Last year, I wrote about the spike in incidents of anti-Asian harassment, verbal abuse, bullying, and violence since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the level of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia seemed to have declined, but since the start of 2021, there seems to be a new wave of attacks aimed against Asian Americans and especially against older members of Asian American community. With this in mind, within the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program at UMass Amherst that I direct, we recently created Student Advisory Board and Program Ambassador group of 10 amazing undergraduate students who support the Certificate Program through outreach and programming aimed at undergraduate students at UMass Amherst. They recently released the public statement Titled “Working Towards Anti-Racism and Dismantling White Supremacy” about this resurgence in anti-Asian racism and xenophobia and its connections to anti-Blackness, and I am very proud to reprint it here:

To the UMass Asian American Community & Beyond,

Since the start of 2020, racist and xenophobic incidents against Asians and Asian Americans have spiked, with the website StopAAPIHate reporting over 2,800 incidents of harassment, bullying, verbal assault, and violence since mid-March, and with many, many more going unreported. In recent weeks, there have also been numerous public examples of attacks on Asian Americans, including the death of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco and the police shooting of 19-year-old Christian Hall in Monroe County, PA.

These incidents are linked to historical constructions of Asian Americans as the Yellow Peril — an imagined political, economic, or public health threat to U.S. society. In many of these incidents, bystanders failed to offer any assistance to the Asian Americans who were targeted, which also illustrates how Asian Americans continue to be seen as perpetual foreigners and as undeserving outsiders, unworthy of any help or sympathy.

While many other people have rightfully condemned these attacks and expressed support and solidarity with Asian Americans, some have focused almost exclusively on the racial identity of some of the perpetrators of these incidents and specifically, have resorted to using blatantly racist stereotypes against Black people and feeding into anti-Blackness. This rhetoric is not only problematic but also is unproductive in the fight for racial justice. These instances of violence against Asian Americans should not be seen as just a result of individual action, but rather as enabled by systematic violence inherent in white supremacy. As such, we need to continue to center anti-racism discourse and organizing around actively combating anti-Blackness because Black liberation will enable liberation for all other groups.

Hence, it is important that Asian Americans do not contribute to the over-criminalization of communities, particularly communities that are already disadvantaged, marginalized, and underserved. Asian Americans need to reject the ways we have been used as a wedge by white society to further perpetuate violence against Black and Brown communities. We need to focus on the root causes of systemic inequality, rather than resorting to stereotypes that demonize people and contribute to more policing, criminalization, and incarceration of already vulnerable groups. Instead, we call on our political, economic, and community leaders to develop community-based solutions that address root causes of alienation and powerlessness. In addition, our communities need comprehensive assistance for the victims and for the businesses that have been hurt by the pandemic. We need to combat the ways systems of oppression have long deprived all communities of color of the resources and support we need to thrive in America. We as Asian Americans must reject any attempt to weaponize our pain as a tool for white supremacy.

Cross-racial collaboration and solidarity are essential to move forward together and to fight together for justice and equality. With this in mind, we call on Asian Americans to:

• Educate yourself on issues faced by underrepresented communities within the Asian Diaspora and beyond, such as the South Asian, Southeast Asian community, LGBTQ+ community, the Pacific Islander community, and the Black & Brown and Indigenous communities
• Actively learn the history of white supremacy across the world and its relation to the domestic & global exploitation of the BIPOC communities
• Actively confront the ways anti-Blackness shows up in the Asian community and do the work needed to unlearn and dismantle these behaviors and stereotypes so we can better show up for the Black community
• Educate yourself on the history of students of color activism at UMass Amherst and take part in efforts to fight against racism here on campus
• Take Ethnic Studies courses to learn the history and experiences of various racial and ethnic groups
• Support reparations for Black Americans. Contact your elected officials and tell them to support HR 40, a federal bill that will establish a commission to make recommendations for reparations for Black people. It is important that this bill includes a comprehensive reparations plan, so support calls from activists to have bill sponsors make the necessary changes needed to fulfill their demands

