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? Good morning, and welcome to The Yappie’s AAPI politics briefing — your guide to the policy news and activism affecting Asian Americans + Pacific Islanders. Send tips and feedback to [email protected] and support our work by making a donation.
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— Edited by Shawna Chen and Mary Yang
? NUMBER OF THE WEEK — 70: That’s the percentage of sex trafficking survivors in Hawai‘i who are Native Hawaiian women and girls, according to Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawai‘i). Native Hawaiians, who are often more vulnerable to predators due to poverty caused in large part by historical oppression, have been targeted at disproportionately high rates for years.
A law supporting survivors of gender-based violence will be amended to include Native Hawaiians in the language after the Senate unanimously approved a bill led by Hirono last Thursday.
City Spotlight
? Our round-up of headlines from metro areas across the U.S.
LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles will construct a memorial to commemorate the 18 people who were fatally shot or hanged in an 1871 massacre targeting Chinese immigrants.
- The history: In 1871, a mob of around 500 white and Hispanic people tore through the city in one of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history. The attack wiped out roughly 10% of the city’s Asian American population at the time.
- “This memorial is important because it allows us to unfold and point to a segment of U.S. history, of L.A. history, that’s been buried for 150 years,” Gay Yuen, who chairs the Friends of the Chinese American Museum Board of Directors, told The Los Angeles Times’ Gregory Yee.
- A larger movement: Organizers with the Eureka Chinatown Project are also demanding their town acknowledge its past, Hailey Branson-Potts of The Mercury News reports.
- At one point, the town expelled about 300 Chinese residents, shipping them off to nearby San Francisco, in a purge that was carried out in other California towns and hailed by white people.
NEW YORK CITY — Four retired Asian police captains are part of a lawsuit against the New York Police Department over alleged bias and discrimination in promotions, New York Daily News’ Rocco Parascandola reports.
- The suit alleges that six out of 10 white captains get promoted beyond the rank of captain compared to two of 10 Asian captains.
- Brooklyn lawyer John Scola, who is representing the four retired Asian officers, said they each remained at the captain rank “for an inordinate amount of time based on their skills and knowledge,” and even took on the role of training younger precinct commanders.
- “We hope this lawsuit will drive substantive change moving forward and fix the problem ultimately,” Scola said.
PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia 76ers are stepping up efforts to convince the city’s Chinatown to agree to its proposal for a new sports arena, Joseph DiStefano of The Philadelphia Inquirer writes. The proposed indoor arena would be located just two blocks from Chinatown’s Friendship Gate.
- The tightly-knit community has been resisting these kinds of large-scale developments for decades. “They are making a decision about the future of our community … They think it’s easy to sell [us],” Wei Chen, civic engagement director of the advocacy group Asian Americans United, told University of Pennsylvania’s 34th Street Magazine last month.
- Critics warn that Philadelphia’s Chinatown could face a similar fate as D.C.’s, where the Capital One Arena, which opened in 1997, pushed out the Chinese community and their businesses, leaving only traces of the once-thriving district today.
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Who is the Entrepreneur? Asian Entrepreneurship on the Rise
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Important highlights from 2021 data include a notable shift toward older new entrepreneurs and the rise in the share of new Asian entrepreneurs – from 3.4% in 1996 to 7.3% in 2021.
AAPI Nation
? Here's what else is happening across America…
Our remaining midterm race calls: Incumbent Rep. Michelle Steel (R) defeated Taiwanese American rival Jay Chen (D) in California’s 45th congressional district following a controversial race in which congressional leaders condemned Steel for using “red-baiting” tactics, The Yappie’s Cindy Xie reports.
- Republican Lanhee Chen did not fare as well, conceding defeat to Democrat Malia Cohen last week in the race to become California’s next state controller. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Chen would have been the first Republican elected to statewide office since 2006, The Yappie’s Samson Zhang writes.
Attorney Patricia Lee will become the first Black woman and the first Asian American to serve on the Nevada Supreme Court after Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) announced her appointment on Monday. Lee, who was born in Korea and currently practices commercial litigation, will take on the role effective immediately.
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is now allowing Sikh students to wear kirpans, a religious article that resembles a small dagger, on campus, NBC News’ Brahmjot Kaur reports. The move comes after a campus police officer handcuffed a student wearing a kirpan while responding to a call from someone who’d confused it for a knife. The school apologized after a video of the incident was posted online.
Preterm births—defined as birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy—among AAPIs jumped by 8% in 2021, up from 8.7% in 2020 to 9.5% in 2021, according to a report by the maternal and infant health nonprofit March of Dimes. It’s the largest increase among all racial and ethnic groups in 2021 even though babies born to AAPI mothers typically experience the lowest rate of preterm births.
- Worth noting: Infants born to Black and Native American mothers are 62% more likely to be born preterm than those born to white mothers, per the report.
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