From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987–1995

Abstract

Drawing on archival research and oral histories, this article situates the 1995 police shooting of Chinese immigrant teenager Yong Xin Huang within the context of segregationist violence in southern Brooklyn. I argue that hate crimes and policing were interconnected forms of state-sanctioned removal deployed in response to white anxieties as New York became a "majority minority" city in the late twentieth century. Asian immigrants were subject to this removal based on a long history of their racialization as an invasive threat. Connecting the experiences of Asian Americans to those of Black and Latinx New Yorkers, community organizers built multiracial coalitions to claim the right to the city on behalf of its criminalized residents.