Writing against racial injury demonstrates how language and literacy education has harbored racial injustice against Asian Americans throughout Unites States history. The book is based on the notion that literacy education establishes cultural norms as tools by which people engage with society. Hoang's book is accessible to a general audience and provides a descriptive history of language discrimination. Two distinct parts compare Asian American language and literacy activism in post 1960s California.

In part 1 Hoang focuses on Asian American rhetoric in the early 1970s. Chapter 1 shows how ‘nativism and racism’ (p. 32) prompted discrimination in public schools through an examination of the 1974 class action case, Lau v. Nichols. This landmark case argued against the San Francisco public schools' refusal to provide English language classes to Chinese American students. Hoang's analysis reveals how the case's emphasis on ‘national origin’ (p. 32) blurred the lines between ethnicity and race. The case demonstrates how self-determination became an important feature of Asian American activism. The author reveals how Asian American activists embraced self-determination in chapter 2's analysis of Gidra. The chapter provides a brief history of the development and importance of literary societies in American higher education. Gidra's publication between 1969–1974 was foundational to the alternative press movement and the author challenges educators to ‘reconsider mainstream composition curricula’ (p. 63).

Part 2 reveals the conceptual shift that occurred in Asian American activism between the 1970s and 2000s. This part confronts the idea of a ‘postracial state’ (p. 21) by showing how Asian American students drew from previous activism to address modern racial politics. Chapter 3 demonstrates how cross-cultural student organizations and student governments mediate race. The author performed an ethnographic study of the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC) by tracking the history of Vietnamese American ethnic identity throughout the stages of the organization. Hoang advocates for a rhetorical space that allows students to use their authority in productive ways rather than succumb to notions of personal injury in a victim/aggressor environment.

In the final two chapters, Hoang describes methods by which Asian American activists have transformed their strategies to confront prescribed notions of race. Chapter 4 examines the way that cultural memory affects the motivations for remembrance by analyzing protests against John McCain's March 2000 racial slur. The author effectively covers concepts of memory as the slur gook is recounted through Asian contexts. In the culminating chapter, Hoang turns to student performance to describe the current state of activism. Here, the author provides a description of the role of performance in a review of the VAC's 2002 community involvement. The author draws from performance theory to explain how Asian American activist rhetoric has transformed. Throughout this analysis, Hoang does not suggest that an appreciation for Anglo-Saxon heritage or the English language is inherently bad but provides rich historical context and clear analysis of artifacts to increase awareness into the ways in which language can and has generated racial injury to minority groups.