Dear Asians... (including myself)

Prologue

Shortly after the murder of George Floyd on Monday, May 25, 2020, I saw a trickling of social media postings made by many of my Asian friends and acquaintances on social media regarding this incident. That trickling eventually turned into an outpour of stories, posts, and status updates on supporting the Black Lives Matter and Blackout Tuesday movement. In between the trickle and outpour, I became increasingly agitated. 

Only a few months earlier, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered at the hands of white cowards and Breonna Taylor was murdered by a justice system that never had considered her to possess a soul in the first place. And there were barely any stories, posts, and status updates. At the start of the trickle, I noticed how many of these public postings and comments called out the Asian police officer, attaching collective shame to his silence and accusing him of being complicit. Perhaps this was the beginning for many to take an active pursuit of anti-racist existence in our racially charged society. But I couldn’t help to also wonder whether we finally found a way to enter the conversation, too afraid to condemn the white murderer and instead confidently point out the complicitness of the man who mirrored us. And my frustration boiled, my heart ached, and my soul sat in discomfort, for my [Asian] brothers and sisters and my Black brothers and sisters.       

With the onset of protests and riots, I glanced at a glimmer of hope for the beginning of an awakening to a reality that has been with us since 1619. The looting and destruction of communities only crystallized for me the necessity of this awakening to what has become a normalized existence for many of us. If protest is a statement or action expressing disapproval of or objection to something, then that protest must not cease until the something which is being disapproved and objected has been given a reason to no longer be disapproved or objected, especially when that something is the way in which humanity has been constructed to oppress and deny full visibility of one another. 

From hence I reflect from my corner of the world…

The American nation has assumed an odd dichotomy of black and white, which some might argue is due to the establishment of the nation with European, white colonists and African slaves. But we know that strips the visibility of indigenous people, whose land we visited and stole. I start here to note that visibility is an issue of the matter. (And I can go on about the reasons African people were visible to white Europeans and the implications of that visibility to be the very essence of the system of oppression, otherwise known as slavery, which has infiltrated our [great] nation henceforth. But that is not the current topic at hand…)

My parents are immigrants, foreigners, aliens in America. They were adamant to settle in America, to leave everything behind to start a family here because this was the land of the free, the place where the American dream was afforded to hard workers, and milk and honey flowed throughout the land if you pursued it hard enough. You just had to work hard, at any cost. If your story is in any way similar to mine, you know how important, then, it was to achieve high marks in school, go to the right university, pursue the right profession, all to justify the sacrifices and hard work that our parents made and committed to in America. They took jobs that were significantly paid less or had no status compared to the degrees that were accumulated while in their mother country. They answered to supervisors and bosses who rarely spoke to them because their accent was too much to navigate. But if they flew under the radar, they sometimes could make strides in their employment spaces. And if possible, they could self-employ and begin a business or franchise, that they would then work tirelessly at, well past the average retirement age, perhaps because work was all they had come to know or because they felt the need to in order to ensure that we, their children and sole reason for their toll, could attend the best universities and land prestigious positions in the American fabric of life. The American Dream. 

But what are the requirements to achieve the American Dream?

I remember one time at the grocery store my mother stammered to point out that the white grocery clerk had overcharged her for the cabbage. The clerk barely paid her any notice; when I spoke up with my non-accented English, suddenly we materialized... 

My parents ultimately became successful academic instructors and franchise owners of after-school learning centers. They had over 500 students at a given time across the four centers they worked at six days a week, their way of making sure my sister and I could pursue the American Dream. It did not take age for me to understand that my parents, despite the amazing work they were doing, would get criticized for their imperfect English speaking skills, ignored at staff meetings, and at times, taken advantage by their White colleagues and supervisors, and completely disregarded when students were being poached by other centers from theirs. And yet my parents were awkwardly praised and recognized by the same people when students and parents would specifically call out my parents to applaud their methods. Suddenly, yet momentarily, their opinions were sought and their voices were invited to be heard. 

This selectivity to be seen by others only when convenient infiltrates our own way of existing. Perhaps we could be selective, ourselves, on when to be seen and when to go on existing in the shadows, untouched and unscathed. And conscious or not, our ability to be selective is our privilege, and our choice to be selective is our burden to bear in the system of oppression that permits those in constructed spaces of power to continue to legitimize this power; because ultimately, they continue to get to choose visibility. 

My privilege is to be invisible, in a world where my Black brothers and sisters have been assigned the role of hyper-visibility by oppressors. Do not conflate this with any notion of comparison along a spectrum of persons of color. But understand that this is a reality. And we must begin to unpack the complexity of our Asian/Asian-American (AA) privilege. It is in this space that I believe we come face to face with how that privilege perpetuates our own oppression and at the same time allows us to be selective in matters of contributing to what can be a more just society. A society that can move forward with an honest hope. 

What then?

• We stop tip toe-ing around the issue of racism in America, that of our own peril and that of our brothers and sisters. 

• We engage in dialogue with one another, perhaps beginning in Asian/AA spaces where we can be honest about our stories, the oppression that has been witnessed, experienced, and felt deep in the depths of our souls; where Asians/AAs are suddenly visible when there is a pandemic, yet where “yellowness” as the “Model Minority” can quickly fade into “whiteness” until slurs of “chinc,” “ching chong,” “eggrolls & wonton” remind us we are definitely not white. 

• We admit discomfort in [not] knowing where we fit in a society that has a narrative of condemning the existence of Black lives; and in our discomfort, lack of knowledge, or treading carefully so as never to assume to understand the repeated tortured and inhumane treatment of blackness, we have remained silent.

And...

• We listen. We see. We learn - the history, the stories, the facts.  

• We check our privilege by doing the work inside ourselves, daily, even if we are also in relation with Black brothers and sisters, be it personally, professionally, etc. The work we do in ourselves can not be overlooked or pushed to the side. 

• We act - in protests, re-posts, deciding how we use our money, engaging in hard conversations, creating, donating...   

• We rise up in our visibility, even if that costs our comfort on a variety of levels. 

• We find our voice, which has often been silenced but dare I say, exists loudly, and we use it to raise awareness of and provide a platform for our Black brothers’ and sisters’ voices.

• We teach and share, as a learner ourselves, in what anti-racism entails and what it must look like in the land of the free. And we continue to engage in this work, day in and day out. Understanding that racism does not take a day off. 

I believe that our [my] parents’ struggle in pursuit of the American Dream was as much about tangible opportunities as much as the opportunity to live in a manner where we are whole. To accept my wholeness is to break free of being told who I am, when and where. To have wholeness as a society is where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is true for all. And that can not be when Black Lives Matter, where matter is a minimum, is current

Epilogue

Since I began attempting to make sense of my thoughts in writing last week, I sit with a hope that we are listening, lamenting, and learning, repeat. I am reading, seeing, engaging in difficult dialogue, and hearing about our increased visibility as we stand for justice. I have hope that the trickle, made into an outpour, will rush like the roaring sea until liberty and justice is for all.

There are so many great resources, but sometimes we just need a starting point. Here’s one I really appreciate right now: https://medium.com/awaken-blog/20-allyship-actions-for-asians-to-show-up-for-the-black-community-right-now-464e5689cf3e

Please email me [wangmisun@gmail.com] if you have any to share. Much appreciated.