Following the news that the Florida House unanimously passed a bill that requires Asian American Pacific Islander [AAPI] history be taught in the public education system, an Asian American content creator is speaking out about what she believes are its racist underpinnings.
Shengxiao “Sole” Yu, who goes by the TikTok username @lifeaffirmingnectar, is a social justice educator. On May 17, she took to the platform to share her thoughts on this newly approved bill.
“Y’all, Florida just passed AAPI history education and if you’re like, ‘Wait, did I read that headline correctly? Florida? As in, Governor DeSantis, signed this into bill?’ Yeah, exactly. This is why we gotta use our critical thinking,” Yu says. “Yeah, the same state that has the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, that banned African American history, that banned critical race theory … something’s not adding up.”
‘An important force in Asian American racialization is the invention of the model minority myth, which was very much based on perpetuating anti-Black oppression’
House Bill 1537, which was signed into law on May 9, requires that the “history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the history of Japanese internment camps and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the immigration, citizenship, civil rights, identity, and culture of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; and the contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to American society” now be taught.
This bill, Yu alleges, is a “white supremacist tactic.”
“An important force in Asian American racialization is the invention of the model minority myth, which was very much based on perpetuating anti-Black oppression,” she continues. “On top of that, the theory of Asian American racial triangulation teaches us that Asian Americans are typically used as a racial wedge group to create this triangulated form, this triangle shape, in order to keep the racialized structure…
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