Ethnic communities must stand together
My family visited San Francisco’s Chinatown on Sunday, where Didi and Gege raced around the gorgeous dragon and phoenix play structures at the newly renovated Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground.
We also tracked down the two Lunar New Year ox statues in the vicinity — look for them around the city! — and shopped for dim sum treats while tiny firecrackers popped and crackled in the distance.
We wanted to show support for this beloved neighborhood after recent attacks on Asian Americans in the Bay Area. The same weekend, rallies in San Francisco and Oakland condemned the violence and called for communitycentered solutions.
Multiethnic aid efforts quickly sprang up in support of the cause, including a GoFundMe campaign — spearheaded by Eda Yu, a halfChinese, halfIndonesian journalist, and her partner, Myles Thompson, a Black designer — that raised more than $150,000, which will be divided evenly between several organizations in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Other grassroots efforts include another GoFundMe to underwrite private armed security in Oakland Chinatown, as well as numerous volunteer escorts and foot patrols.
In Oakland, Asian Health Services is the fiscal sponsor for a fund supporting individuals and families of those affected, as well as for a pilot Chinatown Ambassador program — a holistic effort that will include mental health, wellness and deescalation techniques to reduce and prevent conflicts — all to help the community feel safe and secure.
The Oakland Chinatown Coalition — which includes merchants, service and communitybased organizations, and churches — is also working on more longterm efforts after the immediate urgency ends.
Beyond these efforts, I’ve been thinking about how we also must examine systems of power and systems of oppression that have pitted Black and Asian communities against each other.
In 1966, sociologist William Petersen wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine titled “Success Story: Japanese American Style.” Not long after, U.S. News & World Report published “Success Story for One Minority Group in the United States.”
Both articles noted how these communities overcame discrimination; more pieces followed that credited Asian Americans’ success to their family structure, Confucian values and work ethic.
It was fascinating — but disturbing and not entirely surprising — to learn that the modelminority myth was also born out of the Cold War. If the U.S. was to win the global propaganda battle with the Soviet Union, it had to prove that democracy was superior and that poor countries should follow their lead.
Though flattering to Asian Americans at first glance, the articles had a sinister motive, asking “If Asian Americans are ‘making it’ in this country, why can’t Blacks?” It was a false equivalency, claiming that the discrimination Asian Americans faced was identical to that of slavery, segregation and police brutality.
In “The Souls of Black Folk,” scholar W.E.B. Du Bois asked African Americans, “How does it feel to be a problem?” That is to say, to have your body, your children, your people maligned — racially profiled by law enforcement in the pursuit of suspects.
Statistically speaking, Asian Americans have higher educational levels, higher incomes and lower rates of unemployment compared with other groups. But that’s only in the aggregate. The blanket category masks the vast differences among Asian subgroups in their history, language, education, socioeconomic level, immigration status, disabilities and other elements of identity.
In a viral TED talk, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explained the “danger of a single story.” “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”
Out of this time of strife and suffering, let’s write our next story — together.
It was fascinating to learn that the modelminority myth was also born out of the Cold War.