In the wake of the violence in Atlanta, Black and Asian communities are coming together to stand against racism
The history of Black and Asian relations in the U.S. is fraught. Anti-Black racism has existed in the Asian community, and anti-Asian racism has existed in the Black community. The recent actions of solidarity come at a pivotal moment as calls for improving the security and safety of elder Asian Americans have sparked concerns about the next course of action. Community leaders have warned against more policing, given law enforcement’s pattern of disproportionately targeting Black and brown individuals. “We’re not safe until all people of color are safe. Safety doesn’t come in the form of heavier policing calls or of carceral state oppression of poor communities,” Dao-Yi Chow tells TIME. Chow, who is Chinese American, was one of the organizers of Running to Protest’s “Black & Asian Solidarity” rally. “That’s only continuing to align ourselves with white supremacy. And if we continue to do that, those are anti-Black acts that’s only going to continue to drive divisions in between our communities,” Chow says.
The word bich means a kind of jade. Growing up, I knew that Vietnamese girls were supposed to wear jade bracelets and grow into them so that one day the bracelets would be permanent. The stone is meant to protect, to heal—and the greener the jade, the better. In a different country, in a different life, my given name would be just as beautiful. In truth, I could never wear a bracelet very long. In truth, most of the people who have claimed to like the name Bich, or who have been outraged and horrified at the idea of changing it, have been white women. They are the ones who told me the name was cool, was interesting, was unique, was being true to myself, was an important part of my heritage and cultural identity. They said that they liked the name, that it would break their hearts if I changed it. They did not say that they wished to have the name themselves. I wanted to believe them; for a long time, I made a choice to believe them. But I knew, too, that they liked the exotic so long as they didn’t have to deal with its complications. They liked the idea of the exotic, not thinking about how exotic might benefit the person deciding what exotic is. Sometimes I wondered whether they also liked feeling bad for me.
if you think it’s funny or okay to use the racist phrase ‘ching chong’ in ANY manner, in ANY context, for ANY reason, you are a fucking racist piece of shit and i hope you die.
We’re the fastest-growing demographic group in the U.S. But when it comes to the nation’s racial and ethnic divisions, where do we fit in?
In the years leading up to the pandemic, Asian American politics tended toward the ornate and insular. An unusual amount of energy seemed to be expended on matters of Hollywood representation, which, when distilled to its essence, is a demand by the already privileged for access into one of the few industries that won’t have them. The more radical version of Asian American politics was ultimately nostalgic — an attempt to reclaim the ’60s and ’70s and genuine civil rights heroes like Grace Lee Boggs, the labor and Black Power activist, and Yuri Kochiyama, who had lived in an internment camp and famously cradled Malcolm X’s head as he lay dying — and called for solidarity with Black and Brown people. These ties are nice and inspirational, but they do not mean anything to a vast majority of Asian Americans who came to this country post Hart-Celler. The Berkeley students who coined the phrase “Asian American” had probably come from families that were in this country for generations and lived as anomalies in a country that was Black and white. Given a choice, those activists identified with Black people and tried to forge solidarity among all those who had suffered under American imperialism and white supremacy.
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Every few months I come across assimilated Asian men venting on social media about the time one of their white neighbors in buildings just like mine in Brooklyn mistook them for delivery men, inevitably followed by a firm statement of their credentials: “I guess he didn’t know, I am a journalist/doctor/lawyer/hedge-fund manager!” It’s embarrassing for both sides when this happens, but the implication has always felt so bizarre to me; the real offense is being mistaken for being poor. What sets modern, assimilated Asian Americans apart, when it comes to these sorts of differentiations made by so many immigrant groups, is that our bonds with our brothers and sisters are mostly superficial markers of identity, whether rituals around boba tea, recipes or support for ethnic-studies programs and the like. Indignation tends to be flimsy — we are mad when white chefs cook food our parents cooked, or we clamor about what roles Scarlett Johansson stole from Asian actors. But the critiques generally stay within those sorts of consumerist concerns that do not really speak to the core of an identity because we know, at least subconsciously, that the identity politics of the modern, assimilated Asian American are focused on getting a seat at the wealthy, white liberal table. Or, if we want to be generous, we fight about food and representation and executive-suite access because we want our children to live without really having to think about any of this — to have the spoils of full whiteness.
