Note: This event has been canceled. Please stay tuned as we look for a new way for our community to discuss and learn about this urgent topic.
Current events have given us urgent cause to reexamine the United States’ long history of discrimination and violence against Asian Americans. Chinese were lynched in California and exclusionary laws cut back their immigration. Japanese citizens were corralled into barbed-wire camps during World War II. And immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and elsewhere faced levels of bigotry as they tried to assimilate into white America. Amid the coronavirus pandemic we have witnessed a resurgence of this brand of bigotry and corresponding challenges to addressing it and covering it in the news media. The Ira A. Lipman Center at Columbia Journalism School is sponsoring “Race in America: Covering Violence Against Asians,” a forum examining these issues with historian Ellen Wu and journalist Jiayang Fan, to be moderated by Lipman Center Director Jelani Cobb.
Ellen Wu is an associate professor of history and director of Asian American studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of "The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority." Her expertise is Asian Americans, race in the United States, and immigration history.
Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She has reported on China and American politics. Her most recent story was about the Atlanta shootings and the dehumanizing of Asian women.
