“This is what we wanted to learn”: Anti-racist and anti-colonial education with 1st gen Korean American seniors in a time of Asian hate and racialized dread

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the challenge and promise of developing an anti-racist and anti-colonial curriculum and pedagogy in a time of racialized dread. Drawing on my experience teaching a 10-week course on racial justice, delivered in the Korean language, to 1st generation Korean American seniors in the Southern United States. I explore how the group channeled their frustration, tension, and anger in the face of Asian hate into hope and a passion to learn about the history of race in the United States and the Asian American community. Through weekly lectures, counter-storytelling, and in-depth discussions, I learned of their desire to name the racialized dread arising from everyday racism. By employing Critical Race Theory and Asian Critical Theory, and centering the Ethnic Studies’ liberatory approach to education, I demonstrate that the community’s perceptions of race and racism are shaped at the intersection of U.S. imperialism, South Korea’s transnational ideology of meritocracy, and the legacy of the unending Cold War on the Korean Peninsula. This paper also reflects on how engaging an ethnic community through teaching transformed my pedagogy and perspectives to be more decolonial and inclusive. In light of the current war on Critical Race Theory, this paper contributes to expanding discussions focused on reimagining and revitalizing the liberatory pedagogy of community as a way to confront racialized dread.

Keywords:

• 1st generation Korean Americans
• Critical Race Theory
• Asian Critical Theory
• liberatory pedagogy of community
• COVID-19 pandemic

Dread can be unspeakable. It arises when shared social norms dissolve, leaving a vacuum where people feel ignorant, bereft of truth, and with nothing left to lose. It is a collective, affective experience causing anxiety and fear, though naming the dread can be challenging, as it is a covert state of melancholy (Goldberg, 2021). During the 2-year peak of the global COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022, Asian Americans encountered a particular dread, what I call a racialized dread, in the form of a shared affect shaped by the pervasive Asian hate that they witnessed and experienced. It felt as if they would “wake up each day to questions about serial events” of racism, wondering “what’s the next episode, (and) what horror is facing us now?” (Goldberg, 2021, p. 6). Seeing how the public associated their racial background with the origins of the disease and the resulting crisis, and encountering violence directed toward them—including racial bullying, verbal attacks, lynchings, and even murder—Asian Americans understandably felt dread. New technology and real-time updates across multiple media platforms delivered a relentless montage of tragic crimes driven by Asian hate occurring not only across the country but around the globe. Years of explicit Asian hate led to prolonged tension that resulted in a state of lethargy. This resurgence of explicit racism and resulting feelings of “not knowing where things are going” intensified the sense of dread. In the midst of this racialized dread, however, some channeled their frustrations and found the motivation to learn about the structured racial system of the United States so that they could begin to “name” the unspeakable feelings associated with this racialized dread.

In this paper, I explore the purpose and practices of teaching and learning in this time of racialized dread. I reflect on my experiences teaching 1st generation Korean American seniors (mid 50s to early 70s) at Hope for Tomorrow,¹ a nonprofit organization devoted to immigrant justice in the southern United States. I demonstrate that, in the learning spaces where my course on racial justice was delivered in their mother tongue (Korean), the group was able to safely and honestly give voice to the confusion, anger, dreams, and hopes associated with the pandemic and Asian hate. Throughout weekly lectures, counter-storytelling, and in-depth discussions, I learned of their desire to name the racialized dread that grew from everyday racism. By employing Critical Race Theory and Asian Critical Theory, while centering the Ethnic Studies’ liberatory approach to education, I argue that the community’s perceptions of race and racism are shaped at the intersection of U.S. imperialism, South Korea’s transnational ideology of meritocracy, and the legacy of the unending Cold War on the Korean Peninsula. This paper also reflects on how engaging an ethnic community through teaching transformed my pedagogy and perspectives, making them more decolonial and inclusive. In light of the current war on Critical Race Theory, this paper contributes to expanding discussions focused on reimagining and revitalizing the liberatory pedagogy of community as a way to confront racialized dread.

