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Notes on Asian & Black Solidarity, May 2021

May 29, 2021

Note: I started writing this before the March 16 Atlanta shootings. Like many, many Americans, I am outraged and saddened by the events in Atlanta, and the overwhelming response to those events has informed some of what is captured here. This post also attempts to collect observations about other events from 2020 and early 2021. I’ll try to make distinctions between pre- and post-Atlanta observations clear where relevant.

Since the start of the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans have increased dramatically, fueled by Trump’s racist rhetoric : “Kung Flu”, “Chinese Virus,” etc. and sustained by online platforms that allow racist memes and content to proliferate. Videos of acts of violence against Asian Americans have circulated on the internet, occasionally appearing to (or sometimes just presumed to) depict Black perpetrators — with a predictably racist response. Racism against Asian Americans is not new in America; the racist scapegoating of Black Americans is even older. What does feel new to me is the volume and magnitude of cries for Asian & Black solidarity. Some of the ensuing conversations on the topic have felt awkward, tentative, or off-base, but the momentum I see from Asian Americans around resisting the model minority myth and fighting white supremacy together with other groups — particularly Black Americans — makes me feel hopeful. In this moment where so many conversations feel new or renewed, it still seems useful to try to state some basic facts and observations out loud. This post attempts to help in that process by sharing some of the larger themes I’ve been seeing and hearing lately. I hope that we are able to continue to build a broadly shared set of principles and base assumptions as a foundation for future solidarity & racial justice work.

About me

We all bring our own identities with us when we engage with these issues, so I’ll just tell you what kind of Asian I am up front. I’m a queer woman originally from the Los Angeles area. My mom is of Western European white and Central American descent. She looks white. My dad is Japanese American — sansei, or third generation. My dad was born in “camp” during WWII, which is Japanese American shorthand for saying that he spent his earliest years in a desert prison facility because of racism. I generally read as Asian and get questions like, “no, but where are you REALLY from,” with some regularity — although particularly in parts of Hawaii and L.A. where multi-racial East Asian Americans are common, people often guess my background more precisely. As in most communities of color, my lighter, more caucasian appearance is generally a source of privilege (except at the rare family gathering when someone gets drunk enough to tell me that “you don’t even LOOK Asian,” where it’s just annoying). I also have a masculine-of-center appearance, and I am sometimes mistaken for a cis or trans man or presumed to be nonbinary instead of a dyke-y* woman who happens to love practical clothing. A masculine appearance is often also a source of privilege, although some of that is offset by how uncomfortable my whole queer vibe makes some people. I live in Oakland, California and work in the tech sector in a management role.

Sources

I was first introduced to the idea of Asian & Black solidarity after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests & police response in Ferguson. As for many others, the events of 2014 were radicalizing for me and launched me on a racial justice learning path. The organization 18 Million Rising, part of the Allied Media network, was helpful in my initial education on the topic of Black and Asian solidarity and has been a valuable resource ever since. For this post, many of my observations started on Twitter. I log in daily and follow a mix of tech people, activists & organizers, journalists, academics, queer folks from many walks of life, writers, architecture/design/planning people, and politicians. I try to intentionally maintain a diverse feed along many axes. While Twitter is often the start of my journey on a particular topic, it’s usually not the end of it — when I see something interesting, I’m likely to click through and read the source, listen to the podcast, etc. Often clicking through in this context meant reading or viewing mainstream news sources and then following the thread further toward more niche or local analysis.

Some of my observations also come from interactions with groups or organizations. I am part of a few informal racial justice discussion groups or working groups that meet on a regular basis. I semi-regularly show up to events run by larger organizations working on racial justice issues, including SURJ, some tech-focused organizations, a local mutual aid group, and a few groups focused on organizing Asian Americans. I am a member of a church that is interested in social & racial justice and leads members in related discussion and activist work. Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco have their share of marches, rallies, and protests, and it’s common for me to show up at those too when they seem unlikely to provoke a direct response from the police.

Observations

Across all of these media and modes of interaction, here are some themes I’ve noticed.

