Apr 6, 2021
What Should It Mean to be Asian American? An Open Letter and Invitation
To our Asian community and family,
We find ourselves in a watershed moment for the Asian and Asian American community — one that is powerful, profound, and uncertain.
Many Asians are naming, sometimes for the very first time, their lived experiences with racism and systemic oppression. Asian women are describing the racially hypersexualized encounters that, perhaps, have haunted them for years. Asian organizers and activists are showing up, as always, continuing to mobilize and organize our community on the ground. It’s a moment heavy with racial awakenings, a myriad of emotions from confusion and pain to hope, and need for healing.
It’s also illustrative of the complexity of our Asian community and the power dynamics that arise when we try to work together across lines of difference. As we write this, we’re inspired by and grateful for the visibility of the Asian community right now, but we’re nervous and anxious at seeing how privilege and oppression make themselves visible in who and what kinds of organizing get the spotlight. We believe addressing these very real distinctions in our community along ethnicity, gender, age, class, and many other identities both visible and invisible must be at the core of building pan-Asian solidarity.
For example, most of us are familiar with and have the vocabulary to reject the model minority myth. We know that we are not all doctors, lawyers, or engineers, and we readily support one other in pursuing our dreams in creative arts and entrepreneurship. However, this is only one side of the model minority archetype, the economic side. There is a political side to the model minority archetype that tells us to avoid engaging in political and civic issues of social justice and an even more insidious side to maintain white supremacy at the expense of Black people. Many of us never learned about the history of Asian American radical organizing, and our corporate-matched donations are the only connection we have to the nonprofits and community-based organizations that have been leading racial justice work for Asian Americans today. This detachment from political life has been true for far too many Asians, until recently.
We believe that this is a watershed moment because in our individual and collective responses to the anti-Asian attacks, we are redefining what it means to be Asian American. In doing so, we have an obligation and a responsibility to be hyper-aware, critical, and intentional of how we build power and shape this collective identity. This leads us to a very simple but fundamental question: What does it mean to each of us to be Asian American?
This is what we, the two of us, believe being Asian American means for us:
- To stay focused on naming, dismantling, and replacing the systems that shape the Asian American experience: When we think of racism and hate, we tend to focus on the individual incidences of harm that occur. We are taught to think of racism as people being racist in their thoughts and interactions, when the reality is that racism is so much larger than that. Racism is about an entire system that grants power, privilege, and oppression on the basis of race, and it manifests itself in every visible and invisible system that shapes Asian American experience — from education to healthcare to housing and employment. We can see examples of white supremacy in housing where people of color, including Black and Asian renters and home buyers, are shown fewer homes than white people with the same economic background. We can see it in employment where Black and Asian job applicants were twice more likely to receive call backs when they “whitened” their resumes. Ultimately, justice doesn’t just mean holding individual perpetrators accountable; it means uprooting the white supremacist systems that invisibilize, marginalize, and dehumanize all people of color, including Asians.
- To be humbled by the ancestors who have come before us and honor their legacy: We are not the first Asian Americans to engage in activism. Before we can fully step into our own leadership, we have to study the work of those who came before us, especially since the US education system so often does not teach the history of Asian Americans in this country. As we’ve done our own learning over the years, we’ve been inspired by the history of radical Asian American organizing that drew upon a systems-level analysis. We think of such leaders as Grace Lee Boggs who engaged in meaningful community building, organized across BIPOC and marginalized communities, and had a clear analysis of how systems of oppression existed in American life.
