The Los Angeles Chinese Massacre was not an isolated incident. Anti-Chinese violence and politics have shaped American citizenship and immigration policy.
On this day 150 years ago, a largely white mob of hundreds descended upon what’s now downtown Los Angeles and indiscriminately began beating, shooting and hanging any Chinese person they saw.
A century and a half later, as Asian Americans are facing a surge in racial violence prompted by the pandemic, I’m thinking about the lessons never learned from this forgotten history.The massacre was buried so deeply that even those with deep roots in Chinatown did not know it happened until generations later.
“This was an ethnic cleansing,” said Gabriel Chin, a law professor at UC Davis who has studied anti-Chinese legislation. “And it was successful.” It’s a history that feels uncomfortably familiar to us in 2021. The economic tensions may be different, but the stereotypes are the same. Asian Americans are still seen as perpetual foreigners and economic threats. And the violence is on the rise: The STOP AAPI Hate tracker has recorded more than 9,000 incidents of anti-Asian violence since the pandemic began in 2020.
There are no definitive, comforting answers. The most enduring legacy of America’s era of anti-Chinese violence is simply an absence of Chinese people and communities where they once were. A group of community leaders and Chinatown elders are partnering with the city of Los Angeles and the Chinese American Museum to create a proper memorial to the victims beyond the small plaque currently installed.
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