Sy Stokes, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow — National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID), University of MichiganPhoto credit: Dr. Charles H. F. Davis III
When I heard the news of Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white supremacist who killed eight people in Atlanta-area spas, six of whom were identified as Asian women, I thought of my grandmother. Shortly after the attacks, my parents called me to discuss what we needed to do to ensure her protection. It is a conversation I assume that many Asian American and multiracial families are having right now, one often clouded by a hopelessness that is too paralyzing to produce any viable answers. I was raised hearing stories from my father, a former Black student activist at Howard University during the 1960s, whose descriptions of the racist violence he witnessed over 50 years ago were eerily similar to what we are witnessing today. These conversations were not necessarily new to us, even in regard to anti-Asian violence. Though, there was a particular reason why the news of these incidents hit far too close to home.
My grandmother had already been a victim of one of these attacks before.
Over ten years ago, when my grandmother was walking home from Pacific East Mall, an Asian mall in Richmond, California, she was the victim of an attempted robbery. Standing at 4 foot 8 inches, she channeled all the strength in her small frame to beat the assailant with the side of her purse until he fled the scene. It was hauntingly similar to what happened in San Francisco a day after the Georgia attacks, when a 70-year-old Asian woman defended herself with a wooden plank from a 39-year-old white man who randomly attacked her on the street. However, just like many of our elders who have fled from war-torn countries to the U.S., she dismissed the incident as a mere hiccup in her daily routine and told us not to worry.
As much as we want to respect her own autonomy, we all knew that what is currently happening in America required us to limit that autonomy for the sake of her own safety. It cannot be understated that the attack on my grandmother outside of Pacific East Mall years ago, and the current attacks occurring in Oakland Chinatown and San Francisco Chinatown, are a violation of our sacred enclaves. In 1970, my grandmother immigrated to the United States with her husband and children, including my mother who was eleven years old. Like many East Asian immigrants arriving to the Bay Area, they planted roots in Oakland Chinatown, which was originally settled in the 1850s and is one of the oldest Chinatowns in the U.S. For many East Asian immigrants and Asian American families, Chinatowns have been critical to the social, cultural, and economic sustainability of our communities. This is why, despite being a reported site of anti-Asian violence this past year, my grandmother has been reluctant to discontinue her visits.
I have never been to Young’s Asian Massage — one of the sites where Asian women were targeted during the attacks in Georgia — but I assume it is also considered a sacred space where Asian women like my grandmother could seek refuge from the alienation they experience in the outside world. In view of the recent attacks, they have lost a sense of safety and security in places that were built for their safety and security. If she can no longer visit a place she once called home, what place is there left to go?
During the call, my mother asked me to write about the importance of Black and Asian solidarity in the midst of the anti-Asian attacks. We understood that protecting her, as a Black and Chinese family, was emblematic of something far more significant (I will return to this in a moment). However, before my parents called, I made the mistake of reading through a series of social media posts, and the accompanying comments, about the attacks in Georgia. I expected the usual — an array of white nationalists making xenophobic jokes behind a screen of anonymity. Though, what seemed to be even more apparent were the arguments against Black and Asian solidarity. As a result of some of the anti-Asian attacks involving Black perpetrators, anti-Black sentiments were being invoked left and right. Conversely, due to the history of conflicts between Black and Asian communities, the notion that Black people should promote solidarity at all was put in question. While both perspectives were understandable, the source of my frustration was knowing that both sides were not focusing on the actual source of the issue at hand.
White supremacy has historically served as the underlying catalyst of the racial tension between Black and Asian communities. It has been well documented that the model minority myth was a divide-and-conquer white supremacist political strategy to sew tension between Asian Americans (East Asians specifically) and Black people. The myth is predicated upon a monolithic and meritocratic ideology that positions the success of Asian Americans as an example of the “American Dream” — proof that hard work and strong family values can lift one out of poverty. The seemingly innocuous narrative was an attempt to denigrate the experiences of Black people by claiming we have no right to complain about systemic racism, despite the four centuries of history preceding the current moment.
It could be argued that the contemporary apex of Black and Asian racial tension was the L.A. Riots in 1992. The riots erupted after four LAPD officers were acquitted after violently assaulting Rodney King. However, adding fuel to the fire was an incident that occurred one month prior, when a Korean store owner, Soon Ja Du, fatally shot Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old African American girl, after accusing her of stealing. The context of the incident is equally important, as many businesses in low-income Black neighborhoods in L.A. were owned by Korean immigrants who were able to purchase them from white owners who refused to sell to Black people within the community.
Although racial tension between Black and Asian people may have been the most evident issue on the surface, the underlying catalyst was always white supremacy. The model minority myth was not initially condemned as a problem created by white supremacy to pit communities of color against one another. Instead, it was widely internalized as truth, driving the racial tension inward toward one another. In L.A., the attention was not directed toward the white store owners who refused to sell to Black people in South Central. The narrative was that Asian immigrants were acquiring property at the expense of Black community members. As a result, white supremacy slipped through the cracks, circumventing accountability and leaving behind a trail of destruction in the process. And now, after the mass shooting in Georgia, the same pattern of white supremacy has refashioned once more. If you simply skim the comment section on any social media platform, you will find misguided arguments that are grounded in the deleterious anti-Black and anti-Asian ideologies that I have just described.