We, in other words, want to become as white as white will allow. For the first three decades of my life, this process felt inevitable. I tried on several different selves with wildly contradictory politics: a radical, a revolutionary Marxist in my teens, a Buddhist in my early 20s, followed by a bout of self-destruction and then a more stable period as a professional writer. During those phases, each of which was deeply felt, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t end up fine. In retrospect, I don’t really know why I believed that — things could certainly have gone wrong, and for a while in my 20s, they did — but because I knew all my middle-class Asian and white friends would be fine, it followed that I would be, too.
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Our narratives are ultimately nation-building exercises — a way for “Asian American” to mean something more than “someone with ancestry from the continent of Asia.” But they also work to erase the more meaningful differences between ascendant, educated individuals and the working-class, sometimes undocumented people who seem to be most at risk to fall victim to the sort of violence that has been on the rise. Six of the eight people murdered in Georgia were Asian, yes, but they also were mostly poor women with a shallow foothold in this country. (The dead also included a white woman whose Latino husband was in the spa when she was killed. He was handcuffed by responding police officers who, according to Spanish-language news sources, ignored him for hours while he pleaded to know if his wife was alive.) In the days after the attack, social media was full of Asian Americans talking about their collective trauma: the shame of Americanizing one’s name and complaints about strangers asking, “Where are you from?”
I do not mean to judge these responses; they were made by people who were grieving and scared and who wanted to reclaim the status of “people of color” and remind everyone that we, too, suffer violence from white supremacy. Nor is this merely a taxonomical complaint. But as long as these tragedies reroute the specific class, immigration and gender politics at play into the squishier problems of professional Asian Americans, the nation that’s built will too often ask, “Why aren’t we treated like white people?” instead of, “What can we do to liberate ourselves and all other oppressed people?”
The Atlanta shootings are merely the latest symptom of a prejudice with a long history
In 1970, Asian Americans were the least unequal of any ethnic group. By 2016 they were the most. While the income of the bottom 10% of black people has increased by two-thirds over the past 50 years, that of the bottom decile of Asians has improved by just 11%. The income of the top 10% of Asian Americans has, however, rocketed.
Indians are the most successful of Asian groups: 40% of over 25s possess a postgraduate degree; just 7.5% live in poverty. That contrasts with the 28% of Hmong, a people of Chinese ancestry, who live below the poverty line. Almost half of Vietnamese have no education beyond high school. The median income of Laotians is barely half that of Indians. There is, in other words, no such thing as an “Asian community”, still less one that is uniformly affluent or highly educated.
Nevertheless, the myth has persisted, particularly on the left. Many of those now denouncing attacks on Asians as products of “white supremacy” were just a few months ago insisting that they were “privileged”, even “embracing whiteness”. As with Jews, the myth of privilege has allowed many to ignore the racism that Asians face.
Ahead of the 2022 midterms, the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders are significantly more likely to be mobilized by a shared fear of violence and discrimination than before the pandemic.
In 2020, amid a year of violence and fear, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were hypervisible — and that changed the way they look at themselves and politics, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.
As the global pandemic took hold, former President Donald Trump started using xenophobic terms to blame Chinese people for spreading Covid-19. Anti-Asian hate crimes spiked, with people self-reporting more than 9,000 incidents to the advocacy organization Stop AAPI Hate. A shooter in Atlanta killed eight people, six of them East Asian women, and sparked national outrage. Then came a shooting in Indianapolis that had Sikhs mourning.
All of these events created a political solidarity unlike anything the community has seen before. The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll — one of the most extensive surveys across nearly 50 ethnic groups that make up the diaspora — shows that two in 10 adults are now more likely to identify with the broader “AAPI” label than they were pre-pandemic, a notable shift for a racial group that tends to be “nationality-first.” This movement in identity, on the heels of a massive voter turnout jump from 2016 to 2020, is key to building electoral clout, experts say.
