Browse Exhibits (3 total)
“NOT ANOTHER RACIST KILLING”: Protest Photographs from the CAAAV Digital Archive
Since 1986, the members of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities have been dedicated to the ongoing fight for racial and economic justice, specifically within poor and working-class Asian immigrant and refugee communities in New York City. Hundreds of protests have taken place since the organization’s birth, and an exponential number of protest signs have been made by CAAAV members and allies. These protest signs embody the wide range of organizing efforts that CAAAV has engaged in for the last four decades. Given the ephemeral and highly personal quality of protest signs, many such items are lost to time. But photographs of these protests, preserved in CAAAV’s digital archive, offer a way to preserve and remember these objects in the digital sphere.
Quality of Life: CAAAV’s Activism Against the Giuliani Administration’s Policing
For the duration of the Giuliani administration, CAAAV’s leadership fought against anti-Asian attacks that had been labeled as ‘random’ but were extremely targeted as a consequence of unchecked systemic and state-sanctioned racism that manifested itself “in the form of police brutality, environmental racism, labor exploitation compounded by physical and sexual abuse at the worksite, and the deepening of poverty through a domestic legislative war against the urban poor.” This digital exhibition explores some of CAAAV’s important leadership roles in fighting for the quality of life for every New Yorker.
The Modern-Day Yellow Peril: CAAAV Protests Against Rising Sun
The entertainment industry is one of the biggest in the United States, being worth an estimated 678 billion USA dollars in 2018 and expected to grow to over 720 billion USA dollars by the end of 2020. This is much bigger than comparable industries, such as sports (71 billion) and IT services (17.5 billion).
The entertainment industry has a significant impact on our lives because we learn from it. We learn about human relationships from entertainment, such as ways to be a good partner, student, friend, parent, or lover—the things we should value in our lives. We also learned about racial stereotypes about one another from the entertainment we consume. We consume stereotypes about women of all races, the LGBTQIA community, African Americans, Jewish Americans, the Lantix community, and East Asian Americans.
This exhibition focuses on CAAAV's efforts to protests against Rising Sun, a major studio picture that featured stereotypes against East Asian Americans. The exhibit aims to build an understanding of Hollywood stereotypes against East Asian Americans.