San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Time to listen to our allies as Asian neighbors suffer
Each time I step away from my laptop after watching a video showing a Black person assaulting or robbing an elderly Asian person, I’m left with a sense of dread.
The reality is horrifying. More than 30 violent crimes have befallen Bay Area residents of Asian descent this year. This is a community that has long felt unseen and ignored. A handful of these terrible incidents have turned into viral videos, all with Black aggressors.
As a Black man in America, I’m familiar with how easy it is to have a narrative twisted against me based on a few anecdotes and scant data. I know
that other communities of color are, too. The “illegal” Mexican immigrant. The “model” Asian trope. The marauding Black criminal. These are the stereotypes that reduce, discredit and pit marginalized communities against each other when we should be lifting each other up.
I don’t want this to happen in the Bay Area. Not now, not after all our communities accomplished during last year’s reckoning on race and justice. But, as much as I want to shoehorn this dialogue to its evolved conclusion, I know the timing isn’t right. Not yet. Now is the time to simply hear the pain.
I was reminded of this in my conversation with Clarence Kwan, who writes the antiracist zine Chinese Protest Recipes and is a longtime ally of the Black Lives Matter movement. “In the same way that, in Black Lives Matter, we were told to listen to Black people, listen to Black leaders, listen to Black women, in our fit of rage right now, the best thing people can do is listen to us,” Kwan told me. “If we’re willing to listen to each other, then that’s the best way we can figure this moment out and how to move forward.”
Letting our Asian neighbors figure out their moment will lead where we need to go: to a nuanced dialogue about antiAsian racism that isn’t antiBlack. Or so hopes state Assembly member Alex Lee, DSan Jose, who, at 25, is California’s youngest Asian American lawmaker.
“There are people who jump to the conclusion that because a Black person did (the crime), then all Black people must hate Asian people. That’s such a slippery slope that I just don’t condone,” he said. “It is completely valid for people to feel upset ... to feel afraid and that is OK. But I believe from what I’ve seen that what’s happening are symptoms of larger issues.”
Some of these larger issues involve the increased pressures that communities of color are under during the pandemic, but also the parallel trials that they endured fighting for rights in this nation of ours.
Black people understood the pain Asian Americans endured as immigrant laborers in the 19th century, and the racial violence they were subjected to through the racist “Yellow Peril” lens. Frederick Douglass denounced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A century later, Asian and Black folks marched together during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, including on the UC Berkeley campus. It was two UC Berkeley students — Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee — who, inspired by the Black Power movement, coined the term “Asian American.”
This kinship permeated the childhood of Margaretta Lin, executive director of the Just Cities/Dellums Institute, a social justice group in Oakland. “I came to this country in 1968 after the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted and the vestiges were finally removed,” she told me. “Growing up in Philadelphia, we experienced a lot of hate crimes and racial bullying. But the people who came to my to rescue as a 4yearold were my Black neighbors. … I saw my Black neighbors as people who were safe, the people I could turn to when I was in trouble.”
In that same spirit of solidarity, Black community leaders started a fundraiser this month for the Asian residents who were victims of violent crimes. The fundraiser’s goal was $3,000. In only a few days, it raised more than $15,000. The money will be divided among several organizations, including the Asian Health Center in Oakland and the Vietnamese Health Center in San Francisco, according to the fundraiser’s organizers. The Bay Area knows how to have this conversation. It knows what to do next.
But the dread is still there. It flickers with every email that asks me to explain why all Black people are targeting all Asian people, or claiming that the region is only dangerous because of the crimes committed by people who look like me.
I wrestle with that dread, even as I trust my Asian neighbors and allies to steer us away from it. And so I’m listening — and waiting to hear how I can help.