Anti-Asian Racism, Labor, and Capital

Vincent Chin was killed in 1982 by white men with ties to the auto industry who blamed Japan for the loss of American jobs. Today, Asian Americans are at the center of a different economic transformation — the tech boom — as engineers, gig workers, and laborers whose positions complicate any easy story about the AAPI community. And as tech becomes a terrain of authoritarian power globally, the politics of anti-Asian violence can't be separated from questions of class, imperialism, and who the movement is actually built for.

Scott Kurashige (American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism) joins Charmaine Chua to discuss the history and limits of pan-ethnic coalition, from the Third World Liberation movements of the 1960s to "Stop Asian Hate," and what a politics grounded in labor, class, and anti-imperialism might look like instead.

This event is for labor organizers, scholars, students, and community members thinking seriously about race, solidarity, and the world the tech economy is making.

The first 30 attendees will receive a free copy of . Additional books will be available for sale and signing, thanks to Eastwind Books.

Lunch will be served.

Sponsored by Asian American Research Center and UC Berkeley Labor Center.

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Scott Kurashige serves as President and Literary Executor for the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation. He is the author or co-author of five books: The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008, recipient of AHA and AAAS book awards); The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century with Grace Lee Boggs (UC Press, 2011); The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit (UC Press, 2017); Exiled to Motown: A Community History of Japanese Americans in Detroit with the Detroit JACL History Project Committee (University of Washington Press, 2024); American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism (UC Press, 2026). A scholar of history, ethnic studies, and social movements, he has engaged in activism and community organizing in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean scholar, organizer and writer, and acting Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Marxist political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change, with a specific interest in how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. Her first book, The Logistics Counterrevolution, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota press in 2027. She is also at work on a second book, How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in Society and Space ,The Review of International Studies, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She co-directs the Marxist Institute of Research, serves as the current Chair of Campus Organizing with the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and is a research fellow at the Transition Security Project. In 2023, she was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.

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