatives to the larger society. Brokers’ work reveals the changing boundaries between Chinese and Anglo worlds and how tensions among Chinese shaped them. By reinserting Chinese back into mainstream politics, this book alters common understandings of how legally “alien” groups helped create modern immigrant nations.

See article by Dora Nipp "But the Women Did Come: Working Chinese Women in the Interwar Years"

A remarkable story of a group of 13 Chinese Canadian civilians who were trained by the British Secret Service (Special Operations executive), for Operation Oblivion- a covert "suicide" mission that would parachute them in the jungles of the Pacific to fight the Japenese during World War II.