Critical Race Theory, AsianCrit, and 1st generation Korean American narratives

In looking at 1st generation Korean Americans’ education and collaborative knowledge production, I deploy Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit) to interrogate their experiences with racialization and transnational migration in the Asia-Pacific. CRT was developed by legal scholars and has spread to various inter/disciplines such as ethnic studies, history, sociology, and women’s studies. According to Crenshaw, CRT was developed in the late 1980s by scholars who wanted to find “both a critical space in which race was foregrounded and a race space where critical themes were central” (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 19). CRT scholars seek to center the lived experiences and histories of people minoritized by institutional racism and intersecting forms of subordination (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001), an approach that was actively pursued by the field of Ethnic Studies. Scholars in Asian American Studies have similarly developed an AsianCrit approach inspired by CRT. Varaxy Yi and her colleagues write that AsianCrit is a framework which acknowledges how

transnational contexts (e.g., historical and contemporary U.S. imperialism and global migration) differentially shape Asian American subgroups’ experiences. Moreover, AsianCrit recognizes that racism and the racialization of Asian American lead them to engage in strategic (anti-)essentialism, which denotes that Asian American communities both embrace and challenge socially constructed racial categories in complex and strategic ways to advance social justice. (Yi et al., 2020, pp. 546–547)

By centering diasporic and transnational components that are often overlooked in discourses on racism, yet are significant to the structures of racial oppression that shape Asian Americans’ life experiences, AsianCrit scholars take a heterogeneous approach to community. Further, by using a strategic (anti-)essentialism that deploys racial (e.g., Asian American) and pan-racial (e.g., AAPI) categorization in some contexts and interrogates them with data disaggregation, scholars in AsianCrit work toward social, economic, and political transformation (Yi et al., 2020).

Reflecting on my experience teaching 1st generation Korean American seniors, I use the AsianCrit scholars’ theoretical framework to unpack tangled group experiences formed at the intersection of the past and present, and the collision between the Korean War, the neoliberal modernization of South Korea, and racial capitalism and imperial immigration policy in the United States. The participants in my community-based racial justice course were born in South Korea between the 1940s and the 1960s. Whereas the motivations behind each family’s decision to leave South Korea vary, most of the families shared transformative economic, social, and political experiences in post-Korean War society. Although some of my research collaborators left before they became adults, they continue to be affected by transnational Korean social norms that are redistributed and reproduced through everyday interactions and a shared cultural context in kinship and ethnic communities in the United States.

AsianCrit’s emphasis on the necessity of interrogating Asian American racialization and dismantling the model minority construct through transnational and sociohistorical context (An, 2017; Curammeng et al., 2017) also aligns well with my transnational and critical approach to these Korean Americans’ experiences with identity formation in the United States. The compressed modernization of post-Korean War South Korea and the country’s rapid economic success (Abelmann, 2003; Chang, 1999; Cho, 2000)—often characterized as “the miracle of Han River” (Park, 2014)—instilled “a sense of pride, confidence, and most importantly, a belief in meritocracy” among South Koreans (Chung, 2022, p. 115). As many scholars in transnational migration have pointed out (Schiller, 2005; Vertovec, 2004), when transnational im/migrants cross nation-state borders, they carry their embodied sociocultural norms from the home country, norms that are rearticulated and reassembled in conjunction with the new land’s political, social, and cultural patterns. The Korean immigrants’ investment in upward mobility and their ethos of hard work, therefore, must be understood in association with the transnational Korean state’s ideology of meritocracy, which was “reinforced by the tenets of the model minority myth” (Chung, 2022, p. 115). Adopting this CRT and AsianCrit framework, this paper resists the homogenous representation of Korean Americans and contributes to a multidimensional discourse of the Korean American experience.

Situating the study and the researcher’s positionality

This study draws on reflections from teaching a course entitled “Asian American History and Culture,” in the Korean language, for ten staff, activists, and community members at Hope for Tomorrow over the course of three months in 2021 and 2022. The class was offered at the request of the organization’s director, who was committed to bringing a course on racial justice to a community who had suffered from anti-Asian hate during the pandemic. I was serving as a board member at the Korean American Education & Community Service (KAECS, a pseudonym), which Hope for Tomorrow joined years ago as an affiliated organization. Through various activities, rallies, and Zoom calls, the director at Hope for Tomorrow learned I was an educator and scholar working in Ethnic Studies, which led her to think of me when searching for someone to teach a course on U.S. history and racism centering on Asian American perspectives. As most of the potential students would not be fluent in English, my identity as a 1st generation Korean immigrant who speaks fluent Korean and knows the cultural norms and history of both the United States and South Korea also proved advantageous to her.

