Étiquette : racism

This year’s health crisis led to major social outbursts. Anti-Asian racism widely surfaced and tackled the image of a silent and docile minority. George Floyd’s death crystallized Black Lives Matter movements all around the world and urged communities (Asian included) to address their own racism and pushed forward the debate concerning racial dynamics. In that particular context, this paper aims to study how young Vietnamese descendants invoke and interpret familial and national history to question their own community’s political positions, specifically regarding the question of race and migration to convey a message of trans-generational, trans-national and trans-ethnic convergence. After 1975, Vietnamese Refugees constituted one of the biggest migration movements, and the Diasporic communities they constitute are now one of the biggest and more sparse in the world. Some left when Indochina ended, others fled the regime and the communist party sent workers in allies socialist countries. These intricate trajectories lead to divergent, if not opposite, narratives and fracture lines among them. It would be too easy to simplify the dynamics and say that these fracture lines between liberal, anti-racist and racist conservatives overlap with the opposition of communism (originating from the North of Vietnam) and anti-communist (from the South of Vietnam who fled the regime), older against younger generations.