Asian Pacific American Law Journal

We began our tenure as editors-in-chief of the Asian Pacific American Law Journal’s (APALJ) Volume 28 in the journal’s tiny office in the back corner of the law school sitting among stacks of publications from the past three decades. Since its founding, APALJ has stood apart in its mission of elevating authentic perspectives on issues at the heart of the Asian American community. It is this mission that shapes our volume; the articles published within draw on stories often overlooked in critiquing established ways of thinking and engaging in a radical imagination of what Asian America could be.

This paper has four parts. Part I gives the necessary historical background on the Unangax̂ up to and during evacuation during World War II. Part II details the conditions of the camps in both Alaska and the continental United States, alongside the return home for both communities. (Most of Part II will be focused on the experience of the Unangax̂, given that lower-48 internment camp history is more widely known.) Part III is a short history of the redress and reparations movement. Part IV explores why the two groups were interned during World War II and the differences in their reparations. Although Japanese American internment was justified as a kind of “security response” during the War, Unangax̂ internment was supposedly for their own protection. But by looking at the orientalization of both Unangax̂ and Japanese Americans, each group’s control over valuable resources, and the difference in reparations, this paper identifies how these disparate groups were tied together by the federal government’s colonial, racist acts.

Restriction of interracial marriage was one of the longest surviving forms of statutory racial segregation in the United States, spanning from 1662 until 1967. Over a decade prior to Loving v. Virginia—the case which decided the unconstitutionality of anti-miscegenation statutes—the Court was faced with a similar case: Naim v. Naim. The appellant of this case, Han Say Naim, was a Chinese immigrant who had married a white woman and had his marriage voided under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Political pressures—specifically fear of interrupting school integration after Brown v. Board of Education—kept the Justices from ruling on interracial marriage in 1955. This paper seeks to go further by looking at the historical background of Asian exclusion to demonstrate how Naim exposes a legal preference for litigants that align closest to monogamous, patriarchal, and white American values, delaying resolution of the interracial marriage question despite favorable equal protection jurisprudence at the time of the case.

Scholars have long criticized the model minority myth as harmful to Asian Americans and rooted in anti-Blackness. Fewer scholars, however, have analyzed whether and to what extent the contemporary Asian American identity emerged from and depends on the model minority myth and with it, anti-Blackness.Even fewer have done so using a Vietnamese-American vantage point. This Article does both.

This Article elevates Vietnamese American voices to disrupt anti-Black narratives in the model minority myth and casts doubt on the usefulness of the very concept of Asian American racial identity. The model minority myth is so intertwined with the Asian American identity that any deconstruction of the myth must also deconstruct the Asian American identity.This Article builds on two preexisting critiques of the model minority myth—flattening and anti-Blackness—from a uniquely Vietnamese American vantage point by elevating the disruptive narratives of Vietnamese Americans and Viet-Black coalition building. By adopting this vantage point, this Article builds on a tradition of narrative in critical legal scholarship and women-of-color feminist coalitional politics to dismantle the model minority myth, elevate Viet experiences, and demonstrate the promise of solidarity.

In SFFA v. Harvard, the Supreme Court effectively overruled forty-five years of precedent and held that the educational benefit of racial diversity is no longer a “compelling interest.” This decision effectively ends race-conscious college admissions. Interestingly, Asian Americans featured prominently in the litigation. The plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), specifically emphasized the plight of Asian Americans as innocent victims of discrimination.

SFFA is no NAACP. It is neither a household name nor a storied civil rights organization. It is instead an entity created by Ed Blum, a California businessperson who has long litigated against affirmative action and voting rights laws. Blum is recorded on video saying “I needed plaintiffs; I needed Asian plaintiffs . . . ” Why seek Asians? It’s because Asian Americans can be framed as especially sympathetic victims, “model minorities” cruelly harmed by affirmative action.

Given this framing, with its long pedigree, Asian American ambivalence about affirmative action should not be surprising. Indeed, after the SFFA opinions came down, a UCLA colleague reached out to celebrate that the Supreme Court had just struck down discrimination against Asian Americans. I felt disheartened to suggest that he was mistaken.

Even after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which Asian Americans were the plaintiffs in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Asians continue to remain a non-sequitur in the ongoing debate on race and equity.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, focusing on whether Harvard’s consideration of race in admissions intentionally discriminates against Asian Americans, is expected this month. A big part of our research has been to identify anti-Asian discrimination, so we understand how charges that Asian Americans are held to a higher standard in college admissions might feel like another instance of anti-Asian bias. But we just don’t see an Asian American penalty in college admissions.