- To be held accountable when we perpetuate anti-Blackness: White supremacy maintains its power by driving a wedge between Black and Asian communities. We’ve seen many conversations online where Asians have directed their anger at the Black community, because some of the perpetrators are Black (despite the fact that 90% of hate crimes against Asians are perpetrated by white people, according to researchers from the University of Michigan). We’ve also seen Asian folks co-opt organizing slogans from the Black community such as #AsianLivesMatter, and Asian corporate employees rally around anti-racism efforts without including their Black colleagues and equating their experiences of racism to what Black colleagues experience. As Asian Americans, we have a unique position in the US racial order where we experience racism and simultaneously benefit from a proximity to whiteness due to the model minority myth. This grants us a relative racial privilege that we cannot ignore. And unfortunately, all of the above examples perpetuate white supremacy by either disregarding or diminishing that anti-Blackness is at the core of what systemic racism is in the US. Because of this, it is only until Black folks no longer experience racism in the US that Asians will also no longer experience racism in the US. It doesn’t work the other way around. We try to remind ourselves of this at all times, and we consistently push ourselves to do better in doing the hard work of understanding how we can work together to address the root causes of conflict.
- To take our direction from those who have been leading Asian civil rights work through nonprofits and community-based organizations: The history of radical organizing continues into the present, and there have been other Asian activists and organizers who have been instrumental in leading this work out of various nonprofits and community-based organizations. The two of us are diversity, equity, and inclusion professionals who work in corporate America. While we wear many other hats, we believe there are limitations to our impact and knowledge because of the spaces we work in. Especially since many conventional solutions have failed to rectify the inequities we see, and because the success of so many corporations is directly tied to capitalist systems, we believe that in this moment of urgent action, we should all be looking to local leaders in grassroots and community-based organizations for systems-wide solutions. We’ve seen calls for justice and accountability for anti-Asian attacks lead to greater investments in law enforcements and policing, against the urging of community-based organizations who have felt the impact of police brutality and over-policing.
- To hold our community accountable for representing the true diversity of the Asian community, especially those most marginalized: In this moment of heightened visibility for the Asian community, we’re noticing that East Asians, cisgender men, corporate business leaders, and all the intersections of that are being seen as thought leaders. We challenge each and every one of us to center the folks who are most impacted by the violence we are seeing today. When we organize events to address anti-Asian attacks, does the speaker lineup reflect the fact that women have reported experiencing more than 2.3x the number of hate incidents than men, according to Stop AAPI Hate? We also want to challenge Asian folks who are organizing through their employee resource groups at work to broaden their sense of community to the Asian folks served, impacted, or even marginalized by your company’s business operations. When we build community under the label of being Asian, we have a responsibility to think of the Asian folks who aren’t at the table that we are building.
Of course, this is just the perspective of two individuals. But as we wrote this, it got us thinking: Would our hopes resonate for others? What are we missing? How can other Asians who care deeply also share what they hope for, too?
We know there’s a lot of work going on right now to continue to call attention to injustices of anti-Asian violence — and the work can look different. Some of us are having tough conversations with family and friends. Some of us are fundraising for people and organizations. Some of us are challenging behaviors in our predominantly white corporate workplaces. Some of us are attending virtual and in person events to be in community and learn from one another. Some of us are joining protests.
If you’re engaged in any work, we invite you to take a moment to pause, breathe, and check in with the how of the work.
And to help us shape our collective identity and our collective how, what if we first started to individually answer the question of What does it mean to each of us to be Asian American?
We invite you to reflect on this question in whatever means feels appropriate for you and if you’re feeling compelled, join us for a conversation on April 22nd at 5:30pm PT / 8:30pm ET. You can find the link to register here. After you register, we’ll share more details about what you can expect.
We’ll create space during the conversation to share reflections on the question as Asian Americans, build community, and make meaning of this moment together. We hope to see you soon.
In community, solidarity and love,
Authors’ Note
As the authors, we want to name our own locations as it relates to power dynamics: One of us is an East Asian (Chinese and Taiwanese American) cisgender man and the other is a Southeast Asian (Vietnamese American) cisgender woman. We’re both the children of immigrants. We’re millennials with college degrees from predominantly white institutions, and we’re both diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants who work in corporate America. We don’t believe we have it all figured out. In fact, our own journeys to unpack our place as Asian Americans in the movement for racial and social justice are lifelong work. We’re also cognizant the two of us have not been on this journey as long as many other leaders, activists and organizers in our community have. And we’re grateful to always be learning.
This article represents the views of its individual authors, and not the organizations and employers they are affiliated with.
