ABSTRACT
What’s the future of New York City after 9/11 and after the 2008 financial collapse? As I write, billionaire Michael Bloomberg is running for a third term as CEO–Mayor of New York City. He is presiding over the ‘clean’ information age economy of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries—the very industries that have led to the current collapse. A year before the election of President Obama, Bloomberg held a highly publicized police raid on a block in Chinatown—what he touted as “the counterfeit triangle” robbing New York City of billions of dollars. This modest, run down triangular block of Canal Street became a new “terrorist” ground zero wrecking havoc on the economy of New York City and the national economy (Barnes 2001). In this era of China’s dramatic rise and apparent US decline, might this raid be the harbinger of the new role of Chinatown in American political culture? This chapter attempts to uncover a dimension of what gets in the way of American people understanding and relating to Chinese people—a legacy of anti-Asian racism. I seek to expose this filter that distorts and separates basic people-to-people understanding.
