Chinese American Children Interrogating Race Through AsianCrit-Informed Racial Literacy in a Community-Based Book Club

• In Event: Unforgetting Multiple Histories and Imagining Multiple Futures of Asian(American) Im/migrant Literacies

Abstract

Asian Americans face unique and long-lasting racism and have been positioned as threatening yellow peril and perpetual foreigners (Lowe, 1996; Takaki, 1990) through an outsider racialization (Ancheta, 2006). Particularly, the intense racial stigmatization and the recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment changed the racial climate for Asian American children within educational settings, regardless of their ethnicity or citizenship status (Jeung et al., 2020). Furthermore, the minimization of Asian American contributions, collapsing of diverse identities into a monolithic group, and the persistence of racial tropes in K–12 schools contribute to children’s recycling and internalization of dominant deficit discourses (Author, 2024; An, 2020; Boutte & Muller, 2018), which disempowered communities and strategies for dismantling racism (Chandler & Branscombe, 2015), and alienated Asian American children in education (Yi, 2020). Thus, this study, an AsianCrit-informed practitioner inquiry, provides an out-of-school space for students of Chinese descent to (re)learn Asian American history, heroism, and contribution, as well as unpack their racialized experiences through literary discussions and lifeworlds sharing. The research question is: How do four Chinese American students negotiate their understandings of racism and sociopolitical injustice through AsianCrit-informed racial literacy engagement in the context of a community-based book club centering their identities, histories, and voices as learning resources?
This study draws upon Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) (Iftikar & Museus, 2018; Museus & Iftikar, 2013) and racial literacy (Sealey-Ruiz, 2011, 2021b) to center critical issues unique to Asian and Asian American communities in the United States. This study foregrounds two tenets – Asianization and (re)Constructive History. Racial literacy, as an analytical skill and practice, serves as a theoretical and pedagogical tool to guide curriculum design and book club meetings in this study to center race learning for Chinese American students.
This research employed a single-site, collective case study (refer to supplementary document) (Stake, 1995) to foreground Asian American history and experiences through collective meaning-making in a community-based book club. The current study, conducted from December 2021 to May 2022, focused on how four Chinese American students, aged from 9 to 11, negotiate their understanding of anti-Asian racism through racial literacy engagement. Additionally, practitioner inquiry guided the study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), through which researcher-practitioners engage collectively in “social change” (p. 40) in communities of inquiry (also see more from Mirra et al., 2015).
Through four students’ participation in a community-based book club and engagement in literacy practices for one year, findings reveal the success of students learning about unique ways of racialization of Asian Americans on individual and systemic level, most importantly, the tensions and resistance including these children’s internalizing racism, developing assumptions to reinforce dominant narratives, and still walking through model minority stereotype. This study not only addresses anti-Asian racism and historicizes Asian American experiences in the U.S. South, but also discusses the Black/white binary, anti-Blackness, and the operation of white supremacy, offering critical implications for future interdisciplinary scholarship in literacy, ethnic studies, and critical race studies within southern contexts.

Authors

• Wenyu Guo, University of South Florida

• Yuechen Sun, University of South Carolina