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Taylor Pang, who works for the Department of Agriculture in Marks, Mississippi There is no such thing as a monolithic community, be it in a rural town or the nebulous notion of what it means to be an American. Long before Minari a film about a family of South Korean immigrants in the 1980s hit theaters, Emanuel Hahn and Andrew Kung explored Asian communities in the Mississippi Delta. The pair interviewed almost 20 people, including fourth-generation farmers and grocery store owners for a singular oral history project that launched in 2018. Many of the people they found living in the Delta were older, and the far-flung community was reluctant to talk to outsiders or address the racism that they had endured over the years. ....
Racism against Asian Americans has been prolific since Asian workers began immigrating into the U.S. in the mid-1800s. Even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and long before Japanese internment during WWII, the concept of Yellow Peril was born, which existed as sort of a catchall for the threats that white America felt as Eastern Asian immigrants started coming here to work in large numbers. Particularly, the white American working class was afraid they would be put out of work by Chinese immigrants who were willing to work for less. Yellow Peril is a term I learned last summer. I saw it at a protest against police brutality, written in big black letters on a red poster board: Yellow Peril supports Black Power. I had no idea what the term meant at the time, but I felt like I understood it within the context of the situation. The sign was really just talking about solidarity between victims of white supremacy. ....