Dear Brown People: Being Black, Brown & Mixed in the Fight for Black Lives

Over the last few harrowing weeks, my newsfeed, chat threads, and inboxes have been inundated with articles and think pieces, book lists, toolkits, and TED talks that while salient and validating, are really directed at and intended for white people.

For once again, even when the rallying cry across the country and the world is ‘Black Lives Matter’, whiteness somehow still ends up nudging its way to center.

It is so pervasive; I myself became a ready enabler. In writing an op-ed in my local media, try as I might, I couldn’t help but write to an imagined white audience, clumsily tacking on my love note to black and brown folk at the very end. And I saw dozens of other black writers across the blogosphere and the Twitterverse doing the same: Dear white people stop killing us, dear white people get your entire life together, dear white people this is on you, dear white people don’t talk to me, dear white people I’m tired, dear white people let’s work together, dear white people here’s what you can do, dear white people here’s what NOT to do, dear white people, dear white people, dear white people.

I am tired of talking to dear white people.

I have other conversations I’ve been struggling to have for years (possibly my whole life), critical spaces I’ve been hungering to hold — essential spaces that are unapologetically black, brown, mixed, and intersectional af. Spaces of self- and community-care for us to have our cups refilled and to be reminded of our magical beauty and worth, spaces for us to learn about the long histories of solidarity and deep national and transnational connections between our struggles for justice and survival.

But also spaces to interrogate and confront the role white supremacy has played in shaping our own lives and subjectivities, the ways in which it has become internalized through self-hate, colorism, classism, respectability politics — and the ways in which racial bribes have been doled out to make people of color complicit in anti-black racism and violence. Oh, and Blacks for Trump 2020. Let’s talk about that.

Comedian Hasan Minhaj spoke powerfully about the need for South Asian communities to speak up after the murder of George Floyd. In his twelve minute monologue, he eloquently reminded us how the Civil Rights Movement and black struggle paved the way for the immigration reforms that allowed a new wave of immigrants from around the world (including my parents) to come to the U.S. Back in 2016, at the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement, young Asian Americans penned a passionate letter to their parents. As a New Yorker and the daughter of immigrants, my earliest memories of police violence against black bodies include Amadou Diallo. Days after George Floyd’s death, African writers wrote an open letter of solidarity to Black America. Native communities in Minnesota and across the country are standing and kneeling side by side with the black community for Black Lives. Protests around the country and the world are powerfully multiracial. The organization Resource Generation has been organizing a multiracial community of young adults with class privilege in the fight for social justice. We need more of this and we need more spaces for BIPOC to be in community with each other not only on the front lines and in the streets, especially in predominantly white communities and institutions. Though, I would argue, that even our most diverse and densely populated cities are severely segregated. (And no, segregation, did not end in the 1960s, it just un-hooded).

As a diversity professional, I am keenly aware that often our work is couched in “white speak”. It imagines a white person who needs to learn about diversity, inclusion, equity, microaggressions, implicit bias, stereotype threat, white privilege, white fragility, white supremacy etc. etc. It becomes so natural to us, particularly in the white-washed anemic brand of corporate diversity that we need reminding that there are others who need space, need tools, and are in need of a different conversation altogether.

Last summer, I presented to a roomful of black and brown undergraduate research students and medical students on microaggressions. It was a boiler plate presentation my colleague and I had originally put together to talk to a group of primarily white students. As we wrapped up and opened the floor for questions, hands shot up. What my colleague and I learned that day was that these black and brown students felt triggered and re-traumatized by yet another workshop that reminded them that they were in a system that considered them less than. They would have to return to campuses and lab spaces where microaggressions were a daily, consistent occurrence, and we had failed to give them any tools to survive and thrive. What they wanted from us, the two women of color diversity professionals, was empowerment, ways to stand in solidarity, ways to organize and most importantly, ways to heal and be whole in the midst of all that. Over the last year, I have reflected a great deal on that day in that lecture hall fielding those critical questions and the wider repercussions of our propensity for “white speak” when talking about racial justice and the ways in which it silences and reduces other vital (and frankly, more interesting) dialogue and action.

Now, please don’t get me wrong: it is essential that white people talk about racial justice and start doing the messy work required immediately. This is urgent work. It is crucial to dismantling the U.S. racial caste system whose intimate and casual violence has brought this country to a near breaking point in the last few weeks. Yet more and more, I am unsure if that work is the true extent of the work and if it is my work to do or to be such a central part of. I am much more invested in the work that needs doing in our BIPOC communities.

