Despite the considerable influence of the “Asian Century” on Australian Government policy and the purported centrality of Asia to Australian national identity, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously highlighted and intensified the deleterious impacts of anti-Asian racism. Specifically, Orientalist discourses and a “fear of invasion” that underpin the differential racialized treatment of the Asian diaspora in Australia have manifested in both old and new racisms that have had significant impacts on the mental and physical wellbeing of Asian Australians. In response to this crisis, this autoethnographic paper acknowledges the growing methodological complexity of Critical Race Theory and advances a novel, future-focussed Asian Australian social justice agenda in solidarity with other racialized minorities by interrogating the collaborative potential of Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) and Autoethnography through an investigation of their respective theoretical and methodological intersections.

The ongoing racialized violence against “Asian” communities—that was simultaneously illuminated and amplified during COVID-19—is not a geographically isolated phenomenon. Vis-a-vis the Atlanta Massacre of 2021 and other senseless attacks on “Asian” Americans stemming from white supremacist fears of the Yellow Peril, “Asian” Australians have likewise been, and continue to be, victims of everyday old and new racisms rooted in Orientalist discourses and concomitant fears of the invading Other. As microcosms of society, schools are germane for the analysis, confrontation, and transformation of such racialized injustices and so, as a means of intervening in these everyday inequities, this paper weaves an AsianCrit-informed autoethnography with palimpsestuous composite narratives drawn from semi-structured interviews in a broader project with other migrant “Asian” Australian teachers to chronicle personal and professional race-making practices in the face of racism before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also rethinking and re-stor(y)ing a–way toward more hopeful, inclusive futures in schools.

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