The Depth of our Losses, Recent & Historical

#StopAsianHate #Asians4BlackLives #WeKeepUsSafe

(Note: following this essay is a list of resources, including books about Situating Asians in America, available at The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org*)

A year ago, my co-host Tamara penned a letter to our listeners on behalf of The Lift Up in response to the continued murders of Black Americans for whom we still are seeking justice today — Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, among the “long list of names of dead Black Americans who were only trying to live their lives or denied legal due process.”

So now, it is surreal to find ourselves in shock about the spike in anti-Asian violence (many against the elderly) and in grief for the lost lives of Christian Hall, Vicha Ratanapakdee, Angelo Quinto, Yong Zheng, Pak Ho, and most recently the eight victims of mass shootings at Asian massage parlors in Georgia, six of them women of Asian descent.

As someone who usually trades in words, I can’t seem to find them in this moment. After 24 hours of retweeting others’ more cogent collected thoughts on the matter, I’ve retreated and taken solace in the words of the poets Ocean Vuong and Jericho Brown. It is timely that The Lift Up had chosen Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Brown’s The Tradition for our National Poetry Month episode airing on April 7.

Both poets explore the concurring states of violence and beauty in their own unique experience of America and the individual’s relation to place, personal and collective histories, and to the moment. The Vietnam War figures prominently in Vuong’s personal life (his mother was a war baby, borne of a Vietnamese farm girl and a US soldier) as well as his poetry. For instance, in the poem “In Newport I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek to a Beached Dolphin’s Wet Back”:

For Brown, in poems like “Ganymede,” it is about how Black bodies continue to be subject to the whims of white power and violence, from enslavement to police violence:

In these poems, we’re reminded that American imperialism and racial violence are not new or aberrant, rather they are intrinsic to the founding of the United States on stolen Indigenous lands. I can’t begin to understand who I am as a Pilipin* in America without recognizing that.

If you’ve listened to our podcast, you’ve probably heard the story of my paternal grandfather Lolo Pilong, who migrated to California in the late 1920s as a US national under American colonial rule, and how key the semiautobiographical novel America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan and the poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes are to re-collecting my lolo’s story of being a brown man and unwanted in America, an experience he rarely spoke of when he returned permanently to the Philippines in 1938.

When people hear the term “white supremacy,” it likely conjures an image of a white extremist, from a hood-wearing klansman to a Viking-/MAGA-hat wearing insurrectionist or mass shooter. But in reality, white supremacy is a norm in this country, whether we subscribe to it consciously or unconsciously. Until we see and acknowledge that, we will keep failing to #StopAsianHate or to make #BlackLivesMatter to all Americans.

This image is from the beautiful #UnitedAgainstHate rally in NYC on Feb. 20, 2021. The BIPOC solidarity action was organized by activists, including Rohan Zhou-Lee who is Black and Asian. NBCAsianAmerica irresponsibly and reprehensibly reappropriated the image, erasing and undermining the work of Black activists and organizers; CHOSE a divisive headline as clickbait; and in the process contributed more harm and hurt to already wounded Black and Asian communities.

If your first instinct when hearing about violence against Asians is to focus specifically on Black or brown perpetrators while at the same time “excusing” the behavior of white ones as isolated acts of an extremist, a “lone wolf,” or someone with mental health issues (this goes for the media as well, see example to the left), ask yourself why that conscious/unconscious bias exists. For example, could your anti-blackness as a Pilipin* have something to do with what you’ve internalized from the educational system and social norms you inherited and continue to parrot from your white supremacist American colonizers?

If you are among those calling for an increased police, even militarized presence in your community or offering “bounties” to hunt down the violent offenders, consider how modern policing has historical roots in the 17th- and 18th-century slave patrols of the South and the Boston Watch of the North, which relied on violence to control Black American bodies. Consider how Blacks represent 12% of the adult population in the US but 33% of the prison population. And if you’re an Asian who buys into “model minority” or “good immigrant” myths, know that the carceral system destroys our communities too — 118,100 Asian Americans currently are in federal prisons.

The house of cards that white supremacy and capitalism is built on relies on our foundational complicity and blind faith (or cynicism) that there are no other options besides the frameworks laid out for us. So, we keep teaching the same mythologies with unequivocal heroes and villains, winners and losers. In extolling the values of liberty and justice, we learn only of white-led rebellions and revolutions, not the protracted struggles and the solidarity movements of the oppressed and colonized. And we continue to organize our societies according to arbitrary hierarchies and castes. Why do we hold out hope for a different outcome — e.g., equity and inclusion in our irrevocably diversifying society — when we haven’t evolved the blueprint to meet changing expectations of the future?

What we are witnessing — in the midst of extreme weather events and climate change, multiple crises wrought by the financial markets, the #MeToo Movement, the rise of macho fascism around the world, the immigration and refugee crisis, the global pandemic, the prison industrial complex, the Black/Black Trans Lives Matter Movement, the Anti-Asian campaigns — is the movement from margin to center. To quote a prescient then-Senator Barack Obama, more and more of us are being forced to recognize that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for; we are the change that we seek” … Because our institutions have no incentive to help or “save” us.

