Local protesters call to end hatred of Asian Americans
DAYTON — A few dozen people gathered at Courthouse Square downtown Saturday afternoon to remember the eight people shot by a white gunman in Atlanta on Tuesday.
People at the event also spoke out against racism. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been blamed and attacked nationally over the past year for the COVID19 pandemic.
Darsheel Kaur said she grew up with people asking her where she was from, and she didn’t know she was Asian Americans for a long time. Some of her coworkers and peers now didn’t know she was Asian American until this past week, when she was talking about the Atlanta shooting, she said.
“We are used as a wedge between white and Black America, without ever having the space to express our own narratives, identities and experience with self-determination,” Kaur said.
She said Americans love many aspects of Asian culture: yoga, anime, food, spiritualities and nail salons.
“But the moment of now is asking for us to be included in the larger human family,” Kaur said. “Not as the perpetual other, but as your neighbors and friends and colleagues and classmates, who have their own spirit stories and experiences reckoning with and resisting the white supremacy embedded in this land and soil.”
Kaur said she hoped that people could come together to rise up against the hatred.
“Hatred is hatred,” said Bishop Jerome McCorry, a founder and president of the National Congress on Faith and Social Justice. “That was a supremacist act.”
McCorry organized the event with Fred Lambert. Lambert said when he heard the news, he decided he needed to do something. He said that Dayton has its own problems with racism against Asian people.
The owners of Xuan Vietnamese-Thai Cuisine in Riverside recently announced they were shutting down their store in May due to vandal activity near the restaurant twice. The grocery store next door, International Foods, was also attacked.
People at the event also asked that locals support Asian American businesses.
“Murder is the end of it,” Lambert said. “It’s the microaggressions, vandalism, the acts of hate, consistently taking place and that are consistently ignored. I felt we should at least make some space for people to come together to express themselves.”
He said he planned to continue the anti-racism events, holding them on Saturdays at 1 p.m. at Courthouse Square.