As discussed in the following sections, teaching a course on racial justice grounded in an Ethnic Studies curriculum to a community organization led me to ask myself thorny yet necessary questions regarding the liberatory potential of decolonial education and how I can practice it through language, curriculum, and pedagogy. It also presented an invaluable opportunity to reexamine many things, such as my views on the value of education, collaborative knowledge production, and my own vision of Ethnic Studies for communities outside the ivory tower. The weekly class brought me genuine joy as I taught and learned alongside community members, most of whom were my parents’ age, in my most comfortable language, Korean. Teaching an Ethnic Studies course in my mother tongue reminded me of what I can do with and for my community, given my unique strengths as a transnational Ethnic Studies scholar, including my language proficiency and knowledge of the history, culture, and social norms of South Korea.

Beyond “double alienation” and “double victimization”: engaging the 1st generation Korean American seniors’ desire to name the racialized dread

Teaching in/with community has been one of the core missions of Ethnic Studies, particularly among Asian American Studies scholars and students. The push for Ethnic Studies began in San Francisco in 1968, when striking students demanded a “relevant” education, one that resisted “the Eurocentric curriculum and bureaucratic structure which excluded, ignored, and denigrated the experiences of Third World peoples” (Osajima, 1998, p. 269). Equally emphasized in this process was a desire to innovate pedagogically in order to produce new knowledge with which to realize social change through political and community action (Umemoto, 1989). For Asian American student activists—who were already using community teaching to bring liberation and “self-determination” to the unprivileged in local Chinatown and Filifinx communities (Agarwal-Rangnath et al., 2022; Dong, 2009)—teaching in/with community was essential to doing Ethnic Studies. This tradition has continued and expanded as scholars in Asian American Studies have worked tirelessly to develop a new vision for teaching Ethnic Studies, both on campus and in community.

With the rise of Asian hate and a reckoning with the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the United States that took place throughout 2020, teaching once again became a crucial tool for Asian American scholars working to resist the white supremacist capitalist system (Horse & Nakagawa, 2020). My classroom shared this goal. As I discuss elsewhere (Chung 2021), many students who were raised in a period when the United States promoted racial colorblindness, as if racism was a thing of the past (Apfelbaum et al., 2012), found themselves suddenly fearing explicit racism that targeted their community. At the same time, however, they were motivated to engage more actively with Ethnic Studies, hoping it would help them better understand the oppressive U.S. racial system and provide a means of resisting it. Through teaching and mentoring, scholars and educators in Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies worked relentlessly to respond to these students’ needs.

Inspired by this effort, my university classes were redesigned to help students engage with their experiences in a time of racialized dread through in-class discussions, story sharing, and collaborative writing activities. Through my teaching, I found that many Asian American students in my classes felt frustration as they witnessed their parents and older family members facing verbal attacks, microaggressions, and even physical violence motivated by Asian hate while participating in everyday activities. They were also confused when they saw their elderly family members and others in their community condemning the Black community as being partly responsible for Asian hate crimes. Students asked questions such as “how can we help older Asian Americans,” “how do we understand our parents better,” or “how do we intervene in racist dialogues in our community.” As I heard these conversations happening more frequently, I came to wonder whether the 1st generation Korean American seniors were situated within competing frames of “double victimization” and “double alienation,” from both American society and from younger members of their own ethnic community.

A suggestion from Miyeon, the director of Hope for Tomorrow, about offering a course on racial justice to older 1st generation Korean Americans was timely. When she asked for a meeting in November 2021, she mentioned how members of the community, particularly the elderly, suffered from ongoing racial hatred directed toward people of Asian heritage. This generated uncertainty about what would happen to them and it motivated them to learn and talk about the origins of the racial attacks. She said, “Seeing Asian Hate and the Black Lives Matter movement during the pandemic raised many questions about the nature of race in the United States and how we should approach this phenomenon in our community. People felt frustrated and fearful about the racial violence. Those feelings emerged because we didn’t know how racism developed in America and what it (racism) really was. Because we never had a chance to learn formally about it. It (the course on racial justice) would help us to learn this together.” When she asked me if I could teach a course in her community that engaged with these topics, I did not think twice before agreeing. We soon began developing a theme and design for the course, and consulted the students on their interests and what specific topic they wanted me to cover. By engaging directly with Asian Americans old enough to be my students’ parents or grandparents, I hoped to develop a better pedagogy and curriculum that could connect my students with older generations in a more inclusive, respectful, and liberatory way.

