MoCA must say No New Jail in Manhattan Chinatown, No $8.7 billion New Jails Plan

To: Nancy Yao, President of the Board of Directors, The Museum of Chinese in America

The CID Coalition stands in solidarity with the Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) and other organizers in NY Chinatown in their demands for MoCA (Museum of Chinese in America) to explain its involvement in the Borough Wide Jails Plan and to publicly reject the plan, and any concessions and community give-backs, associated with the construction of jails in New York and Chinatown. We call on MoCA to place values of racial justice and Asian American working class solidarity over financial gain — by ceasing its practices of artwashing, displacement, and criminalization.

We reject the museum’s complicity in mass incarceration, which has carried on America’s legacy of slavery and Jim Crow; the perpetuation of anti-Blackness by non-Black people of color when it serves to advance our interests; and this clear manifestation of the model minority myth among Asians and Asian Americans. As such, we implore all community members to stand against efforts to build a new jail, which will only uphold a system of oppression that has led to the highest prison population in the world, where African Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times that of whites.

We join the Chinatown Art Brigade in the following demands:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCeqchalO-v/?igshid=nstse7escnp4

1. Close Rikers and say no to Mayor De Blasio’s 8.7 + Billion Dollar Jail Plan

2. Reject all deals, concessions and community ‘give-backs’ made with the city to profit off the new jail plan. Be transparent with the communities MoCA is meant to serve.

3. Remove Jonathan Chu from the Museum of Chinese in America’s Board for his harmful leadership that promotes displacement in NY Chinatown, via his role as a luxury developer and owner of the gentrifying Hotel 50 Bowery.

4. Abolition now! Support the abolitionist vision and demands advanced by groups such as No New Jails NYC and Free Them All For Public Health.

To our Asian American and Chinatown communities broadly: Being for Black lives means being against prisons and police, against dehumanizing and cruel “sweeps” of our houseless neighbors, and against gentrification, displacement and predatory development. It means moving beyond slogans and hashtags to stand in meaningful, tangible solidarity with our Black and Indigenous neighbors — who have been part of our communities for generations and stood with us through Chinese exclusion, Japanese American incarceration, redlining, and multiple waves of gentrification. It means investing not in prisons and police but in community-led services that support the health, safety, and self-determination of our Black and Indigenous neighbors — and by extension, benefit all of us. And, it means being accomplices in BIPOC-centered, community-led movements for prison abolition, such as No New Youth Jail Seattle, who succeeded in compelling King County to empty its newly built jail by 2025.

We implore all community members to support the abolitionist demands and visions of Free Them All For Public Health and No New Jail NYC, and we call on MoCA to live out its professed values with accountability and transparency.

Sincerely,

The CID (Chinatown-International District) Coalition

#HumbowsNotHotels