We also call on our allies to:

• Learn about the issues faced by various groups under the Asian American & Pacific Islander umbrella and learn about the differences in our experiences and histories
• Learn about the ways white colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism have exploited Asian countries and Pacific Islands
• Learn the origins of the Model Minority Myth & Orientalism and the ways it has been used to make Asians invisible
• Actively dismantle stereotypes that you hold about the Asian community

As the Asian American community we need to actively remember that the root cause of our issues and pain has and always will be the result of whiteness and white supremacy. In order to achieve true racial justice and liberation, we must not lose sight of that.

“We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don’t get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again”. – Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

“You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.” – Grace Lee Boggs

Check out Asian Americans Advancing Justice’s list of Resources for the Asian American Community on Anti-Blackness to learn more about the ways you can learn & take action.

You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was quite an eventful year in many ways, and for good and bad. As we approach the end of the year and the start of 2021, I want to reflect on how the Asian American community fared throughout the year and how different political, economic, and social events throughout the year had positive or negative effects for Asian Americans collectively.

Bad (Very Bad):
The one event that framed the lives of Asian Americans and billions of people all around the world of course, was the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only has the Covid-19 virus resulted in more than 18 million infections and almost 320,000 deaths (both are officially reported numbers, with many more likely unreported) just in the U.S. (with 77 million infections and 1.7 million deaths worldwide, respectively), but it’s also led to thousands of incidents of racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans, with such examples ranging from verbal harassment, cyberbullying, physical assaults, and even attempted murder. Many Asian American-owned small businesses have also been hurt badly by this wave of anti-Asian hate, through physical damage and vandalism to their stores but also through lost revenue and this situation has made many Asian American communities even more vulnerable to gentrification and the real danger of completely disappearing altogether.

These incidents are based on the historical constructions of Asian American as the Yellow Peril, or some kind of political, economic, cultural, or public health threat to the U.S., and of Asian Americans as “perpetual/forever foreigners” who are unworthy of being “real” or “legitimate” Americans. Making the situation even worse, not only did the Trump administration not do anything to address this situation, they actively fanned the flames of hostility and division by repeatedly using inflammatory terms such as the “China virus,” etc. Recently, the first batches of the Covid-19 vaccine started to be administered so it looks encouraging that the Covid-19 virus might be contained in a few months. However, the sociological aftermath and effects of this wave of anti-Asian hate and racism will continue to linger and fester for the foreseeable future.

Good (Out of Very Bad):
After the tragic murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Live Matter movement this spring, many people in the U.S. and around the world were forced to confront the historical legacy and ongoing dynamics of systematic racism against Black people. This included the Asian American community. As I wrote previously, it should be abundantly clear by now why Asian Americans need to unite in solidarity with our Black brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and family and embrace their struggle for racial justice. Hopefully Asian Americans recognize how the racism that we’ve faced involves the same institutional structures of privilege, authority, and power that operates against Black people and other people of color, and that if we want others to stand up in our defense during those situations, we also have to show up and do the same without hesitation when it happens to Black people. Through the Black Lives Matter movement, many Asian Americans have taken steps to have these difficult conversations and to confront the anti-Blackness that has and still exists within our communities and our own families (see this excellent list of resources to promote Black-Asian solidarity).

Good:
Although it was a nail-biter in many ways, the 2020 Presidential election resulted in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being elected as our next President and Vice President, and the upcoming ouster of the worst President in U.S. history. While we progressives are still a little wary of Biden’s more “centrist” positions on several important issues, we certainly need to celebrate this as a major accomplishment and big step forward for racial equality and social justice for people of color, immigrants, and others in vulnerable situations, and common decency for all of us as human beings. These past four years have been literally terrifying in many ways and while there’s still a lot of work to be done, at least we can be thankful that the worst of it is coming to an end.