Many scholars in education have pointed out the importance of curriculum to the process of liberating learners. In her observations on Asian American education, A. Lin Goodwin delineated “curriculum as colonizer,” exploring how existing education policies and curriculum can silence and/or marginalize the minoritized group (Goodwin, 2010). Curriculum, what Michael Apple describes as “mechanisms of social control” (Apple & Apple, 2004, p. 61), is significant in resisting the racial othering of the minoritized; designing a curriculum for a racial justice course intended for older Korean Americans was thus the first and most important step in preparing for my teaching. To create a relevant curriculum for immigrant learners that would engage their histories, cultures, and struggles, I first asked what they wanted to learn in the course. They picked Asian American history in the United States and race/racism as primary topics, though they were equally interested in learning about history specific to Korean Americans and its relation to other racially minoritized groups in America. Their interest in these topics aligned with what many CRT scholars in education have emphasized, including a desire to interrogate the intersectionality of oppressive systems across race, ethnicity, and class (Stovall, 2005) and to examine racism and white supremacy through the practices of learning and researching (Dixson et al., 2006). It also echoed AsianCrit’s core project of embracing heterogeneity and complexity by not essentializing Asian American experiences into simple patterns and narratives, or aggregating unifying voices. The curriculum for the class (Table 1) was carefully constructed out of a desire to more directly reflect and respond to the students’ interests.

Table 1. Course curriculum.

Week 1	What is “Asian America,” and Why Does It Matter?   Race, racial formation, colonialism, and the U.S. empire
Week 2	Immigration Policy & Law and Its Impact on the Asian American Community
Week 3	Korean Americans: Arrivals and Struggles in the U.S. Independence movement, Hawaiian farmlands
Week 4	World War II and Japanese Internment Camps
Week 5	Civil Rights Movement and the Birth of the “Model Minority Myth”
Week 6	Vietnam War, Adoptees, and Southeast Asian Refugees
Week 7	Racial Conflict and Solidarity between Asians and Blacks: LA Uprising
Week 8	9/11 and the “War on Terror”: Muslim and Arab Americans
Week 9	Pacific Islanders and the Environment Justice Movement in Hawaii
Week 10	Immigrant Justice Movement and Collective Liberation

With the rise of racialized dread during the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with Asian hate and the Black Lives Matter movement, engaging with Asian-Black relations in the United States became a significant focus of our class. In response to news coverage of multiple, physical attacks on Korean American seniors that took place across the nation, many participants were concerned about becoming the target of racially motivated violence themselves. Early that year, for example, an 83-year-old Korean American woman in a New York City suburb was “spat on and punched so hard” that she lost consciousness (Hawkins, 2021), and a Korean American couple in their 60s encountered a man “wielding a metal pole (who) smashed through glass, ripped down racks and hurled racial slurs at them” at their store in Charlotte, North Carolina (Chan, 2021). The students’ reactions to these Asian hate crimes resonated with a national report revealing older Asian Americans had experienced increased fear, stress, and anxiety since the start of the pandemic in the face of these anti-Asian attacks (STOP AAPI HATE, 2022). In the midst of such a challenging time, the students wanted to learn how other racially marginalized groups experienced the pandemic. The ongoing Black Lives Matter movement motivated them to discuss racial dynamics between the Asian and Black communities. In response to their interest, the ten-week curriculum on racial justice featured three weeks dedicated to the racial relationships between Asian and Black Americans. The themes of these 3 weeks were: “What is ‘Asian America,’ and Why Does It Matter?: Race, racial formation, colonialism, and the US empire” (Week 1); “Civil Rights Movement and the Birth of the ‘Model Minority Myth,’ 1950-1960” (Week 5); and “Racial Conflict and Solidarity between Asians and Blacks: L.A. Uprising” (Week 7). Encountering the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and racism, the students explored the shared systemic inequality and oppression faced by various minority groups. Appreciating their passion and interest, I hoped my class could serve as a space where we could “challenge false binaries and other essentializations of race and society,” such as “Black vs. Asian” (Chang, 2020, p. 752).

