Louder Than the Lies: Asian American Identity, Solidarity, and Self-Love
Ellie Yang Camp
Heyday: 2024
Hardcover: New
9781597146616
A primer on racism that offers an intersectional, anti-racist, coalition-building view of Asian American identity.
"This is and will be a necessary and useful tool for generations to come." --Jenny Wang, author of Permission to Come Home
What does it mean to be Asian American? How does our racialization in the United States shape our lives and our worldviews? With candor and care, Ellie Yang Camp, a Taiwanese American educator, offers a set of ideas and frameworks to guide us toward a more nuanced understanding of these questions. Drawing on her experiences and observations from history, conversations with Asian American peers, and lessons derived from other people of color, Camp unpacks the confusing dynamics that underlie anti-Asian stigmas and stereotypes in the US. From the model minority myth to yellowface to anti-Blackness among Asian communities, Camp presses into hard questions and moments of discomfort, naming fears so that we might dispel them.
Key stories of resistance reveal the importance of solidarity, both among the diverse people under the Asian American umbrella and with all who are exploited by white supremacy. Acknowledging that racism is a system thrust upon us to control us, Camp fuels our boldness to challenge tropes, dismantle prejudices, and embrace self-determination as an act of radical liberation.
Table of Contents:
Author's Note
Introduction: What does it mean to be Asian American?
Part I: THE SYSTEM
Chapter 1: We Are Racialized
Chapter 2: We Live in a System
Chapter 3: We Live in an Evolving System
Part II: LIVING IN THE SYSTEM
Chapter 4: We Are Commodified
Chapter 5: We Are Erased
Chapter 6: We Are Demonized
Chapter 7: We Are Indoctrinated
Part III: DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM
Chapter 8: We Are a Remedy
Chapter 9: We Are a Legacy
Chapter 10: We Are a Paradox
Conclusion: We Are a Future
Acknowledgements
Discussion Questions for Asian Americans
Discussion Questions for Non-Asian Americans
Reference List and Further Reading
Biographical Note:
Ellie Yang Camp is an artist and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. The proud daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she has been a high-school history teacher, a full-time parent, a calligrapher, an anti-racist educator, and now an author. She has a bachelor's degree in political science from UC Berkeley and a master's degree in education from Stanford.