(2008, recipient of book awards from the American Historical Association and Association for Asian American Studies), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century with Grace Lee Boggs (2011), and American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism (2026). He is President of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation, previously served as faculty at the University of Michigan, University of Washington Bothell, and TCU, and had fellowships at Harvard and the Smithsonian.
Kurashige applied the "Page 99 Test" to American Peril with the following results:
As I write this, the headlines are dominated by two stories: 1) the US-Israeli War on Iran, in which one of the most horrific scenes has been the bombing of a primary school for girls resulting in the massacre of 175 or more victims; and 2) new reporting of sexual violence against women and girls by the noted labor leader, Cesar Chavez.Visit Scott Kurashige's website.
Page 99, which contains graphic accounts of misogyny, sadly demonstrates a deeper connection to the problem of violence against women and girls in US history, especially the history of militarism. Here are some passages:From 1972 to 2015, according to Okinawan police, U.S. military personnel and their family members murdered twenty-six and raped 126 Okinawans. The latter number is almost certainly a severe undercount, because most rapes were not reported or prosecuted, owing to sexist social and legal structures, internalized oppression among Okinawans, and extraterritoriality provisions in the SOFA granting Americans effective immunity. These problems received more exposure following an international incident that prompted over ninety thousand Okinawans to protest on October 21, 1995, demanding curtailment of the U.S. military presence. Three American men in their early twenties—two in the marines and one in the navy—kidnapped a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl and bound her with duct tape.Thankfully, the young girl survived a brutal sexual assault. But others were tragically lost.Despite some reforms and concessions by the U.S. military, both the bases and the tensions on Okinawa persist. In fact, a new wave of mass protests erupted more recently following the murder of Rina Shimabukuro, whose badly decomposed body was found in a suitcase, spawning another international incident. In May 2016, Kenneth Gadson, an American contractor and ex-marine married to a woman from Okinawa, stabbed Shimabukuro in the neck and clubbed her on the head to subdue her—thereby enacting a longstanding rape and kidnap “fantasy.”I began research the problem of anti-Asian violence decades ago as incidents erupted during the 1980s and 1990s. But I wrote much of American Peril specifically in the aftermath of the March 2021 shootings in Atlanta-area massage parlors that led to the mass murder of eight people, including six Asian women. The authorities and the much of the media initially treated it as an isolated incident that was “not racially motivated.” They largely ignored how the dehumanization of Asian women as sexualized labor for American men is rooted in the establishment of “R&R stations” surrounding U.S. bases in Asia, media stereotypes of Asian sex workers in war movies, and discriminatory laws and practices rendering women and immigrant workers vulnerable to exploitation and repression.
In this way, my book points to the deeply rooted history of anti-Asian racism, especially as it connects imperialist violence overseas and violent acts of racism within the United States.
The Page 99 Test: The Shifting Grounds of Race.
--Marshal Zeringue
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