The history of Asian American racialization can be traced back to the mid-1800s (Almaguer, 1994; Cheng et al., 2021; Cheung, 2017; Huynh et al., 2011; C. J. Kim, 1999; S. Y. Kim et al., 2011; Wu, 2014). This racialization has been conceptualized and enacted on Asian American minds and bodies through concepts like the model minority, perpetual foreigner, and yellow peril and calls for further research. As Asian Americans represent only 1-2% of the public school teacher and principal workforce (NCES, 2023), focusing on the experiences Asian American educators and educational leaders provides a way to rethink and reconstruct traditional notions of leadership as a form of transformative resistance (Yosso, 2002).

Engaging in spaces centering reflections on identity, emotions, and co-constructing transformational spaces to acknowledge our experiences helps us realize that the work of justice does not have to follow a traditional path. We can enact social change through a humanistic and creative activism that helps us see a process for change rooted in our ability to creatively rethink the pathways for change, not by being told what to do but by looking to each other (Boggs & Boggs, 1974; Fujino, 2005).

Pursuing ways to amplify the study of counternarratives and counterstories developed through those who historically pursued and, in the present, pursue ways to repudiate white dominant narratives in order to create a world with racial, social, and economic justice (Duncan, 2005; Woodson, 2019; Wu, E.D., 2014).

When leadership is refocused from an individualistic to a collectivist lens, more comprehensive, relational, and humanistic models of leadership arise to encourage varied approaches to leadership that consider more actors, arenas, processes, contexts, and levels of analyses that influence governance, building networks of knowledge, information sharing, service delivery, and policy reform (Ospina, 2017).

Combating racial inequality across all communities within the work of cross-racial coalitions better promotes social change and policies that intersect race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class (Lien, 2014). As such, larger social movements need the support of cross-racial coalitions to provide avenues to create long-lasting social movements (Merseth, 2018).