  • Black women show up for everyone — and a lot of Black people are already here showing up in solidarity with Asian Americans. I’ve often heard it said that Black people, and Black women in particular, are the first to show up to support the rights of others and the last to leave. I had heard this, I knew this (especially after all of the 2020 election rhetoric about Black women saving America), but holy heck, the disproportionate magnitude of this truth still caught me off guard. I first found out about the Atlanta shootings not because of the major news outlets, but because multiple Black women I follow on Twitter immediately posted something that somehow captured the exact right mix of anger toward the perpetrator with compassion for the victims and critique of the culture that would allow this to happen. In the days after the Atlanta shootings, the vast majority of the Black people I know in real life or follow on social media took the time to say something in support of Asian Americans. Famous people like Roxane Gay and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and also folks you wouldn’t know by name — college friends, coworkers, the pastor at my church. Many had already been vocal about the rise in anti-Asian violence in 2020 and early 2021. Other people of color were also relatively likely to speak up. While some white friends and acquaintances have spoken up, the majority of white people I know or follow on social media have been comparatively silent on the issue.

  • Coverage of the Atlanta shooting went beyond coverage of similar tragedies involving other non-white racial & ethnic groups. I was saddened and outraged by what happened in Atlanta, but I was also genuinely surprised to see anti-Asian violence in the news cycle for multiple days after. (As the headline of this recent Time article so plainly put it, as Asian Americans, “We Are Always Waiting Our Turn to Be Important.”) Friends in a racial justice discussion group pointed out that the sustained mainstream media coverage is likely one more ugly manifestation of the “model minority” idea. As the “model minority,” Asian Americans are somehow more sympathetic as victims of violence and portrayed as more innocent. Media coverage highlighted victims’ dedication to family and strong work ethic, classic model minority tropes rarely covered by the mainstream media when a victim of violence is Black, Latinx, or Indigenous. It is painful to compare the relatively abundant coverage to what felt like shorter, less sympathetic media coverage of the 2019 El Paso shootings, the comparatively limited individual coverage of many instances of police violence against Black Americans, or the ongoing epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls that receives almost no media attention (search for #mmiw on one of the major social media sites and see if you’ve heard any of those names on the evening news).

  • Some of the credit for that increased media coverage goes to Black people outside of media. I think part of why the Atlanta shooting received sustained media coverage was because Black activists, politicians, writers, and others took the story seriously right away. I did see many white journalists, politicians, and Twitter personalities discuss the story, but momentum lagged a day or two behind, and the angles covered were often ones I’d already seen Black folks or other PoC bring up. This dynamic isn’t unique to this situation, but this was a particularly clear case.

  • The Indianapolis FedEx shooting also didn’t get as much coverage — and colorism probably played a part in that. Four of the eight people that died in the April 16th Indianapolis shootings were Sikhs. The FedEx facility targeted was known to have a high percentage of Sikh workers, leading many to suspect racial motivations for the choice of target. However, this shooting didn’t receive the same length or depth of media coverage as the Atlanta shooting. While it’s impossible to know exactly how the coverage might have been different had the four Sikh victims been of East Asian origin, there are always disparities between how or whether South Asians and darker-skinned Asians are treated or considered vs. East Asians and lighter-skinned folks — and sometimes fewer of the “positive” model minority stereotypes are extended to South Asians and other brown or darker-skinned Asians.

  • Just as stereotypes of Black Americans prevent many from seeing the full variety of Black experiences, stereotypes of Asians can do the same. While news coverage of many Asian victims has been quite sympathetic, it has also often stuck to crude stereotypes and seems narrowly focused on East Asians or occasionally Southeast Asians. Coverage of victimized Asian American elders often frames them as stereotypically docile, frail, law-abiding, and hapless. Coverage of the Atlanta shootings often jumped to the assumption that the victims were sex workers or sex trafficking victims. Media coverage of interracial violence also rarely acknowledges that there are Asian gangs in many major American cities — and that some percentage of interracial violence is gang violence. The truth is, there is a huge range of Asian American experiences out there: for example, while a few Asian sub-groups have average incomes above whites, many Asian sub-groups have high rates of poverty. And in all of the media coverage over the past year, we seem to have mostly forgotten that South Asians are also Asian, and that we went through a similar and equally nonsensical racist surge of xenophobic violence in the early 2000s. Additionally, despite how often Pacific Islanders are included in the acronyms and hashtags (e.g. #StopAAPIHate), there’s been little discussion of the particular mix of imperialist and colonialist oppression that Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders deal with, sometimes from multiple sides of the Pacific.

