Ayurella Horn-MullerShawna Chen
Despite elevated degrees of exposure and many decades spent advancing justice, Asian Americans have long been excluded from the national climate movement, activists and scientists tell Axios.
The big picture: Asian Americans across the country are working to change that legacy of omission by leading climate organizations, protests and research.
What they’re saying: Climate justice activist Alexia Leclercq, who is Taiwanese with Indigenous ancestry, tells Axios that growing up in Texas, “upper class, white, mostly men” were always depicted as scientists or environmentalists.
Between the lines: Age-old stereotypes have portrayed Asian Americans as civically disengaged and politically inactive, obscuring the community’s history as initiators in the fight against climate impacts they’ve suffered firsthand.
State of play: Demographics within leading climate agencies and behind global climate reports that help set the national policy agenda tell another story.
Zoom in: In 2018, Asian Americans made up 5.6% of the U.S. population but earned only 3% of ecology Ph.Ds, and were “markedly absent” from leadership positions in ecology, according to a 2020 paper in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America.
Yes, but: “The idea of the model minority myth is so pervasive and so powerful, and we’re fighting against it every single day,” says Andrea Chu.
Meanwhile: The “shadow” of the China Initiative — a controversial Trump administration-era policy which ended last year following allegations of racial profiling — has further strained longstanding research equity issues.
Of note: The lack of disaggregated data on different Asian American subgroups contributes to the “systematic exclusion” of Asian Americans in environmental research fields, according to Chu.
Zoom out: Communities of color face higher levels of air pollution at every income level, a racial disparity shaped by redlining and segregation policies.
The bottom line: “We continue to be invisibilized and basically get left behind and never spoken about,” Chu tells Axios. “My approach to this problem has been not to try and fight for space … but to create the spaces that we need.”
Courtesy: (Axios)
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