And what work might that be, you ask?

Well, just like white people, people of color are not an undifferentiated mass, a homogenous monolith. Within communities of color, there is a rich diversity not only of race, culture, and ethnicity, but of political ideologies, life experiences, transnational histories and struggles, socio-economic class, faith, gender identity and expression, ability, sexuality, etc. And lest we forget, while Derek Chauvin held his knee on the neck of George Floyd for those deadly 8 minutes and 46 seconds, a Hmong-American officer named Tuo Thao stood by facing the store — owned by an Arab-American — where Floyd had allegedly used a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. This. Is. America. And it is entirely more vast and complex.

There is an elaborate web of connection here. Lest we forget that Native people are killed by police at higher rates than any other racial group in the United States — a fact that goes largely unseen because of the complexity of Native racial identity and a horrific history of genocide that began with the founding of this nation. Lest we forget that racism is a public health crisis, which the COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp relief. Lest we forget that the policing of Latinx and Chicanx communities as well as other immigrant communities has its roots in the policing of black bodies. Lest we forget the children and families at the border. Lest we forget transnational ties and struggles that have echoed and are echoing again around the world for Black Lives Matter and against state-sanctioned violence. Lest we forget that Black Trans Lives Matter and we need to say their names too.

As the black mother of a toddler who carries African, South Asian, Japanese, white, and Afro-Latinx roots, I’ve struggled to find resources that help me talk to her about race and racism or to talk to my mixed Asian-American husband about what is going on around us. It is either assumed that people of color already “get it” or great pains are taken not to air out the intimate dirty laundry of interethnic and intra-racial racism, racial bribes, and betrayal within black and brown communities. I want to talk about solidarity and I want to talk about how that solidarity is threatened daily by white supremacy.

I don’t often talk about my identity outside of being a black woman in America — an identity of dazzling abundance and profound meaning. An identity that these days is more than enough for my heart to hold and to tend to. It is, at once, the softest and the most resilient part of me. Yet, this moment, this flash of fire blazing in the very soul of this nation is calling us all out by name. And, I carry many.

In 1986, I was born in the Dominican Republic, a place rife with racial politics and conflict and a long history of conquest and colonialism. I was born to two parents of different races — my father, a young black medical student from Cameroon and my biological mother, a young South Asian woman from southern Africa who had moved to the U.S. and then met my father while they were both in medical school in Santo Domingo. She left me and my father when I was only a few weeks old. I did not learn about my origin story until I was already an adult. I was raised in New York City by my father and by my “adoptive” mother, an Afro-Costa Rican woman who was working as a young physician in a NY hospital when she met my father. As an Afro-Costa Rican woman, she could trace her ancestry to black Caribbean laborers and railroad workers who had come to Costa Rica from Jamaica and other islands as part of the United Fruit Company. I was raised by two black immigrant parents. My blackness was always a constant and blackness in this world, writ large, has always contained multitudes.

Even today, I still struggle with the realization that my South Asian mother gave me, her black child, up. So much of the multiracial narrative focuses on black and white. But how do we make sense of racism and discrimination within communities of color? What does it mean to be black and multiracial in the fight for black lives? Plainly put, I don’t often get to talk about my identity outside of being a black woman in America because of white supremacy. White supremacy manages to silence our conversations and confuses the tongue. It erases histories of interracial conflict, struggle, and solidarity, and it flattens rich diversity into discreet formulaic check boxes.

This moment is calling us all to something. And that call looks different for people of color. It is calling us to name horrifying truths and it is calling us to a radical healing that must start at home. And my home and my community is full of BIPOC folk who I hope can come together in healing and in power and I remain committed to making that so.

In our living room, there is a large framed print of Japanese- American civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama created by the Dream Defenders & 18 Million Rising as part of Blacked Out History Month in 2014. The iconic image of a young Yuri Kochiyama speaking into a megaphone is placed against a backdrop of Malcolm X buttons (Yuri held Malcolm X’s head in her lap as he lay dying, body riddled with bullets in a packed ballroom in 1965). Her shirt features a red, white, and blue scene of a march for Puerto Rican independence that she joined in 1977. Yuri’s allyship and activism is what I dream of, a symbol of the kind of intersectional beloved community I want to build and I want my children to be part of.