Speaking of Kamala Harris, we should also recognize the significance of her election as the first woman, Black, and Asian American Vice President in our nation’s history. This is a major accomplishment that is also long overdue. We should also remember that she was one of several Presidential candidates who were Asian American, along with Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard (who is one-quarter Samoan). Of course, the success of a few individual members does not mean that all members of that particular group have successfully overcome all the challenges and barriers that they have historically faced (see the example of Barack Obama). Nonetheless, I hope that this is an encouraging trend in which more Asian Americans feel inspired by the success of Harris, Yang, and Gabbard and can now see themselves vying for positions of power in various areas of life, and second, that more Americans in general are hopefully seeing that Asian Americans can indeed be confident, charismatic, and inspirational leaders and not just be confined to “technical” jobs like an engineer or scientist.

Bad:
While I am very thankful that Biden won the election, it is very sobering to realize that over 74 million Americans still voted for Trump, the most racist, xenophobic, corrupt, and despicable President in U.S. history. On top of that, it appears that, given the defeat of many progressive Democratic candidates around the nation, that large numbers of Americans are still not ready to support much-needed reforms to our political system and the social structure of our society that seek to eliminate the destructive inequalities and divisions that have caused so much damage to the lives of so many vulnerable people. It is really sad — even tragic — that so many Americans have bought into the propaganda that anything labelled as “socialist” or even “racial equality” is somehow “un-American.” On the one hand, I am encouraged that after George Floyd’s death, many White Americans were jolted into taking a close look at their privileged position within the U.S. racial landscape. On the other hand, I am very discouraged that data seems to show that after the initial shock of George Floyd’s death, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has declined among Whites, Asian Americans, and Hispanics in the months leading up to the election. I suppose it’s another example of the adage of “two steps forward, one step back.”

Bad:
Along the same lines, I also bemoan the apparent rise in power of a small but very vocal contingent of conservative Chinese Americans who have gained attention, influence, and support within the Asian American community and U.S. society in general. As I’ve also written about before and as previous research has documented, this group is overwhelmingly comprised of recently-immigrated, older, and affluent Chinese who are unfamiliar with the U.S.’s tragic history of racism and racial injustice (or even completely deny it altogether) and instead, routinely spread disinformation within their WeChat networks that perpetuate racist stereotypes against Blacks, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims to name just a few groups, and have basically internalized that for them to attain success and be accepted as part of the U.S. mainstream, they need to embrace Whiteness and reject Blackness.

These conservative Chinese Americans are the ones behind the organization Asian American Coalition for Education that sued Harvard University, alleging that it systematically discriminates against Asian American applicants. By the way, as a small “good” item, in March and November, two different sets of federal judges ruled against their claim and found that there is no credible evidence that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants. Nonetheless, it’s almost certain that AACE will appeal this case all the way to the Supreme Court and now that it has a solid conservative majority, the future prospects for affirmative action are not positive. Either way, this small but vocal and politically active group of conservative Chinese Americans has shown that they are passionate, committed, willing to stand toe-to-toe with progressive Asian Americans in asserting their position, and will be a force to be reckoned with in years to come.

Good:
2020 was a pretty good year for Asians and Asian Americans in terms of representation and commercial success in mainstream media and entertainment. Who could forget the surprise and excitement when Bong Joon-Ho’s film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture back in March, the first non-English language film to do so? While Parasite wasn’t an Asian American-centered work, I can confidently say that its success was a source of pride for many of us and it showed that Asian cultural products have the same high levels of quality and depth that white-centered cultural products have implicitly enjoyed for decades.