The work of unlearning white supremacy and internalized oppression (such as colonial mentality or “white love”) is something each of us must undertake before we can begin to visualize and actualize our way toward the future we all deserve. Here at The Lift Up, we are committed to sharing histories, stories of lived experiences, as well as fictions from marginalized voices and perspectives that interrogate constructs and systems designed by and for the dominant culture. Ours is but a modest contribution to our necessary collective unlearning.

In addition to the books and articles linked above, here are other resources we’ve collected to help you on your journey of unlearning/decolonization. Use them, share them, and since this isn’t a comprehensive list, feel free to add to the conversation and body of knowledge around the stories of Asians in America and of BIPOC solidarity:

Check out our book list Situating Asians in America on bookshop.org, which features histories, social science and psychology texts, personal essays, memoirs, fiction anthologies, novels, short story collections, and poems.

Other articles and informational resources (listed in reverse chronological order):

• The cruel plot twist in the Asian American story by Charles Yu
• Anti-Asian Violence in America Is Rooted in US Empire by Christine Ahn, Terry K Park, and Kathleen Richards
• The Atlanta Shooting and the Dehumanizing of Asian Women by Jiayang Fan
• Bipartisan political rhetoric about Asia leads to anti-Asian violence here by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong
• The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings by May Jeong
• The history of fetishizing Asian women Rachel Ramirez interviews Celine Parreñas Shimizu
• A History of Anti-Asian Racism Ayesha Rascoe interviews Jennifer Ho
• The identities of the women killed in Atlanta have begun to belie the suspect’s stated motive by Karissa Chen
• Racism is behind anti-Asian American violence, even when it’s not a hate crime by Pawan Dhingra
• A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking by R. O. Kwon
• The shooter blamed sex addiction, but experts have ‘no doubt’ the Atlanta killings were racially motivated by Irene Jiang and Haven Orecchio-Egresitz; scholars Grace Kao, Ellen Wu, and Nancy Wang Yuen interviewed
• Stop Asian Hate: Connie Wun on Atlanta Spa Killings, Gender Violence & Spike in Anti-Asian Attacks
• Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different Morgan Ome interviews Cathy Park Hong
• Anti-Asian Violence Must Be a Bigger Part of America’s Racial Discourse Alexander Chee interviews Cathy Park Hong
• Racism, sexism must be considered in Atlanta case involving killing of six Asian women, experts say by Kimmy Yam
• The history of tensions — and solidarity — between Black and Asian American communities, explained: How white supremacy tried to divide Black and Asian Americans — and how communities worked to find common ground. By Jerusalem Demsas and Rachel Ramirez
• To Be an Asian Woman in America by Jennifer Ho
• How Asian women are relentlessly objectified in American culture by May-lee Chai
• Why Violence Goes Viral: A Thread in Six Parts by Brian Lin
• Crime, race, safety: what’s really happening in Oakland Chinatown? by Momo Chang and Darwin BondGraham
• Anti-Asian Racism Never Stopped Being an Outgrowth of U.S. Imperialism by Danny Haiphong
• Police Violence, Race-Based Trauma, and Mental Health among Filipina/x/o Americans by E.J.R. David and Kevin L. Nadal
• What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America by Anne Anlin Cheng
• Dear Non-Black Filipinx Fam: We Need to Stop Saying the N-Word by Melissa Pandika
• I want justice for anti-Asian violence — but not at the expense of Black people by Melissa Pandika
• Police Won’t End Anti-Asian Violence. Community Will. by Sam Lew
• The Post-Trump Future of Literature: What will writers do when the outrage is over? Will they go back to writing about flowers and moons? by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• The Stories We Tell, and Don’t Tell, About Asian-American Lives by Hua Hsu
• 20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now by Michelle Kim
• Letters For Black Lives: An Open Letter Project on Anti-Blackness
• https://anti-asianviolenceresources.carrd.co/
• https://hateisavirus.org/resources

Places to donate (where we have contributed) and/or volunteer:

• Volunteer with the Oakland Chinatown Coalition’s safety team
• AAPIWomenLead
• Across Frontlines
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus
• The Asian American Federation
• The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
• Asian Health Services
• Asian Pacific Environmental Network
• Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council
• Asian Prisoner Support Committee
• Bay Rising Action
• Center for Anti-Violence Education
• Chinese Progressive Association
• Damayan Migrant Workers
• East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE)
• East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation
• I Am Womankind
• Japanese American Association of New York
• Japanese American Social Services, Inc.
• The Korean American Family Service Center
• National Alliance for Filipino Concerns
• National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum
• The New Breath Foundation
• Oakland Rising
• OCA — Asian Pacific American Advocates
• Red Canary Song
• San Francisco Rising