How to name the racialized dread?: Decolonizing teaching through language, counter-storytelling, and mutual knowledge production

Even if one’s curriculum is sufficiently relevant, the teaching methods used to help students engage with it are also critical. In particular–in order to resist the imperialist, colonial, white supremacist, and capitalist systems that contribute to oppressive living conditions and the racialized dread experienced by the BIPOC community—it is essential to use teaching methods that do not conform to that same power system and worldview (Park & Bahia, 2022; Williams et al., 2021). Accessible linguistic practices must also suffuse one’s teaching in order to effectively deliver the curriculum. My course seemingly satisfied this requirement as it was grounded in an extraordinarily accessible learning environment, one where the course was taught in the students’ native tongue. However, as I began to prepare for the class by writing introduction notes and slides, I realized my practice had some significant drawbacks. Many expressions and terms I used, in addition to the way I conveyed them, were neither familiar nor easy to understand for these new students. I realized how pedantic, unnecessarily abstract, and masculine the language of the ivory tower can be, given it is the product of an environment established and expanded by an imperial, white supremacist, and patriarchal system. I found that the ways of speaking and teaching I was accustomed to using at my university, for instance, actually repeated and reproduced colonial ways of knowledge production and delivery. Translating abstract terms and jargon into Korean was even more challenging.

As a transnational Ethnic Studies educator and researcher who employs decolonial and feminist theories and methodologies, this realization led to significant self-reflection. Hae-Joang Cho (1994), a cultural anthropologist and feminist scholar from South Korea, points out that decolonial learning and knowledge production are inextricably linked to decolonial and liberatory practices of speaking and writing. She particularly highlights that South Korean scholars who receive their degrees in the West must be vigilant to avoid succumbing to intellectual colonialism by uncritically internalizing or imitating ways of thinking, writing, and speaking adopted by the Western, middle-upper class, white patriarchy when engaging with Korean topics in their research, teaching, and scholar-activism (Cho, 1994). Reminding myself to follow this approach to decolonial pedagogy, I translated my lecture notes and in-class vocabulary, breaking down the terms and expressions first from academic jargon to more accessible English and then from English to Korean, in order to ensure my lectures and learning spaces provided a decolonial and respectful environment for my students. And yet, I am aware that there may still have been limitations in my curriculum and pedagogy. As many critical education scholars note, the “hidden curriculum” (Giroux & Penna, 1979; Jackson, 1968) transmits knowledge, norms, and values, as educators unconsciously convey certain beliefs and assumptions. Perhaps there were terms that I did not fully unpack but simply conveyed, despite my commitment to critical reflection. Aware of this possibility, I have continued to reexamine and revise the language I use when teaching, both at my university and in the community. Remembering Audre Lorde’s admonition that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 2003, p. 27), I consistently cultivate an awareness of structures of power and the role of the educator in resisting them.

According to David Goldberg, dread is deeply connected to the revival of discourses of race and racism and the (re)emergence of white nationalism (Goldberg & Means, 2023). This “evasive” (Goldberg & Means, 2023, p. 2) racialized dread makes it essential for the racially oppressed to speak out about their subordinate status (Spivak, 1988). For CRT scholars in education who have emphasized the “intercentricity of race and racism,” “the challenge to dominant ideology,” “the commitment to social justice,” “the centrality of experiential knowledge,” and “the transdisciplinary perspectives,” (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001, pp. 26–27), counter-storytelling is considered a powerful tool to dismantle “majoritarian” stories shaped by white supremacy (p. 28). Counter-storytelling plays a pivotal role in inspiring learners to look for multifaceted structures of oppression through collective reflection on shared experiences when it is done in a way that acknowledges complexity and diversity in individual’s experiences. Drawing on this potential, my course centered in-class storytelling as a core component of the curriculum, along with my lecture on each week’s topic. What initially emerged during the story-sharing was a desire to learn about the history and politics of race and racism in the United States, as well as an interest in exploring how their preconception of race(ism) was affected by transnational Korean racial ideology.

