hi! no obligation, but if you have any reading/resources on asian/black solidarity during the civil rights movement i would love to know! and thank you for that post; i'm asian and i've been seeing some people trying to pin the blame on other (mostly black) poc :/ we need to address colorist sentiment and stand together, not start a race war
Thank you for this very much appreciated ask - it’s one of my favourite topics. The Asian community and the Black community historically were very interconnected. This is a very limited, non-exhaustive list of the ways we’ve worked together in the past.
In Bandung, Indonesia, the first large-scale Asian-African conference took place in 1955, uniting delegates of 29 countries to discuss ways to oppose colonialism.
There was the Third World Liberation Front Strikes of 1968 which lasted for 5 months and was held by the Black Student Union, the Latino student organisation (LASO), a Mexican American student organisation (MASC), the Filipino organization called PACE and the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action (ICSA) at UC Berkeley, that ended up creating the first college of Ethnic Studies.
There was the Rainbow Coalition, an activist group founded by Fred Hampton of Black Panther fame and included the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican group) and the Young Patriots (for poor white people), which had its second iteration be founded by Rev. Jesse Jackson a decade later to include Asian and Native Americans. He famously protested and spoke up for Vincent Chin, an Asian victim of police brutality in 1984.
There were Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama, who joined African American and Latino groups in protests demanding equality, with Grace being a notable figure in Detroit’s Black Power movement and Yuri becoming a good friend of Malcolm X.
There was Ram Manohar Lohia, who encouraged African Americans to embrace civil disobedience like India, and went to jail for fighting Jim Crow. The Black press was one of the first to take note of India’s independence movement in support, and heavily covered the subject matter when mainstream press was reluctant.
Muhammad Ali refused to serve in the Vietnam war to kill for American imperialism, and the Black Panthers famously held anti-vietnams marches. The first American to introduce China’s current national anthem, “March of the Volunteers” (aka “Qi Lai”) to the United States was Black American singer and songwriter, Paul Robeson, who sympathised with China’s resistance movement against imperialism. W.E.B. Du Bois and Robert F. Williams (former leader of NAACP) were friends with Mao, and in the early days of the Black Panthers, people sold Mao’s quotations “Little Red Books” on the streets to pay for arms.
Ho Chi Minh, famous Vietnamese communist leader, wrote the essay “The Black Race” after being influenced by the teachings of Marcus Garvey: “It is well-known that the Black race is the most oppressed and the most exploited of the human family. It is well-known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery[…]”
There are many more instances: I recommend this site for a decent timeline (x).
There has always been solidarity among ethnic minorities, and even working class white people in some cases - the FBI was terrified of the Rainbow Coalition founded by Fred Hampton because of the racial unity. In my opinion, the lack of education of Asian-Black solidarity (and Latino, and Native people) has been intentional in breaking this bond, because it is in the favour of white supremacy for us to point at each other as enemies. You’ll also notice how, unsurprisingly, many of this solidarity is tied to socialism or communism. I believe that this is also why you rarely hear about this history: to recognise our revolutionary traditions would mean to confront the necessity for a revolution, which mainstream media will never promote. Africa, Asia, and Latin America were fighting a common struggle. We, as people, are still fighting this common struggle. Our solution and priority must always be to look out for our Black, Asian, Latino, and Native brothers and sisters, and be united against white supremacy and imperialism.
I wish you the best in this difficult time <3
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