On Asian America: Living in the rural NW, historical and contemporary stories

June 04, 2021 / 2:38 pm

In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, Asian Americans have been facing rising incidents of physical and verbal assault. This current spike in incidents is just the latest chapter in America's history of anti-Asian hate crimes.

Asian people were among the earliest sea voyagers to the Americas in the 1500s. But even after centuries of presence on these shores, many Americans of Asian descent are still treated as foreigners.

This last episode in the On Asian America series comes to us from Northwest Public Broadcasting. It explores the legacy of violence aimed at Asian Americans, and othering of Asian Americans in the rural Northwest and offers solutions for building spaces of inclusion.

There is research that shows that dominant culture young people often don’t have friends of color, but people of color almost all have dominant culture friends. What does that mean? How does that impact our social ways of being? Those are big, difficult, hard questions, and they are, quite frankly, easier to ignore than to interrogate, but in a society in which we are more ever-connected, the exposure to other human beings, I think, is the way that we build empathy. And the key to all of this for me is really empathy. - Jill Creighton, Washington State University Dean of Students

On Asian America is a collaboration between Humanities Washington, KUOW Public Radio, Spokane Public Radio, and Northwest Public Broadcasting. The goal of the series is to amplify Asian voices and spark an ongoing dialogue about the experiences and contributions of Asian communities in our state.

You can submit feedback and questions about this episode by emailing engage@kuow.org, leaving a voicemail at 206-221-1926, or by texting the word “feedback” to 206-926-9955.

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John O'Brien
Senior Producer, All Things Considered

John O’Brien is KUOW's All Things Considered Senior Producer. He spends his days setting up interviews with newsmakers on subjects from politics and public health to arts and culture. John learned to make radio starting in 2006 as an intern on KUOW’s The Conversation with Ross Reynolds.
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