The scholarly discussion of 1st generation Korean Americans has largely focused on parenting and education (Okazaki & Abelmann, 2018). It often describes the group as goal-oriented and comprised of competitive immigrants who encourage their children to greater academic achievements and upward mobility rather than engaging in holistic parenting. It overlooks, however, that the group includes transnational migrants who cross borders carrying embodied socio-cultural norms shaped by the history of their country of origin (Kim et al., 2017). It also fails to consider that they were not supported with opportunities to learn about their new country, but had to rely on themselves in order to survive when arriving in the United States. In the absence of programs that can assist new immigrants with learning about their new country, 1st generation immigrants often find it difficult to perceive or critique the racialized, oppressive system they are entering. For 1st generation immigrants from South Korea—where a majority of its people are of a single ethnicity (Abelmann et al., 2015) and where U.S. imperialism and the Cold War shaped a White supremacist racial hierarchy (Chung 2021; Kim, 2008)—it can be even more challenging.

The false stereotype that Asian Americans are indifferent to issues of equity and politics and are rather focused on individual success has strengthened the myth that characterizes them as a model minority (Museus & Kiang, 2009; Yi & Museus, 2015). Jinhye shared how she came to think of the model minority myth differently: “(After learning more about Asian American history) I became painfully aware that it (the racist system of the United States) sets the stage for animosity between Asians, Blacks, and Latinos. I have thought a lot about how significant the model minority myth is.” Impacted by the poverty and famine of post-Korean War South Korea, as well as by a rapid industrialization and modernization made possible by education and an ethos of working hard among Koreans, South Korean society has adopted a meritocracy ideology and patterns of behavior that persist among Korean immigrants (Chung, 2022). Combined with the myth of the model minority that posits Asian immigrants as success-oriented but politically indifferent, many 1st generation Korean Americans have been mobilized to project themselves as desirable, “good” immigrants.

The class sessions consistently helped students re-frame Asian-Black relations, shifting from a perception of racial conflict to a focus on exploring racial solidarity and how Asian immigrants have been deployed as a racial buffer to legitimate the white supremacist racial system in the U.S. Throughout the course, the students shared their experiences and reflected on what has happened to the Korean American and Black communities, which included discussing the 1992 L.A. Uprising. Sujin said: “I lived in Koreatown in LA from 1990 to 1992. I have lived on 7th Street and also Vermont (a street in the Koreatown area), so I witnessed (the LA Uprising) with my own eyes. I saw the fire burning on the second floor of the apartment and everything that happened outside. When there was a march (for peace), I also participated and held a banner. So, in so many ways, I can see myself in the historical moments that were mentioned in today’s class.”

Korean Americans during the L.A. Uprising were portrayed by the mainstream media as “rooftop Koreans” who armed themselves to protect their property against looters, mostly people of color; this shaped racial hatred and encouraged the othering of Korean Americans as greedy entrepreneurs and distracted the public from the truth of police brutality and the white supremacist government’s scapegoating of Asian immigrants during the uprising. It is not widely known that Korean Americans, including the so-called “rooftop Koreans,” organized a march in Koreatown in L.A., using catchphrases calling for peace and an end to police violence. About 30,000 people of Korean descent attended the march, making it “the largest Asian American protest ever held in the city” (Kim, 2012). Sujin’s description of participating in the peace march during the L.A. Uprising inspired other students to engage with the community’s long history of taking an active approach to racial solidarity. By sharing memories and reflecting on the L.A. Uprising, the racialized misrepresentation of Korean Americans, and the unjust legal and political system of the 1990s (which continues to the present), students generated “funds of knowledge” (González et al., 2011) to help build racial solidarity among communities of color. This revealed the inaccuracy of framings that perpetually associate communities of color with ignorance or a lack of insight on racial issues, showing that the community has the “cultural wealth” to transform racially oppressive structures (Yosso, 2005).