  • The mainstream media loves to highlight division between Black & Asian American communities. This is so true that even stories about interracial solidarity often run under headlines about interracial tensions. Racism and racist policies have often pushed Black & Asian communities in urban areas close together and forced them into no-win situations — and there are some contemporary and historical stories about resulting racial tensions. One of the most complex and infamous examples is the horrific killing of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager shot by a Korean American store owner after she was wrongly suspected of shoplifting, and the subsequent unrest and violence in Koreatown during the L.A. uprising. Mainstream media accounts of the L.A. uprising and other interracial conflicts often foreground racial “tensions” but utterly fail to dig into the systemic causes. At this point, most of the activists and organizers I follow who care about these issues are used to hearing about this theme, and they are quick to point out that most of these “tensions” can easily be traced back to white supremacy. Some media coverage has looked for evidence of racial tensions as a motivation behind AAPI hate crimes, but the data shows this is not the case.

  • There are still blatant examples of anti-Blackness in many Asian American communities. This is sadly true in nearly all American communities, and Asians are no exception. I also believe that anti-Asian racism is present in most American communities, although I cannot speak to the reality within Black communities specifically. White supremacy has many facets and many manifestations.

  • The media loves to highlight (white) hero stories. Just as the mainstream media is unlikely to dig into the systemic causes of interracial tension, they’re also unlikely to talk about systems-oriented solutions — but hero stories about individuals selflessly helping out Asian American hate victims can still make it above the fold in the e-newsletter. And so many hero stories fall into subtly racist narratives. Consider the volunteer groups popping up to help walk with or watch over Asian Americans, and how it might play into racial stereotypes of Asians as meek or docile — can you imagine a service that was about walking with Black folks on their errands to protect them gaining similar media popularity?

  • The media seems relatively less interested in hearing Asian Americans talk about racial justice — our own or anyone else’s. Another one on the topic of “stereotypes and biases often inform who gets media coverage:” there is a stereotype that Asian Americans aren’t activists or organizers, or aren’t interested in politics. Sometimes it feels like there is also an informal media prioritization of what ethnicity we want to hear from on racial justice, and Asians are at the very bottom of the list. This is unfortunate; we could use more Asian folks speaking out against all kinds of racism and inequality including anti-Blackness, and the lack of media (and social media) traction makes it harder to build this momentum.

  • Some of these interracial conversations about Black and Asian solidarity are still hella awkward. While there are some well-known figures (Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, Kimberlé Crenshaw, etc.) who have been working in solidarity with Black & Asian folks for decades, these conversations haven’t often been part of mainstream Asian American life. In early 2021, I attended three interracial events about Black & Asian solidarity, and I was struck by how fresh, new, and awkward some of these conversations felt. Many people who are interested in this subject right now haven’t yet come to a clear set of shared facts, and sometimes these conversations got mired in retreading well-established racial justice 101 or 201 territory. While the events left me feeling hopeful, it’s clear that some of these conversations are early and there’s a lot we’re still trying to figure out together.

  • We’re sometimes talking about issues in different tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Part of the awkwardness of some of these conversations is the juxtaposition of different types and severities of issues. So much Black activism right now can sadly be boiled down to “stop killing us.” While suddenly the physical safety of many Asian Americans feels more precarious than it has in decades, we can’t let that overshadow the persistence and severity of threats to Black physical safety and civil rights for centuries. While we don’t want to get mired in “Oppression Olympics” competitions, we have to recognize differences of magnitude and severity of the issues we’re discussing, or conversations can easily go off the rails.

