How Asian Americans Are Reckoning With Anti-Blackness In Their Families
In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Asian American activists and social justice organizations have made renewed calls for solidarity and allyship with Black communities.
A deeper and often more difficult step for Asian Americans has been acknowledging and frankly discussing the anti-Blackness engrained in their own communities. But some are trying to begin that work.
Anti-Black racism in Asian communities is tied to the “model minority” myth, which white political leaders, particularly in response to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, wielded in order to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other people of color. Many Asian immigrants internalized that mentality, operating under the false impression that being a “good” immigrant could help them assimilate into whiteness and align themselves with white people.
If we hope to end this violence — all of it — we must reckon with our complicity in this tangled web of white supremacy, and our responsibility to dismantle it.” Densho
At its absolute worst, this dynamic has resulted in high-profile incidents of violence. Following the Los Angeles police brutally beating Rodney King, Korean shop owner Soon Ja Du shot and killed Black teenager Latasha Harlins, the two catalysts for the 1992 LA riots.
One of the former Minneapolis police officers involved in Floyd’s death was a Hmong American named Tou Thao — who, as seen in the widely viewed video footage, did nothing to stop white then-officer Derek Chauvin from killing Floyd. (On Wednesday, Thao and two other former officers were charged with aiding and abetting murder.)
It takes a lot of work to untangle and eradicate this, acknowledging that Asian Americans have faced their own racism throughout history — including during the current COVID-19 crisis — but have also sometimes instigated anti-Black racism, as many activists and social justice organizations have pointed out in recent...
