AAPI Heritage Month lecture “Anti-Asian Sentiment Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic” by Cindy I-fen Cheng, PhD. Professor of History, UW-Madison.
Since the mass outbreak of the pandemic in the U.S., the number of reported cases of violence against Asian Americans has skyrocketed. Of the over 3000 reported incidents, Asian American women were 2 ½ times more likely to be targets of verbal assaults and physical attacks than Asian American men. This surge of anti-Asian sentiment has scholars and community activists interrogate how the calling of Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” or the “Kung Flu” promoted discriminatory actions against Asian Americans. Still, questions abound over why Asians in the U.S. who are not from Wuhan and have never been there would be unduly blamed for the outbreak of the pandemic. This talk will address these difficult questions. It explores how the history of Asians in the U.S. provides a necessary context for understanding the rise of anti-Asian sentiment amid the Covid-19 pandemic. This talk will examine how history operates in the present.
This event is open to all members of the community and will take place on TEAMS on 5 May 2021 from 12:30 p.m. -1:45 p.m.
Please join us by clicking here!
Dr. Cindy I-Fen Cheng is a Professor of History and the director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in History with a Graduate Feminist Emphasis and an emphasis in Critical Theory. Her first book, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War, explored the ways in which Asian Americans shaped the credibility of U.S. democracy during the early Cold War years. Her current project, titled “Rebuilding California’s Skid Row Neighborhoods: Southeast Asian and Central American Refugees and the Growth of the Homeless Population in the United States, 1945-1980,” examines how the residence of Southeast Asian families in the Tenderloin of San Francisco and of Central American families in Skid Row, Los Angeles shaped the development of these locales.