Dr. King’s Legacy: For My Southeast Asian Family

Today, January 15th, marks another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. In major metropolitan areas across the nation people are marching, rallying, protesting, and reflecting on the legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The people participating range throughout the furthest poles of the political spectrum. In many ways, the words of Dr. King have been contorted and co-opted to fit the political message of those who see fit. Those on the right infer that Dr. King was a republican and the white liberal left contest that Dr. King stood up to mean white people, but would never engage in radical means to reach humanities fullest form of self-determination and freedom from U.S. imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Today, social media commentators and outlets will quote Dr. King to no end in order to reflect their political views. Further, younger generations born in the age of technology, will learn today about the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and how Dr. King is relevant to them.

Truthfully, we need to be frank, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a radical civil rights movement leader who sought an end to racial and economic injustice and an end to U.S. imperialism abroad. His call for non-violence, was not a call for the absence of violence. It was a call for an effective strategy in which responses to state violence would be non-violent in order to capture the hearts of the world and thus bring about change. This, sharing this truth of Dr. King, I find, to be the truest responsibility of today’s social justice activist leaders and organizers. I am compelled to write this piece today especially for those who are coming of age, for those who have trouble finding solace in an era where racialized bodies are most endangered, and I write specifically for my Southeast Asian family looking to find a place on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

I, like many young people growing up in this country, have been introduced to Dr. King through our K-12 system. Touted to be the sole leader in the fight for civil rights, Dr. King almost seemed like an anomaly, or an outlier. He appeared to be a prophecy coming into fruition and his only purpose, to fight for the rights of Black folks. My K-12 education, like many K-12 education, truly knew how to squash any revolutionary fire out of their students — misinform, understate, and exceptionalize Dr. King so no other person would dare live up to his legacy. This practice is as ingrained to the American education tradition as segregation. Little did I know then, that the U.S. education system was taking preventative measures to cease any revolutionary uprising.

I grew up as a child of Cambodian refugee parents. Fleeing what ultimately was U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia, U.S. backed genocide, and U.S. military carpet bombing, my parents were entering the country that worked so diligently and effortlessly to kill them. This is irony at it’s finest. The country that sought to kill us, propagated itself to be the hero for Southeast Asian refugees. Shortly after resettlement, I was born in the heartbeat of the revolutionary struggle, the Bay Area of California. I grew up on food stamps, government assistance and understood intimately the systematic and institutional problems that plagued the American refugee condition. I’ve felt severe hunger only poverty can bring. I’ve experienced over-policed, and police occupied cities. I’ve seen the death of dear friends by state violence, and have witnessed crippling impoverished wages that sent my friends straight into the informal economy succeeded by time in county jails and state penitentiaries.

I lived a majority of my life living through the repercussions of failed (or successful, depending on where you stand politically) domestic and international policy. From government assistance, to underfunded schools, to food deserts, to law and order policies, to incarceration, to deportation, to death, I have seen how the U.S. lays waste to my community and communities of color at large. I knew the condition of my community very rarely resulted in happy endings and I was upset there wasn’t anything done about it, or anything that I knew of. At the time I was growing up, I found no relevance and made to connections to the issues Dr. King looked to address — racial and economic injustice, and U.S. imperialism, all things that informed the lived realities of my families’ lives.

I remember one summer evening, I was driving home from my first semester of college and I heard Assata Shakur’s “Letter to My People,” come on the radio. A particular part of the letter caught my attention. It was when she read, “It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa”(Shakur, 1978). I thought to myself, who is Assata Shakur and why did she mention Cambodia? This lead me to an unforeseeable reality. Black folks have been fighting and leading the way for the freedom of all oppressed people AND Southeast Asian refugees LONG before we became refugees in the United States. I’ve come to find, almost ALL of our renown civil rights and Black Power heroes have spoken out against war and violence in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. ALL of the renown civil rights and Black Power heroes have been fighting for our freedoms well before most of us were alive. This includes Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Rosa Parks, Fred Hampton, James Baldwin, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and the man that inspired this piece today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This was profound moment for me in my process of politicization. I became curious. I wondered why were people, like Dr. King, who didn’t know who Southeast Asian people were, so committed to speaking out on the violence against them? In search for answers I stumbled upon Thich Nhat Hanh letter to Dr. King. In it he writes about the atrocities occurring in Vietnam as a result of war. He shares,

Now in the confrontation of the big powers occurring in our country, hundreds and perhaps thousands of Vietnamese peasants and children lose their lives every day, and our land is unmercifully and tragically torn by a war which is already twenty years old. I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself can not remain silent (Hanh, 1965).

I was astounded to see the notoriety of the Civil Rights Movement reaching all the way to Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh drew the connection between the international struggle of freedom the struggle in the U.S. for civil rights. He drew the connection between their roles in the struggle for human rights. This was the reason Black leaders of the 1960’s were bringing up Southeast Asia in their work and it gave me a reason to have a personal connection to the Black leaders we celebrate today. This revelation cemented the idea that the liberation of Black folks (in the 60’s and now) are directly tied to the liberation of my community.

In Dr. King’s sermon titled, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence” he responds to Hanh’s letter with prophetic tradition:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent (King, 1967).

These words spoke powerful truth to me. It gave me purpose. To understand that the violent oppressive forces that effect us at home effect people abroad became a revelation to me. Today, I believe, especially in the era of 45, especially on this MLK day, these words can not be more true. That in the face of economic and racial injustice, that in the face of U.S. imperialism and global militarization, that we must speak up and speak out,show up and show out.

Now, to my Southeast Asian family and community everywhere. Today, is particularly special. It is to commemorate the time when people sought to fight for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist reality. It is a day of reflection of our histories and how they have intersected with that of the largest civil rights movement that changed the landscape of the world. It is time to place ourselves in the histories of the United States. It is a time to think about our place in the current movement and the current struggle. It is a time to radicalize our ideas and responsibilities to justice and freedom for all oppressed people as those who fought for a freedoms before us did.

And for me, when I think about my place on this MLK day, I think about my family, my community, I think about folks behind bars, folks deported to Cambodia and Vietnam after resettling their whole lives here. I think about justice and freedom, and more importantly, I think about what justice and freedom means for them, those who have never seen an end to the state violence, the same state violence Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought for in his day.