COALITION SPEAKS OUT AGAINST ANTI-ASIAN VIOLENCE

Community leaders call for end of racially motivated attacks

Say their names.

It’s a phrase — an expression of grief and anger, also a rallying cry — heard often in recent years, perhaps loudest last summer during demonstrations held across the nation denouncing violence against people of color.

It was evoked again publicly Friday morning in San

Diego, this time as a reaction to the shootings earlier this week in the Atlanta area that took the lives of eight people, many of them women of Asian descent. At a news conference, representatives from organizations including the Asian Solidarity Collective, Pillars of the Community, Black Lives Matter San Diego and We All We Got stood together outside the County Administration Center and Waterfront Park to call for an end to race-motivated violence in all its forms.

“We are here in solidarity as a multiracial, multi-age, multi-gender coalition to support and center survivors and victims of antiAsian racism, gender violence and xenophobia,” said DJ Kuttin Kandi, executive director of Asian Solidarity Collective.

Kuttin Kandi, also known as Candice Custodio-Tan, is a retired hip-hop DJ, activist and organizer who cofounded the organization in 2016 after the police-involved fatal shooting of Alfred Olango, a 38-year-old Black Ugandan refugee, in El Cajon.

A gunman on Tuesday drove to three Asian spas in the Atlanta area and opened fire at each location, shooting nine people and killing eight of them. Authorities have said the suspect told law enforcement his motive was to curb his sex addiction, and that the spas “were a temptation he wanted to eliminate.”

But that revelation has done little to change what many people see as a targeted attack on Asian women, and further evidence of broader, ongoing hatred aimed at Asian people, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. DJ Kuttin Kandi noted that the

Stop AAPI Hate initiative in a recent report pointed to just under 3,800 hate incidents — including verbal harassment and physical assault — reported between March 2020 and Feb. 28 of this year, a number the organization says represents a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur.

She also noted several historical examples of violence and discrimination against Asians and Asian Americans, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, internment of Japanese Americans during

World War II and surveillance targeting Muslims and South Asians after the attacks Sept. 11, 2001.

“This kind of violence needs to be named as it is specifically racialized misogyny, sexualization, fetishization of Asians,” she said of the Atlanta-area shootings. “We urge all our community leaders, elected officials to name this for what it is — anti-Asian violence, gender violence, labor exploitation, xenophobia and all the things.”

“Name a thing a thing.”