America’s Racist Past Collides with the Present as We Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in 2026
By Eddie Wong, Posted May 20, 2026.
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM) in May 2026 marks an inflection point, a time of change in the USA, and it’s a time that is disturbing and dangerous for the 25.2 million Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders (AANHPI). We’ve already witnessed the rollbacks on D.E.I (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs at colleges, major corporations, and government agencies. (Note: previously awarded grants on projects tagged as DEI have been rescinded by the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities.) Additionally, the looming U.S. Supreme Court decision on denying birthright citizenship marks how far our nation has moved to the white supremacist view of governance. If you missed it in the daily onslaught of rightwing initiatives, check out the Penn State University study released on March 31,2026 about the impact of a reversal of birthright citizenship: “The biggest relative change in births of babies without citizenship would be among Asians, at 41 per 1,000 Asian immigrants. That compares with 17 births of children without citizenship per 1,000 undocumented Latinos.” The New York Times article, “Supreme Court’s Birthright Decision Could Deal a Heavy Blow to Asians” April 1, 2026 reported that there could be 6.4 million U.S.-born children without legal status. The study noted that the Asians in the U.S. are here on student and work visas. They have legal status, just not U.S. citizenship. Thus, APAHM 2026 is occurring in a vastly different USA than in 2024 or even 2025.
Reuters photo at U.S. Supreme Court. Photographer unknown.
Composed of over 50 ethnic groups, AANHPIs use APAHM to showcase our diverse cultural heritage and history of our struggles and achievements in the U.S. Using a variety of activities such as essay contests, street fairs, concerts and lectures, we reach out to the broader community in a gesture of solidarity. Thus, it becomes a public expression of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies at a time when campuses feel pressure to cut back funding for ethnic student activities.
2026 is also America’s 250th birthday, prompting the question of where AANHPIs fit into the white, patriarchal narrative that is being spun out by the Trump administration.
But first, let us pay tribute to Jeanie Jew who kicked off the effort to recognize Asian American and Pacific Islander contributions to the U.S. Congressional staffer Jeanie Jew, whose grandfather worked on building the Transcontinental Railroad, lobbied her boss Rep. Frank Horton in 1977 for federal legislation for a month-long celebration of Asian Americans. Rep. Norman Mineta co-sponsored Horton’s bill and Senator Spark Matsunaga and Senator Daniel Inouye authored the Senate version of the bill. This led to President Jimmy Carter issuing a proclamation two years later in May to recognize APA Heritage Week. In 1990, President George Bush extended APA Heritage Week to a month-long celebration. Ever since then, community groups across the country have used APAHM to mark the achievements of our diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. An individual can make a difference as Jeanie Jew’s dogged determination proved.
APAHM 2026 comes at a time of heightened visibility of AANHPIs in a variety of fields: business, politics, entertainment, the arts, medicine, sports, fashion and other fields. A glimpse of the advances that have been made can be seen in the excellent HBO special “The A List,” which profiles 15 celebrities, leaders and activists including TV broadcast journalist Connie Chung, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Actors Sandra Oh, Kumanil Nanjiani and Bowen Yang, chef Yia Vang, surfer/scientist Cliff Kapono, Japanese American redress/reparations activist Kathy Masaoka, and others. “The A-List” Director Eugene Yi, co-director of the Emmy-awarding winning documentary “Free Cho Soo Lee” with Julie Ha, noted how over the course of filming from 2024 to the present “…things can quickly backslide and how quickly people can be erased.” Yi added, “We literally have people being disappeared on the streets and we literally have histories being erased.” (Associated Press article, May 13, 2026 by Terry Tang).
AANHPIs are breaking through in popular culture and in sports and Asian influences are heralded in cuisine, fashion, architecture, film and music, but there’s a danger lurking underneath the good vibes. AANHPIs are also in the crosshairs of a rising tide of white Christian nationalism aka white supremacy. We know that racist rhetoric about Asians as “unassimilable,” “degenerate,” and “health hazards” led to white-led mob violence against our communities, e.g., Sept. 2,1885 at Rock Springs, Wyoming when 28 Chinese miners were killed and Chinatown burned to the ground; Sept. 4, 1907 when 500 white workers attacked Sikh lumber mill workers and drove them out of Billingham, Washington; and January 19-20, 1930 when Filipinos in Watsonville, CA were attacked on ranches and farms as well as city streets. Today, this raging stream of hatred is fueled by “white replacement”
conspiracy theories, false blame on Asian imports for U.S. economic decline, and characterization of Covid as the “China virus. Thus, we witnessed the 2012 Sikh Temple murders where six worshippers died by gunfire from a white supremacist and the 2021 Atlanta spa murders of six Asian women massage workers, along with a white woman and a white man.
10TV.com promo, Central Ohio.
