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.

As many news organizations have been reporting, Vietnamese Americans in San Jose, CA are blasting the police department there for several incidents of police brutality, the latest one happening last month in which officers were videoed beating a young Vietnamese American man, Phuong Ho, who appeared to be unarmed and submissive, as shown below:

As the San Jose Mercury News reports, the incident started as a private argument with Ho and one of his roommates and escalated due to language and cultural barriers:

The grainy video depicts the event as Siegel struck Ho, a math major from Vietnam, more than 10 times with a baton in the hallway of the house. Payne shocked Ho with a Taser gun. Ho does not appear to be combative in the video, although it does not record the entire interaction between Ho and the officers. . . .

The incident developed after Ho had argued with a roommate over soap being slopped onto a steak. Ho reportedly picked up a steak knife and told the roommate that in Vietnam, “I would kill you” over that. Ho dropped the knife and was not armed by the time police arrived, according to witnesses.

Officer Siegel had trouble understanding Ho when he asked his name, and attempted to enter Ho’s room to look for identification. He told Ho to wait in the hall, according to police reports. When Ho ignored Siegel’s order and attempted to follow him into the room, Payne pushed him into a wall, setting off the events that another roommate captured on cell phone video, in which the officers are seen striking Ho as they yell at him to turn over onto his back.

As the Mercury News article notes and as Raj Jayadev at New America Media elaborates upon, this particular incident was just the latest in a series of questionable conduct by the San Jose police against the Vietnamese American community and other racial/ethnic minorities in the area, who allege that officers have engaged in police brutality on several occasions and on top of them, the police department and city officials have refused to address such allegations:

The Phuong Ho video has elicited such outrage in San Jose because it comes on the heels of a year-long sequence of various public revelations of police abuse, and a matching series of failures by city leadership to respond to the demands for transparency and accountability that have spanned ethnic communities.

To begin with, last October, the Mercury News released data from the Department of Justice that showed that San Jose had a dramatically higher arrest rate for public intoxication that any other city in California (even those with much larger populations) and were arresting minorities at a disproportionate rate. Latinos in particular were heavily overrepresented in the arrest rates, accounting for nearly 57 percent of all arrests despite only representing 30 percent of the general population.

The news set of a firestorm in San Jose, leading to a raucous City Hall forum, where hundreds of people recounted stories of being arrested without cause, and roughed up in the process. . . .

On Mother’s Day of [2009], Daniel Pham, a 28-year-old Vietnamese man with mental health issues, was shot and killed by police. Police were called after Pham cut his brother with a knife. Pham was dead shortly after they arrived. The San Jose Police Department did not release the police reports and the transcript of the 911 call, despite an overwhelming demand from the Vietnamese community for transparency.

The District Attorney chose to have a closed grand jury for the officer-involved shooting – meaning no one, including Pham’s family members, would be allowed to know what happened inside the courtroom. On Oct.18, 2009, the District Attorney announced the results of the closed grand jury – no indictment. The public still has no answers as to why Pham is dead, and there is a growing sentiment being voiced in the Vietnamese community not to call the police if they need help, lest they risk the fate of being the next Daniel Pham.

And just last week, days before the Phuong Ho video was released and days after the no indictment result of the Pham case, the City Council voted down a set of reforms that would have forced the San Jose Police Department to remove the veil of secrecy surrounding their department, and open up public access to police records. Mind you, these recommendations came from a Sunshine Reform Task Force assembled by the mayor himself, who had now become the most vocal proponent for not disclosing police files.

A number of community groups across ethnic lines – the Asian Law Alliance, NAACP, Vietnamese Association of Northern California, La Raza Lawyers Association, and others – have filed a demand for the immediate release of police reports associated with the Ho case. The city has yet to respond.

There are several aspects of these incidents of brutality and excessive force that are rather troubling. The first is that as the Mercury News article points out, the San Jose police department actually has several Vietnamese American officers and as far as I have heard, has done a relatively good job at recruiting and retaining such officers to supposedly better serve the Vietnamese American community there.

Secondly, much like their neighbors in San Francisco to the north, San Jose generally has a very racially and ethnically diverse population and a reputation as a relatively liberal community. With that in mind, one might presume that relations with their constituents would be better.

Nonetheless, despite the presence of Vietnamese American officers and the city’s liberal reputation, these incidents of police brutality and, just as important, the refusal of city and police officials to be transparent and accountable for such incidents continue to exist.

Why would this be the case? What other reasons might account for this widening rift between city and police officials and the residents they are supposed to “protect and serve?”

Until city and police officials open up and directly address these issues, we can only speculate about what else is going on. As such, I would hypothesize that the officials’ actions (or lack thereof) might be an unconscious form of resistance against the changing demographics and political/cultural makeup of the city.

As I’ve written about before, many (as in a large number, but not all) Whites likely feel threatened by the fact that “their” community, “their” state, and “their” country are increasingly become more culturally diverse and that the U.S.’s position as the dominant and most powerful country in the world is slowly eroding in the 21st century. On top of that, the current recession and the continuing effects of globalization have compounded their financial insecurities and personal anxieties.

Faced with these recent trends, many Whites have sought to adapt and indeed embrace such changes. However, these cultural, economic, and political shifts have led many others to become defensive and have led to a backlash. Others have pointed out that the vehement and racially-tinged opposition to President Obama by the far right is an example of this backlash. Further examples include increased interpersonal and institutional hostility towards immigrants and towards people of color in general, and Asian Americans continuing to be questioned on their loyalties and identity as “real” Americans.

It is within this larger social context that we might see the refusal of San Jose city and police officials to account for their actions and to make the details of police brutality allegations public as further examples of this unconscious White interpersonal and institutional backlash.

Change does not come easily and as sociologists have consistently documented, there is inevitably a stage of competition and conflict before things settle down and the cultural and political landscape stabilizes. Unfortunately, in the meantime, Vietnamese Americans in San Jose and other racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants throughout the country are likely to encounter more examples of these kinds of hostility.