“What time is it on the clock of the world?” Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs asked this in their 1974 book Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. Our movement ancestors stressed that our conditions are always changing and our progressive ideas must attend to changing realities.
The Seeding Change Podcast is a place for us to learn together about where we’ve been and where we’re going for liberation. Created by young, left Asian Americans, we share stories, discussions, and political education.
The Asian American community is complex. Across Asian communities and other communities of color, there are commonalities in high poverty rates, criminalization, incarceration, and lack of access to work, healthcare, housing, and education. We have different histories and oppressions based on colonialism, [U.S.] imperialism, immigration pathways, wars, and resettlement.
The role of Asian progressives in the US is crucial and strategic in anti-militarism movements and international solidarity. Internationally, the US pivots 60 percent of its Navy ships, 55 percent of its Army, and ⅔ of its Marine Corps to the Asia Pacific Region.* Asian Americans are needed in international anti-imperial struggles given how much of our histories are shaped by a legacy of U.S. imperialism, and with the rise of military spending in our homelands.
This material reality–and the history and systems that created it–has become obscured by the model minority myth. The monolithic image of “crazy rich (East) Asians” comes at the expense of working class Asians of diverse ethnic origins, and our Black and Indigenous relatives.
We yearn for a nuanced analysis that builds unity for Asian Americans to organize for liberation for all. As Asian Americans together in this fight we aim to be strategic, coherent, and impactful in building power on personal, regional, national, and transnational levels. In solidarity and coalition with poor, working class, immigrant, queer and trans, Black and Indigenous communities, and international political movements, the Seeding Change Podcast shares perspectives that grow the power of Asian American organizing towards realizing a long term social and economic justice agenda. Onwards in the struggle for freedom and liberation for all peoples here on Turtle Island and in our homelands!
The creators of this podcast are connected through an organization called Seeding Change, a program that develops the skills, leadership, and commitment of young Asian Americans to organize for racial, economic, and gender justice.
*Adm. Phil Davidson (Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command), “Ensuring a Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” Fullerton Lecture Series, March 7, 2019.