Following is an excerpt:
“Asian American” and “Asia” Today 2012 was a year when the term “Asian American” regularly appeared in the media. The fatal shootings at a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The specious invocations of Asian American students in the Supreme Court case of Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas at Austin, the outcome of which could potentially end affirmative action as we know it. The misleadingly cheery Pew Report, “The Rise of Asian Americans.” The spineless and retrograde rulings in the cases against the eight soldiers who fatally bullied 19-year-old Private Danny Chen, who declined a full scholarship to CUNY’s own Baruch College in order to join the military. The passing of Hawai‘i Senator Daniel Inouye, a veteran of the racially segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, recipient of the Medal of Honor, and the highest-ranking APA politician in the U.S. history. The 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII. Edward Rothstein’s historically ignorant and ideologically offensive review of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center, on the front page of the New York Times Arts Section.1 Even the phenomenon of “Linsanity,” Jeremy Lin’s sudden rise to basketball stardom, despite — or perhaps because of — its spectacular reification of everything from Asian American masculinity to the Model Minority Myth, revealed how sedimented anti-Asian and Orientalist views remain in this country.

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