Anti-Asian Violence and Black-Asian Solidarity Today

This lecture will last 2 hours and is free to the public. Nopper’s lecture will examine the alarm and growing discourse regarding “anti-Asian violence,” currently circulating in mainstream and social media among pundits, celebrities, and Asian American community organizers across the country. The lecture will examine the merging of fighting “anti-Asian violence” with the promotion of “Black-Asian solidarity” in the context of COVID-19. This lecture calls for defunding the police and for abolition.

We will examine the intertwined narratives of “anti-Asian violence” and “Black-Asian solidarity,” considering the work the narratives are doing and if they challenge or promote carceral logic. What might these narratives reveal or conceal about Asian Americans and racial politics. We will also look at how this replicates or departs from discourse and programs promoting Black-Asian solidarity in the wake of the 1992 LA Rebellion.

Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist with experience teaching in Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies and working for and with Asian American community and anti-war organizations. Her research focuses on Black-Korean conflict, the racial and gender wealth gap, financialization, criminalization, punishment, and the social impact of technology. She is the editor of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, a book of Mariame Kaba’s writings and interviews (Haymarket Books), and researched and wrote several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series.

View the lecture here.