George Floyd.  Ahmaud Arbery.  Breonna Taylor.  Rayshard Jones.  Elijah McClain. Walter Scott. Eric Garner.  Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice.  Riah Milton.  Dominique Fells.  Sandra Bland.  Freddie Gray…We will say their names. 

The nation is on fire, literally and figuratively, demanding justice for the many black men, women and even children dying at the hands of the police. The Society for East Asian Anthropology adds its voice to this powerful chorus against anti-black violence and systemic racism in the United States.  We stand with Black Lives Matter in condemning brutality by the police and others in positions of power against African-American citizens. And we support the statement of the Association of Black Anthropologists.

In his dying moments during his encounter with the Minneapolis police, George Floyd, like Elijah McClain, Eric Garner and scores of others before them, pleaded, “I can’t breathe.”  In trying to understand the common experiences of these black men and women as the victims of state violence in the United States, we see them as linked to the victims of similar acts of violence around the world. The SEAA is committed to trying to understand these national and international connections in the context of our own vocational endeavor.  The SEAA understands that racism manifests itself in America in some ways that are different from but, in others, tragically consistent with those we witness in East Asia. In both contexts, deep-seated racism and ethnocentrism motivate the often state-sponsored oppression of minority peoples. The genocide of Uyghurs and persecution of Tibetans and other ethnic and religious groups in China; discrimination against Korean, Chinese, Ainu, Okinawan, burakumin, mixed-race and other minorities in Japan; the xenophobic animus directed towards foreign residents in South Korea: all bear witness to this reality.  As ethnographers, our recognition of these realities, and our interrogation of them, are inflected according to the uniqueness of the sociocultural, political and historical dynamics of each context.  They are further complicated by an intersectional appreciation of how racial and ethnic discrimination are cross-cut by class, gender, sexual orientation and other vectors of social identity and difference in the region, as can be seen, for example, by the post-WWII American military domination of East and Southeast Asia—the empire without colonies—and its consequences in the Philippine, Okinawan, and Korean camp-towns. The post-WWII American militarism in Asia augmented sexual oppression and violence directed against women in Asian countries, which cannot be separated from racial domination, yet it comes with underlining complexity. For instance, we need to address the mass rape and sexual violence committed by the Japanese military against Asian women in the 1930s and 1940s, while we must not set aside mass rape and sexual violence committed by Korean soldiers deployed in Vietnam. It is no coincidence that the African Americans were disproportionately drafted and killed in the Vietnam War. Transitional justice for unresolved violent past in varying frames of colonialism, military occupation and domination, and nationalism, predicated on racial and sexual discrimination and dehumanization of others still lies ahead and it is our responsibility, as scholars, to critically think about race and racism in East Asia in close proximity with what is happening in the US today.

One key way in which the SEAA enters into dialogue with the Black Lives Matter movement, then, is through recognition of the consistent ways in which discrimination operates within both the African and Asian diasporas, and in the intersections of the two.  The scars of colonialism, occupation and other forms of white supremacist domination, so visible in the U.S. today, are also visible in Japan, China and Korea, refuting a persistent and pernicious mythology of the irrelevance of race in East Asia.  The biopolitical management of black bodies on slave ships, on plantations, in inner cities and in the American prison system in some ways echo the incarceration of Uyghurs in “re-education camps” in Xinjiang.  Reports of the forced sterilization of Uyghur women today echo that of Puerto Rican women between the 1930s and the 1970s.  The discrimination faced by Africans in China, racially stigmatized as carriers of the novel coronavirus, echoes the white racist abuse hurled at Asian-Americans accused of spreading the “Kung Flu”.  The frictions between Korean Americans and African Americans during the Rodney K