Therefore, it would be naïve to deny that some Asian Americans have internalized anti-Black ideologies. There is nothing easier than to be anti-Black in America. Anti-Blackness is spoon-fed to every one of us since birth in the shows we watch, the books we read, the political propaganda we unconsciously consume, and the education we are taught. Anti-Blackness being treated as an ontological given is something that can only be disrupted through epistemological resistance.
There is no reason to resist an ideology when you are conditioned to believe it is common sense.
It would also be naïve to deny that some Black people have not internalized xenophobic ideologies about Asian Americans as well. Asian Americans have been stereotyped as palatable, assimilating, quiet, and powerless people, contributing to an overarching narrative that suppresses our personal and political agency and renders us invisible.
There is no reason to acknowledge our pain if you are conditioned to believe we do not exist.
However, the fact that the tension between Black and Asian communities is even a topic of discussion, when the mass murderer in Georgia is a white man, is a testament to the power of white supremacy — it can distract us from the source of the issue even when white supremacist violence manifests in its most malicious forms. As much as white supremacy is embedded within our systems of power and oppression, it is also a mechanism of hypnosis that renders us incapable of seeing beyond interpersonal antagonisms. But that is precisely why solidarity between Black and Asian communities is so extraordinary — that despite white supremacist ideologies being spoon-fed to us, we still refuse to eat.
We can look to Civil Rights Activists like Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, the symbolic matriarchs of Black and Asian solidarity, who were fierce advocates for the collective liberation of Black and Asian people. We can even look to the term, “Asian American,” which in 1968, was coined by graduate students at UC Berkeley who were inspired by Black Power Movement activists. We can look to the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition between the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the Black Student Union, and other racial and ethnic student groups at San Francisco State University, who successfully engaged in the longest student strike in U.S. history. And finally, one does not need to look further than last year, when Asian American organizers helped organize and mobilize protestors at Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country after the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the many other Black lives taken by law enforcement in the tumultuous year of 2020. These are only a few of the many examples that demonstrate how Black and Asian solidarity has always remained at the epicenter of political resistance to white supremacy.
When we witness tensions arise between Black and Asian communities — or any conflicts involving different communities of color against one another — we have to remember the true source of our frustration and anger. We must remember that one year ago, Trump labeled COVID-19 the “China Virus” during a press conference, going so far as to cross out the word “corona” and replace it with the word “Chinese” in his speech notes. We must remember how his xenophobic rhetoric is connected to the 150% increase in anti-Asian attacks throughout the past year. We must remember that despite Robert Aaron Long taking the lives of six Asian women, Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office refused to label it a hate crime simply because the assailant stated it was not racially motivated. Instead, they claimed his motivation was a “sex addiction” that he “wanted to eliminate” because he was “kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day.” We must remember how it was reported that this same officer was allegedly promoting shirts on his Facebook page last year that read, “COVID-19 imported virus from CHY-NA,” and saying, “Love my shirt…Get yours while they last.” We must remember how Asian women have been hyper-sexualized and deemed disposable, and the attacks in Georgia are a byproduct of a longstanding history of institutionalized patriarchy and xenophobia. We must remember that even though the Biden administration proposed a 100-day deportation moratorium, 33 Vietnamese refugees, many of whom have lived in the United States for decades, were just deported on March 15th, a day before the mass shooting in Georgia. Each of these examples are inextricably linked, and are driven by what bell hooks calls “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” So, why are people touting Black and Asian solidarity as a solution when it is a problem created and perpetuated by white men?
One might argue, even by reading the title alone, that this article perpetuates the narrative that white supremacist violence always ends up becoming a problem that Black people must fix. This is not what I am proposing to any extent. Instead, I am arguing that white people are guilty of either perpetrating or remaining complicit about white supremacist violence until proven innocent. Given this reality, we cannot depend on white people to fix a problem they created since they have never had to suffer from its material consequences. While we welcome white co-conspirators who can help in our efforts to combat white supremacy, unfortunately there is limited historical precedence to justify a dependence on this behavior on a mass scale.
However, there is evidence of Black and Asian solidarity — moments in history that have shaken the very core of our existence, permanently altering the political status quo toward our collective liberation. Moments when, despite the hypnotic subterfuge of white supremacy breathing down our necks, we shared a battleground rather than remain spellbound. Our collective resistance has always been the greatest threat to white supremacy. The current moment is no exception. I do not emphasize this point because there is some irreversible divide between Black and Asian people that must be reconciled, as such claims are more of a hyperbole than truth (although people on Twitter may disagree). Rather, I emphasize the importance of solidarity as an attempt to readjust our focus toward recognizing the fundamental issue at hand — that white supremacy has always been, and always will be, the enemy.
