The Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit is an online toolkit for organizers and educators to teach social justice among the Asian American community. It exists online as a 300 page free downloadable pdf on a website titled: www.asianamtoolkit.org
This toolkit was launched on September 7, 2016 and aims to contribute to the long term goal of making racial justice a reality by giving Asian American organizers the tools needed to build the ranks of all people who work to dismantle structural racism and white supremacy. It was created through the collaboration of 15 diverse A/API grassroots organizations across the United States that focus on the lives of Asian Americans living in what they define as “the most precarious margins of power.” These organizations include the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Chinese Progressive Association SF, Korean Resource Center, Filipino Advocates for Justice, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, PrYSM, DRUM, Khmer Girls in Action, 1Love Movement, AYPAL: Building API Power, VAYLA New Orleans, Freedom Inc, Korean Resource Community Center, Mekong NYC, VietLEAD
This toolkit is unique in that provides full lesson plans and teaching resources, while recognizing that the Asian American Pacific Islander community is very diverse and that an all-encompassing toolkit is not possible. Thus, the lesson plans are created so that organizers and teachers can easily adapt it to their particular community.
The toolkit is divided into 3 parts:
- Part 1 includes 15 lessons on racial justice spanning “Asian American Identity, Model Minority Myth, Gender & Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Race & Working Class + Immigrant Struggles, For Black Lives, Colonialism, & Islamo-Racism.” These lessons are critical in that they introduce the idea of intersectionality and the idea that racial justice needs to exist throughout all of these areas.
- Part 2 is a compilation of curriculum that each organization felt was crucial in their work towards racial justice. These resources are more nuanced and go into more significant depth. Here, the toolkit does an excellent job of highlighting the work that so many Asian American organizations have done in the fight for social justice, thus combatting the belief that Asian Americans are apolitical and passive. By creating this space in Part 2 for organizations to share their own resources and making more efficient the flow and exchange of tried and true ideas, this toolkit is pivotal in accelerating the goals of the Asian American movement as well as the rate of education and advocacy.
- Part 3 includes a variety of additional resources that are crucial to the understanding of racial justice, such as infographics, FAQs and Fact Sheets about the Prisoner Industrial Complex, Affirmative Action, and Asians4BlackLives Principles.
The lessons in the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit go beyond exposing the injustices facing Asian Americans today by contesting the roots of those injustices: racism, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. More than ever, given the United States’ current state of affairs, this toolkit is crucial in building the ranks of Asian Americans who are committed not only to advancing Asian American politics but also working to debunk race as a category of human difference.