That reminder turns the work of making legible a history that has long been overlooked into a search for a more inclusive future. But the surge in violence against Asian-Americans is a reminder that AmericaвЂ™s present reality reflects its exclusionary past. Evaluating gradations of victimhood, and where a persistent sense of otherness ends and structural barriers begin, is complicated. Asian-Americans do not fit easily into the narrative of race in America.

But it is unclear what will become of the fervor once the sense of emergency dissipates. The attacks have produced a remarkable outpouring of emotion and energy from the Asian-American community and beyond. Then came the Presidency of Donald Trump, his racist sneers about вЂњkung fluвЂќ and the вЂњChina virus,вЂќ and the wave of anti-Asian attacks that has swept the country. Asian-Americans have been stereotyped as the model minority, yet no other ethnic or racial group experiences greater income inequalityвЂ“вЂ“or perhaps feels more invisible. Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, and Asians are projected to be the largest immigrant group in the nation by 2055. In one particularly horrific episode, in 1885, white miners in Rock Springs, in the Wyoming Territory, massacred at least twenty-eight Chinese miners and drove out several hundred others. According to вЂњ The Chinese Must GoвЂќ (2018), a detailed examination by Beth Lew-Williams, a professor of history at Princeton, in the mid eighteen-eighties, during probably the peak of vigilantism, at least a hundred and sixty-eight communities forced their Chinese residents to leave. Largely forgotten in this defining period of American history, however, is the virulent racism that Chinese immigrants endured on the other side of the country. In the turbulent years of Reconstruction that followed, at least two thousand Black people were lynched. The Civil War, by the latest estimates, left three-quarters of a million dead. America, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was engaged in an epic struggle over race. Violence, often shocking in its brutality, followed. They came seeking the vast, open spaces of the American frontier-where, they believed, freedom and opportunity awaited.ДЄs the Chinese presence grew, however, it began to stir the anxieties of white Americans. They were escaping a homeland beset by violent rebellions and economic privation. They wore the traditional male hair style of the Qing dynasty, shaved pate in the front and a braid down to the waist in the back. They were mostly peasants, often travelling in large groups from the same village. Some came in search of gold others were attracted by the lucrative wages that they could earn working for the railroad companies laying down tracks to join the Eastern and Western halves of the United States still others worked in factories making cigars, slippers, and woollens, or found other opportunities in the American West. They eventually arrived in the thousands. Men began scraping together funds, often using their familyвЂ™s land as collateral for loans, and crowding aboard vessels that took as long as three months to reach America. Whether from the merchantвЂ™s letter, or from ships arriving in Hong Kong, news of CaliforniaвЂ™s gold rush swept through southern China. The friend told others and set off across the Pacific Ocean himself. According to an account in the San Francisco Chronicle, a merchant visiting from Canton, the provincial capital-likely soon after the discovery of gold at Sutter Creek, in 1848-wrote to a friend back home about the riches that he had found in the mountains of California.

That was what the people in Guangdong Province called the faraway land where the native population had red hair and blue eyes, and it was rumored that gold nuggets could be plucked from the ground.

China in the late 1800s