  • Mainstream media coverage of mixed-race people is often awkward — and many still haven’t quite grasped that some Asian Americans are also Black. As Soledad O’Brien put it , “News orgs struggle so mightily to deal with multi-ethnic multi-racial people. It’s so utterly embarrassing. All the time.” (This in response to a particularly not-nuanced Washington Post headline about how Kamala Harris was “raised to identify as Black.”) I ache at the awkwardness of most news coverage that reckons with the backgrounds and lived experience of Black and Asian folks like Naomi Osaka and Kamala Harris — and see almost no coverage of non-celebrity mixed-race or multi-ethnic people, despite the fact that we are a growing demographic group.

  • Trauma. There is slowly growing mainstream awareness that so many Black Americans experience intergenerational trauma and race(ism)-related trauma in the United States. There still isn’t a lot of mainstream awareness of Asian American trauma, despite relatively well-known U.S. chapters of history behind some of that trauma. Consider how many (still living!) Asian Americans came to America as refugees from war-torn places, how many millions of Asians were killed due to U.S. government actions overseas during the Cold War era, or how many Asians faced racist trauma once they got here (e.g. WWII camps). Many Asian American communities have tried to move past these events by discussing them (and anti-Asian racism) as little as possible and focusing on the future, which makes it even more challenging to reckon with the impact of this trauma on the affected groups and their descendants.

  • The model minority myth is still alive and well, and it’s still a harmful, racist trope created to blame Black Americans and other people of color for their own victimization by white supremacy. While the trope has benefited Asian Americans in some ways, it victimizes and limits them in others — and it’s long past due to be retired. In my own corner of the Asian American community, I have seen many mainstream Japanese American organizations start to actively speaking out against the model minority myth and in favor of racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter. I’m also pleased to see other Asian American organizations doing similar work.

  • We have to collect our people. Just as in any racial or ethnic group, there are plenty of Asian Americans who say uninformed, divisive, asinine things about race & racism and need to go read a book.

  • This is neither here nor there, but bless the many Black women on the internet whose racial justice praxis involves acknowledging that Asian men can also be attractive. Look, I’m not going to foreground this issue when we’ve all got so many other problems to deal with, but I did notice repeatedly while trying to write this never-ending post — this is a thing! It is so rare for mainstream white culture to acknowledge that Asian men can also be attractive, but I happen to follow A LOT of Black women on Twitter who will do this. Thank you for your service.

Calls to action

As I collected my thoughts for this post, I came away with some clear calls to action for myself and other Asian Americans who are interested in advancing racial justice:

  • When we hear insinuations that Black people are the perpetrators of anti-Asian violence, we have to set the record straight. There is no truth to the suggestion that a disproportionate number of Anti-Asian hate crimes have been committed by Black people; “in fact, Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor of xenophobic views of COVID-19, and the effect of Christian nationalism is greater among white respondents.” (Brookings).

  • We can take note of what kind of support on AAPI issues has felt good over the past year, and try to give that back in kind to Black people. I appreciated and was genuinely moved by so much of what friends and colleagues said or posted in response to the Atlanta shootings, and I will use that experience to improve how I support other people — especially Black folks — the next time another racist tragedy hits the news. While I don’t expect or want anyone to speak up in response to every situation on the news, it was genuinely reassuring to hear support for Asian Americans from people who hadn’t spoken up about it before or recently. I also appreciated when people close to me acknowledged that the situation might affect me and that it was ok to proceed as though everything was not 100% normal. Finally, despite a few calls here and there on social media to “check up on your Asian friends,” I appreciated that nobody I’m rarely in touch with randomly reached out to “check up on me” — that was the right choice.

  • Non-Black organizations — especially predominantly-white media organizations — shouldn’t try to tell Black folks how to engage in this work. I sometimes see white folks and predominantly-white organizations (like this NBC news tweet), attempting to tell Black people how to be better allies to Asian Americans. Try this and prepare to be correctly roasted. A great lane for white organizations is doing the work with white people & white institutions, dismantling white supremacy — instead of picking sides or explaining racial solidarity to people of color. And many Black communities already have a lot of relevant experience showing up in solidarity with other racial & ethnic groups. They don’t need tips from NBC news.