Moreover, several Asian American-focused works were a big hit, especially during the spring and summer when people were generally confined indoors and watching more tv, such as the critically acclaimed PBS documentary series Asian Americans, produced by Renee Tajima-Peña; ESPN’s documentary Be Water that profiled the life and legacy of Bruce Lee and was directed by Bao Nguyen; and Netflix’s charming Never Have I Ever series, produced by Mindy Kahling and The Half of It produced and directed by Alice Wu, to name just a few examples. Other high-profile Asian Americans were recognized for their success and excellence, including professional tennis player Naomi Osaka (who plays for Japan but is also very Americanized) who was named Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsperson of the Year” and the Associated Press’s Female Athlete of the Year for her success on the court including winning the 2020 U.S. Open and just as important, becoming a force off the court with her strong activism in support of Black Lives Matter.

Also in the world of professional sports, Kim Ng made history by becoming the first woman and Asian American general manager of a Major League Baseball team (the Miami Marlins). Younghoe Koo’s ups, downs, and ups culminated in him becoming the top scoring kicker in the National Football League and being named to its Pro Bowl all-star game. In addition, K-Pop superstars BTS was named Time magazine’s Entertainer of the Year for their commercial success and their activism in support of numerous causes including Black Lives Matter, mental health awareness, and LBTQ+ rights. Several Asians and Asian Americans are also part of Time magazine’s annual 100 Most Influential list, including Nathan Law (main organizer of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement), Ali Wong, Yo-Yo Ma, Bong Joon-Ho, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google, joining Satya Nadella CEO of Microsoft who was not part of the list), and Lisa Nishimura (Senior Executive at Netflix).

While we need to be careful and not gloss over the struggles and challenges that many Asian Americans still face on a daily basis, these high-profile examples go a long way to making the life, experiences, and contributions of Asians and Asian Americans visible, especially to young people who are beginning to see others like them in positive ways in the mainstream media, rather than as one-dimensional stereotypes and caricatures. The long march towards justice and equality will have a lot of twists and turns, ups and downs, and the Covid-19 pandemic has had and will continue to have severe negative consequences for the Asian American community in many ways. That said, there were also many positive events for Asian Americans in 2020 that we can build on and to move forward in terms of asserting our rights to cultural citizenship and to continue forging solidarity with other minoritized communities. It certainly helps that we have a new presidential administration coming in with that in mind, let’s keep working on building a better future for ourselves, our families, our community, and our society in 2021!

In the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor, and now Rayshard Brooks, I have been very encouraged to see so many people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds unite in solidarity to protest and fight for racial equality and justice in the U.S. and all around the world. In fact, data shows that in contrast to most mass protests in the past, most of the participants in these recent protests are White. I have also been very heartened to see data that shows that the proportion of White Americans who agree that systemic racism against Blacks exists and is a real problem has not just increased noticeably since April, but actually has been steadily increasing since 2014. While there’s still a whole lot of work that needs to be done and many changes that are still to be implemented, all of these trends are indeed very encouraging and seems to suggest a much more positive outlook on this nation’s ongoing fight for justice and equality across all forms of life.

That said, there are many people out there who are still skeptical or even hostile to this drive for racial justice. As I wrote about earlier, many of these people are Asian Americans. Fortunately, numerous other Asian Americans have written excellent articles and essays about how Asian Americans can talk to members of their own community and their own families about racism against Blacks and the need for us as Asian Americans to unite in solidarity with them. Below is just a small sampling:

I happen to be a big Hasan Minaj fan, so in case you haven’t seen it yet, I want to highlight the 12-minute video he made a couple of weeks ago for his “Patriot Acts” show in which he talks passionately about the need for Asian Americans to unite in solidarity with the Black community to reinforce the bonds that exist between both groups and to fight collectively against systemic racism:

Along with talking to Asian Americans specifically about the need to unite in solidarity with the Black community and despite the positive trends that I mentioned earlier, we also need to keep talking to White Americans about racism and how people of color need them not just to be non-racist, but to be actively anti-racist. Along those lines, here again is a small sampling of articles and essays that give some tips about talking to Whites about racism, how Whites can talk to other Whites about racism, and specific actions Whites can do to be anti-racist:

Lastly, I want to share an example of a recent conversation with one of my White friends in which we talk about the Rayshard Brooks murder, police brutality, and systemic racism. He (let’s call him Thomas) and I have been friends since high school (36 years) and in the first several years of our friendship, he was relatively ignorant of racism and White privilege. After I started studying Sociology and Asian American Studies in college, I began challenging him more about racially insensitive comments or jokes that he (and many of my other White friends) would make. My challenges (many of which were rather angry in nature) initially took him off guard because previously, I would have let them go unchallenged. For a while, we had a somewhat tense friendship over these issues but gradually, we both moderated our positions — I became less angry in describing the ins and outs of racism to him, and he became much more open to learning about the privileges he had as a White person. Eventually, he “came around” and became much more “woke” about the history and ongoing nature of racism, its effects on people of color, and his position as a White person in all of this, and I was very gratified to see this change in him. But every once in a while, I need to “remind” him and give him as “refresher” on these issues, as our conversation below highlights:

This past week, the U.S.’s deadly legacy of systemic racism was once again on full display as video captured African American George Floyd being murdered under the knee of a White Minneapolis police officer who was utterly indifferent to his cries for help. Unfortunately, what happened to George Floyd is the same as what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Atatiana Jefferson, Akai Gurley, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, and countless other unarmed Blacks for centuries who have been stereotyped as sub-human, dangerous, and summarily killed under the weight of White supremacy. 

It should be abundantly clear to everyone in the U.S. and around the world by now that racism continues to play an insidious and deadly role in the lives and deaths of Blacks every day. When we see ongoing examples of police brutality and murder of unarmed Blacks and other minorities, along with other systematic but less-visible forms of racism such as Black communities being devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and other institutional inequalities related to health care, or being more vulnerable to economic insecurity and being evicted from their homes, just to name a few examples, there can no longer be any doubt that race remains a central dividing line in U.S. society in terms of who suffers versus who prospers, and even who lives and who dies. This is true even without getting into a discussion about the ongoing examples of Whites calling police on “suspicious” Blacks who are doing nothing more than everyday activities that Whites can take for granted, such as walking in the park, taking a nap, eating lunch, having a picnic, sitting in a Starbucks, mowing a lawn, using a swimming pool, playing golf, or other examples of “Living While Black.”

It is with this understanding in mind that I call on members of the Asian American community to unite in solidarity with our Black brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and family to support the Black Lives Matter movement and embrace their struggle for racial justice. Many Asian Americans have recently felt the sting of racism and xenophobia in the form of harassment, bullying, verbal assaults, discrimination, and violence related to the CoViD-19/Coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully Asian Americans recognize how racism against Asian Americans is the same racism that operates against Blacks and other people of color, and how such acts of discrimination are all interconnected into institutional structures of privilege, authority, and power. If we want others to stand up in our defense during those situations, we also have to show up and do the same without hesitation when it happens to Black people.

Many of who already know this political and moral need to ally with and support the Black community, but unfortunately many other Asian Americans do not. Specifically, two types of Asian Americans come to mind when it comes to this form of personal and collective ignorance:

• “Model minority” Asian Americans who have internalized the myth that Asian Americans have succeeded by working hard, staying quiet, and individual efforts rather than relying on any kind of government or outside assistance. Many who fit in this category have indeed worked extremely hard and made numerous sacrifices to attain a good education, land a well-paying job, and provide a safe and comfortable standard of living for themselves and their family. The problem is when they use their personal example of success to then say, “If I/my family can make it, why can’t Blacks? Something must be wrong with them.” Clearly, what they don’t see is what’s wrong is not with Blacks themselves, but the system of racism that all too often denies them equal opportunities to succeed, or even opportunities to remain alive. “What’s wrong” is the pervasive pattern of police officers and other “law enforcement” authorities to quickly act on deeply-ingrained prejudices (and institutional mechanisms like the principle of “qualified immunity” that shield them from prosecution) and to immediately use deadly force to murder Black people. Hopefully these “model minority” Asian Americans see that after attaining success themselves, rather than pulling up the ladder and criticizing everyone below them, they should instead reach back and offer their support to those who are most vulnerable to inequalities and injustices and are dealing with numerous disadvantages that have made it much harder for them to succeed.
  