Today, we are seeing the explicit expression of white supremacy and racial hatred from far-right circles. Perhaps, the most prominent and dangerous source is the Trump administration. Trump’s attempts to erase the history of struggle against slavery, for civil rights, for women’s rights, for gay and lesbian rights and the negative effects of climate change is being challenged. In March 2025, President Trump’s directive to the National Park Service to remove anything that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living, and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” was met with protest by a coalition of state and local historical societies, the National Parks Conservation Association, Union of Concerned Scientists and others. Trump’s order to remove a display that mentioned George Washington’s ownership of slaves at President Washington’s former home in Philadelphia was overturned by a federal judge in February 2026 after the City of Philadelphia sued. The Manzanar Committee issued the following statement that addresses the fears Asian American have about the erasure of our history: “It took decades for the full account of our story to come to light. Years of trauma, conscious suppression and manipulation obscured the true character of America’s concentration camps for many years…the effort to whitewash the history of Manzanar and the forced removal is insulting, and it is dangerous. Not long ago our government developed an entire narrative about how our community was a threat to national security. That false narrative led to the forced removal and incarceration of more than125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. It is clear that America has not taken to heart the many lessons of our story.” APAHM stands in the tradition of truth-telling and restoring our rightful place in American history and culture.
Trump and his rightwing crew want to reverse and erase the critical view of U.S. history that grew out of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. The body of scholarship and knowledge that came out of ethnic studies, women’s students, labor history, and gender and sexuality studies cannot be undone from a generation’s consciousness. Nor will we allow future generations to be exposed soley to a sanitized white, Christian patriarchal view of our country.
Adding to the rising tension towards AANHPIs is the bi-partisan effort to label China as the U.S.’ number one enemy. Although the Biden administration endorsed progressive measures on climate change and green job creation, it lapsed into the Cold War binary of us against the enemy. Once that enemy was the Soviet Union and now it has become the U.S. chief economic competitor, the People’s Republic of China. The Biden administration’s export controls on American semiconductors and raised tariffs on China’s electric vehicles and batteries were justified on grounds of protecting American industries, but there an ongoing debate about the benefits of protectionism. Biden administration officials’ get tough on China rhetoric is not conducive to resolving complex issues of intellectual property theft and fair and reciprocal trade. Some experts questioned the need for the Biden administration to raise the 25% tariff to 100% on Chinese electric vehicles in 2024, . According to the U.S. International Commission on Trade’s April 2024 report, “Despite the high tariffs, U.S. EV imports from China increased from $7.2 million to $388.8 million during 2018–23 but were still only two percent of U.S. EV imports.”
China is no angel in geopolitics as it infringes upon its Asian neighbors’ territorial waters, and its human rights violations have been duly noted by the United Nations in 2023. But economic competition doesn’t warrant raising anti-Chinese sentiment that is counterproductive towards global stability and U.S. economic growth, and it leads to rising talk of armed conflict. When China becomes the enemy in the eyes of the public, guess who will be singled out for attack in the U.S.?
President Trump has jumped on and off the China bashing bandwagon. After his latest trip to China in May 2026, he offended his MAGA base by coming out in favor of Chinese ownership of American farmland and extended 500,000 student visas to China. True to form, Trump could snap back into China bashing. After all, he levied a 145% tariff on Chinese products in 2025.
AP photo by Lynne Sladky. Hallandale Beach, FL 2020.
2026 also finds us facing the midterm elections in which Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and even possibly one in the U.S. Senate could provide a bulwark against Trump’s attempt to destroy our democracy. The road to winning and establishing a barrier to Trump’s edicts is now much harder with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which allows states to redistrict for GOP control. But unless we organize and fight hard, we will be in an even worse position in 2028 and the years ahead. The brutal truth is that white Christian nationalism holds sway over 32% of Americans (adherents and sympathizers) according to the PRRI Survey conducted in 2025 among 22,111 adults. This has led to the rightwing Republican Party control over the Governorship and both legislative houses in 23 states, which are spread across the South, the Mountain states, and parts of the Midwest. These states also form an electoral bloc that decide who sits in the White House. Progressives must make inroads in these states and winnow away the rightwing stranglehold over U.S. politics.
What Must We Do
Go out and celebrate APAHM. It’s our moment to shine and we may as well be joyful about it and embrace our friends and neighbors of all nationalities to partake. As Daniel Dae-Kim noted in his CNN series, “K-Everything,” it’s amazing to see non-Koreans singing the Korean lyrics to BTS songs at their concerts. Check out the new and free Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook, a comprehensive look at history and contemporary issues facing our communities.
As gruesome and soul sucking as following the news can be, keep your eyes and ears open to call out bullshit whenever you see it. It’s OK to be angry about Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund to the January 6 insurrectionist. It’s worse to tune it out and pretend it’s just more bad news because that’s exactly the form of resignation dictators seek from the populace.
Take a deep breath and decide how much political activity you can commit to this his summer and fall. We either take a stand and reclaim our democracy now or fall back to face more authoritarianism. For some people, just making a financial contribution to groups which are registering new voters, mobilizing for the anti-Trump effort, or recruiting new activists to work campaigns is enough. Give as much as you can and stay tuned. Here are some key groups: Movement Voter Project is a place you can make one donation that is sent to state-based voter mobilization groups; Seed the Vote pays for volunteers to go to hotly-contested Congressional districts in an effort to flip the U.S. House; and Swing Left, which mounts volunteer canvassing campaigns to all voters in a persuasion effort to elect Democratic U.S. House and U.S. Senate candidates.
If you have time and energy, please consider working with a campaign or one of the above-mentioned organizations this summer and fall on the ground.
I’ll be curious to see what shape we’re in by APAHM 2027. Whatever we can do now can shape the future we want to see.
Featured Image:
Actor Sandra Oh, Actor and Comedian Kumail Nanjiani and Sen. Tammy Duckworth are featured in “The A-List: 15 Stories from the Asian and Pacific Diasporas” on HBO. Photo courtesy of HBO.