  • We have to resist the idea that additional policing is the answer. As hate crimes against Asians increase, some reflexively reach for more policing — or more laws that will be used to justify increased police budgets. But as 18 Million Rising reminds me, “more policing is not the answer — it’s what got us here.” If we learned anything from the L.A. uprising, it’s that the police aren’t going to show up for us either when things get bad. We need to look to our communities and to policymakers for other solutions.

  • Anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness don’t manifest the same way — and our rhetoric and actions must recognize that persistent threats to Black lives may be orders of magnitude more dangerous than what many Asian folks face. There’s a beautiful plaza in front of Oakland’s city hall. It was renovated in 1998 and inaugurated as Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, in honor of the civil rights activist and first Japanese American to serve on the Oakland city council. There aren’t that many monuments or places named after Japanese Americans, and I always felt proud when I’d hear people say its name. The plaza is a common destination for protests, demonstrations, and other gatherings, and during the Occupy era, it was the gathering place for Occupy Oakland protestors who dubbed it “Oscar Grant Plaza,” after the 22 year-old Black man who was shot in the back by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland after he had already been forced to the ground and pinned down by another officer. Every time I hear the plaza referred to as “Oscar Grant Plaza,” there is a small part of me that laments the erasure of an Asian American civil rights advocate and politician — why couldn’t we have taken one of the many places named after a forgettable dead white man and renamed that after Oscar Grant? But what do I do about this feeling? I keep my damn mouth shut, because it turns out East Asian American representation in monument and plaza naming is not an issue that deserves equal airtime with the notion that police shouldn’t shoot Black people with impunity. Conversations that fail to recognize these differences in magnitude and severity of the issues are doomed to be unsatisfying and unproductive all around.

  • We have to remind ourselves and others that Asians aren’t a monolith. Some Asians have above-average wealth & high incomes, but many others live in poverty. Some of us are immigrants, some of us have been here for five generations. And we live at many intersections — LGBTQ+, disabled, undocumented, working class or poor, etc. We should reject the many narratives that focus only on the most privileged groups of Asian Americans and ignore the rest.

  • We have to remind ourselves and others that Black communities are also not a monolithic group. People sometimes say “the Black community” as though this is a single group in American, but the Black community is also not just one thing. There are Black people who are descendants of 17th century American slaves, Black people who immigrated from West Africa or East Africa in this generation, Black people from the Caribbean and from Latin America, Black people who are also Asian, and more. Black people also live their lives at many intersections (and don’t forget that a Black woman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the concept of intersectionality).

  • We have to resist the model minority myth at every turn. The model minority myth harms Black folks and other PoC by allowing white supremacists to frame structural racism as something you can get over, if you only work hard, quiet down, and behave. We shouldn’t buy into this because it’s harmful to other people of color and blames them for their own systemic oppression — but it also harms us as Asians, forcing us to fit into a narrow and constraining stereotype that can never fully contain us. We have to reject the model minority myth wholesale — even some of the supposedly “positive” stereotypes and benefits it confers — in favor of living our full, complicated realities in solidarity with other PoC.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to the organizers of the many events on Black & Asian solidarity and racial justice listed below (including many who weren’t identified publicly and can’t be named here), as well as the many, many people who wrote, blogged, tweeted or emailed about these topics over the last year (not all of whom I managed to cite below). I also owe a huge thank you to Jennifer Tu, Sara, and two anonymous readers who provided feedback on earlier versions of this post.

Inputs

This is a partial list of some of the reading, listening, watching, and conversation that informed this post, but didn’t end up linked above. Inclusion on this list does not imply endorsement. There are some true gems and some hot nonsense intermingled below.

* If you are wondering, “You used that word to describe yourself, do I also get to use it to describe you?,” the answer is, “probably not.”