The course members also transformed the learning space into one where they could discuss ways of resisting this oppressive racial system. As we continued to discuss anti-Asian hate, the Black Lives Matter movement, and Asian-Black relations, Jinhye said, “After learning that the racialization of people of color and the exclusion of Asians in the U.S. has taken place over hundreds of years, I realized that this (racist system) will not change soon but may take a long time to fix. There must be many things I could do to make the change happen. I feel motivated to work toward bringing it (change).” Connecting education with a practice to realize collective liberation, Jinhye reimagined herself as an agent of change. After our course was done, she put her plans into action. Since Hope for Tomorrow decided to offer the course again using video recordings of my teaching, Jinhye has taught the 10-week-long course twice in late 2022 and 2023. She recruited a new group of 1st generation Korean American seniors and showed them the recordings, facilitating discussion sessions and encouraging them as they made their way through the content. As decolonial feminist scholars have shown, community building is a “process-based pedagogy” (Lugones, 2003), and engaging in it outside of a formal educational institution is “a form of resistance that moves beyond reaction” (Beckett et al., 2012, p. 6). Creating a space for other Korean Americans to engage with racial justice issues, Jinhye’s resistance transcends simple reaction and motivates her efforts to change the world around her.

Conclusion

Engaging in non-formal education outside formal institutions can lead one to critically reflect on the possibilities and challenges of pursuing social change through popular education (Choudry & Bleakney, 2013; Choudry, 2009). As I engaged these older 1st generation Korean Americans through my racial justice course, I discovered their desire to engage with an anti-racist and anti-colonial curriculum. Through their reactions, I found that we—activist-scholar-educators—must develop a pedagogy of community that respects and inspires politically diverse learners through transformative education. Integrating CRT and AsianCrit-inflected approaches to education that embrace the intersectionality, complexity, and multiplicity of minoritized groups’ experiences, my course attempted to embrace the students’ counter-narratives and engaged in mutual knowledge production through a sociohistorical and transnational consideration of race, colonization, and immigration. In doing so, the learners and I worked to untangle the feelings of racialized dread that arose during an unprecedented period of anti-Asian hate, xenophobia, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

When I asked what the students found most compelling about the ten-week course, Sujin responded: “If you think about why something like Islamophobia happens, (it is because) history repeats itself. White people from Europe ostracized the Native Americans, excluded the Chinese when the number of Chinese immigrants increased, and sent the Japanese to concentration camps during World War II. And this time, during COVID-19, it was not only Chinese people but all Asians who were attacked and forced to live with uncertainty over what tomorrow might bring. The faces that are the target (of hatred) may change, but in a cyclical way. Increasing knowledge through study and discovering the truth is really important. I think that’s how you can get rid of the sense of uncertainty that comes from not knowing what is going on.” Even though racialized dread is hard to pin down, as it is “constantly shifting the ground beneath out feet” (Goldberg & Means, 2023, p. 15), efforts to dismantle the phenomenon through learning, sharing stories, and collective knowledge production are promising. As Sujin’s comments reveal, knowledge, as Asian American scholar-activist Diane Fujino and her colleagues identify, is “one of the key weapons of the weak, a great equalizer that people can use in life-and-death struggles for survival, subsistence, resistance, and affirmation” (Fujino et al., 2018, p. 69). Meanings and practices associated with race are not fixed or static but are subjects to be rearticulated, challenged, and shifted (Omi & Winant, 2014), and it is up to people which direction they will choose.

In the midst of turmoil and dread—where the dehumanizing forces of neoliberalization, privatization, racial othering, and massive surveillance are prevalent—there are still people who choose to move forward, guided by a belief that we can humanize the places we live. Educators’ persistence in teaching beyond dread is necessary to support the people’s desire to learn from and change the world, which was described by students striking for Ethnic Studies in the 1960s as forming the seed of “self-determination” and “people power.” Remembering that the struggle for social and political change takes place on “terrains of learning, knowledge production, and research” (Choudry 2014, p.88), I hope this example of teaching about racial justice in a particular community can contribute to the work of educator-scholar-activists as they reimagine learning and knowledge production in a time of racialized dread.

Acknowledgement

First and foremost, I would like to express my appreciation to the director, staff, and all the students at Hope for Tomorrow who helped create the course and shared with me their stories, experiences, and lives. I would also like to recognize the anonymous reviewers whose comments have significantly improved this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2021S1A5C2A02088731].

Notes on contributors

Ga Young Chung

Ga Young Chung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and an affiliated faculty member at the School of Education, Cultural Studies, and Human Rights Studies at the University of California Davis.

Notes

1 The names of organizations and individuals included in this article are pseudonyms.