The harrowing rise of anti-Asian violence
That we can address anti-Asian racism without being anti-Black
Happy Black History Month!! Welcome to The Breaking Point, a weekly(ish) newsletter that explores the historical legacies of injustice based on the news cycle and culture trends to understand what in the world is going on.
(Source: Advancing Justice - LA)
On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, was beaten to death by two white men in Detroit, Michigan. At the time, the United States auto industry was facing high unemployment rates due to the recession as the presence of Japanese auto manufacturers grew in the country.
“It’s because of you little m****f***s that we’re out of work,” witnesses claim the perpetrators allegedly told Chin, who was celebrating with friends at his bachelor party. (Again, Chin is Chinese American). Later that night, at a parking lot, the men beat him to death.
At the trial, the white men were only sentenced to three years probation and were each fined $3,000. Despite two civil rights trials and a civil suit, the two white attackers never spent a day in jail. Chin’s murder ignited a massive civil rights movement among Asian Americans across ethnic lines — a movement that still exists today.
But Vincent Chin’s case is just one of the many incidents in which Asians have been physically and verbally attacked and harassed in the United States. Before the Covid-19 pandemic reached the US, my partner and I (he’s Vietnamese and I’m Filipino) were already wary of the possible anti-Asian sentiment that would emerge as a result of the rising infection rates in China. Once, we were in Trader Joe’s buying groceries when this white man yelled at the white woman next to me saying, “Hey, you don’t have that Chinese flu, right?” I tweeted this encounter in January 2020. Little did I know, the words “Chinese flu” or “China virus” or “kung flu” would later come out of the sitting US president’s mouth.
Over a year since that encounter — still in the middle of the same pandemic — anti-Asian violence continues to surge. Even more heartbreaking, the attackers are targeting the elders in the Asian community. The very people who hold the treasures and stories of our ancestors. Last July, two men slapped an 89-year-old Chinese lady in the face and set her clothes on fire in Brooklyn, New York. Last month, Vicha Ratanapakdee — an 84-year-old Thai man — died after a brutal attack in San Francisco. Around the same time, a 64-year-old Vietnamese lady was robbed at a parking lot in San Jose ahead of Lunar New Year. On February 3, Noel Quintana — a 61-year-old Filipino — was slashed on the face with a box cutter inside a subway train in New York City.
These attacks — like every other societal issue in the United States of America — are legacies of decades-long anti-Asian sentiment, oppression of people of color, and white supremacy.
Figure of the week: 8.7 million
The number of people who died globally in 2018 from air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, according to new research by scientists from Harvard University, University of Birmingham, and University of Leicester. (Study press release link)
When New York began its social distancing and stay-at-home restrictions, I visited Brooklyn’s Sunset Park — a large Chinese immigrant neighborhood also known as Brooklyn’s Chinatown. I wrote a feature for Vox detailing how the neighborhood and small businesses are struggling in large part due to coronavirus-related xenophobia. A few months later, amid the nationwide protests for Black lives, I wrote about how despite this anti-Asian sentiment, the Asian community still needs to address anti-Blackness ingrained in our culture.
And while there is a lot to unpack in these upsetting incidents — especially considering how some of the suspects were also people of color — I’m afraid we don’t have enough space in this newsletter to dive deeper into the various aspects and historical legacies of anti-Blackness, model minority myth, anti-Asian racism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and more. (See previous paragraph for links to a more curated analysis on anti-Blackness).
After my story on anti-Blackness was published, one of the most common arguments I received was to the effect of “but what about the Black people who attack people in the Asian community?” To which I say, we can fight anti-Asian racism and xenophobia without being anti-Black. Both communities have a long history of trauma perpetuated by white supremacy. I’ll also point to several people in the space using their platforms to speak out about this decades-long issue:
This thread:
Last June, while working on my Vox piece on anti-Blackness, I spoke with Scott Kurashige, a scholar, professor, and author of books on political revolutions, race, and ethnicity — and so I’ll end with this quote from him that didn’t make it into the story:
“So to sum up, I feel that confronting the model minority complicity with white supremacy and anti-Blackness necessitates that Asian Americans be conscious of the history of white supremacy, slavery, and genocide at the core of US capitalism and national identity.
At the same time, as we do this, we need to challenge and enlarge our thinking about Asian American history and consciousness itself, so that when we raise awareness of issues like the beating of Vincent Chin, we don't turn him into a "perfect victim" (a variation on the model minority), and that we instead link that movement for justice to incidents of state violence; recognize that Asian Americans from working-class, refugee, and undocumented backgrounds are more likely to face different and harsher forms of policing and oppression; and see incidents that occur in places like Detroit as connected to patterns of anti-Black oppression and the carceral state.”
Kurashige is the author of the following books which I highly recommend reading about these issues: The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (2008), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (co-authored with Grace Lee Boggs, 2011), and The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit (2017).
Story breakers 📖
Inheritance: A project about American history, Black life, and the resilience of memory, The Atlantic
How the Police Bank Millions Through Their Union Contracts by Andrew Ford, Asbury Park Press, and Agnes Chang, Jeff Kao & Agnel Philip, ProPublica
'A death sentence': US prisons could receive Covid vaccines last despite being hotspots by Kiran Misra, The Guardian
Unemployment continues to be highest for women of color, while it drops for White women by Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th News
A child sex abuser evaded justice in Kenya. Then an ‘ordinary woman’ took matters into her own hands by Max Bearak and Rael Ombuor, The Washington Post
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