  As luck would have it, there was a recent news item that illustrates one example of these “model minority” Asian Americans who are utterly ignorant of how racism works — members of the Lambda Phi Epsilon Asian American-themed fraternity at NYU who were recently exposed to have shared numerous racist and anti-Black messages among themselves. As the news article summarizes:
  
  “As fucked up as it is, I think the threat of police brutality actually keeps those communities more safe than without it,” [wrote] one member of the chat, Stern student Roger Sun. . . . Justin Tung wrote in the chat, “. . . we [Asian Americans] grinded significantly harder while black peoples were lazy.”
  
  I wish I could say that I am surprised, but I am not. While I am not saying that all members of the Lambda Phi Epsilon fraternity are wildly ignorant racists, I will point out that as the fraternity’s Wikipedia page says, “Lambda Phi Epsilon has experienced the most hazing incidents among Asian-American fraternities” and that since 2005, there have been numerous deaths of fraternity members or pledges, and that 18 chapters have closed as of 2019. Scholarly research by Minh Tran and Mitchell Chang in 2013 found that Asian American fraternities have experienced a disproportionately high number of violent hazing incidents and deaths and that within many of them, there is an implicit or even explicit culture of challenging stereotypes of Asian American men as weak, passive, or feminine by promoting an image of them as physically strong and if needed, violent. As this news from NYU shows, these misguided attempts at asserting power can also involve reinforcing and perpetuating White supremacy.

• The second type of Asian Americans who seem to be unwilling to ally with the Black community are many recently-immigrated Asian immigrants. A number of Asians who recently immigrated to the U.S. tend to be unfamiliar with the U.S.’s tragic history of racism and racial injustice, especially perpetrated against Black people. Instead, they are more likely to see the U.S. as a true meritocracy where, similar to the aforementioned model minority Asian Americans, a person’s success is entirely dependent on their own level of hard work and individual effort. Those within this category also tend to rely disproportionately on stereotypical portrayals in the mainstream media and popular culture of Black, Latinx, and Native American & Indigenous Americans as lazy, unintelligent, and therefore, undeserving of any support of sympathy. This also includes internalizing stereotypes of Blacks as violent, dangerous, sub-human, and therefore devaluing their right to live, as exemplified by Tou Thao, the Hmong American police officer who stood by while George Floyd was being murdered.
  
  Based on these structural socializations, many recently-immigrated Asians have also bought into the implicit or explicit belief that in order for them to attain success and be accepted as part of the U.S. mainstream, they need to embrace Whiteness and reject Blackness. One clear example of this category are members of groups such as the “Asian American Coalition for Education” (AACE) that are at the center of the recent lawsuit alleging that Harvard University systematically discriminates against Asian American applicants. As research has shown, members of this group (and Asian Americans in general who oppose affirmative action) are disproportionately comprised of older middle-class and affluent, recently-immigrated Chinese, who among other things, believe that affirmative action in favor of Blacks and other underrepresented minorities means less opportunity for their children and spread misinformation through their WeChat social network. Unfortunately, one of the things that members of this category don’t recognize is that allying with Blacks and other people of color and fighting against systematic racial injustice will mean that everyone’s child will have greater access to educational and other opportunities for success.

Ultimately and at this crucial moment in history, Asian Americans have to make a choice — unite in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters and mobilize collectively to fight for racial justice, or internalize the ongoing racial lies and stereotypes and side with White supremacy. As simplistic as it sounds, it comes down to the old adage — you’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution.