Private Danny Chen and threats to justice everywhere

(photo by Kwong Eng)

When it was first discovered that an Asian American soldier had been found dead in Afghanistan from non-combat injuries, following hazing by his superiors, it was a blip in media consciousness, one story, if at all, to be the end of the story. Our lives carried on seamlessly, and besides the few individuals in this country who had happened to catch that passing spot in select New York media sources, the whole thing had never even happened. Even I thought that the significance of the story wouldn’t last the night, and though deeply saddened and troubled by what had happened, I resigned myself to the reality that this incident would fade into the rest of the invisible history of injustice against our community.

I was quickly pulled out of my resignation when I was asked to join a committee, led by OCA-NY, which was organizing to demand from the Army a fair and transparent investigation of Private Danny Chen’s death. As we met with the family and began planning an action to raise awareness, I was not entirely optimistic about the effect our action would have, considering that the horrifying brutality of the incident itself hadn’t seemed to ruffle a feather.

Trying to contribute the most I could to the campaign, I focused the goals of my own efforts on empowering the people in this city to speak out. I was less concerned with strategizing around the investigation because real justice is so scarcely given in these cases, and I had come to see all those meetings with power players as largely symbolic echoes of the status quo, in which we would get nothing from these officials but formulaic answers about policies that should have protected us.

Two and a half months later, Private Danny Chen’s name is plastered all over the national mainstream media, as if he has just been found dead. The explosion of media attention followed the announcement from the Army that eight soldiers had been charged in Danny’s death. But for the family members and activists who had been pressing for justice since the beginning of October, the guilt of these soldiers was not news, and the circumstances of the case had not become any more abominable or newsworthy. It was as if we had been telling everyone the whole time that something intolerable had happened, that Danny’s death was either a racially motivated murder by his fellow soldiers or the result of constant harassment and merciless violence against Danny by those same soldiers, but up until the moment the media decided it was important, people seemed unimpressed.

The sudden turnaround in our nation’s response to this event has really illustrated two things for me. The first is that when you are an underrepresented person, the most inhumane things that happen to your community are not news until you MAKE them news. Our campaign, which included a march and rally that brought over 400 people from the area, sent out the message that we as a community were not going to be silenced. As marginalized people, we had to convince the media, through grassroots action, that the world would actually care about what happened to Private Danny Chen– that despite the traditional invisibility of Asian Americans in our mainstream consciousness, this would actually be considered worthy of the public’s attention.

News outlets, in deciding which stories get coverage, don’t just respond to the interests of their readership but determine the things that people will be interested in. And as we can see by the widespread alarm of the public following the national media coverage of the case, it wasn’t due to a lack of interest or newsworthiness that there had been a blackout on this case up until now. The media holds the power in determining our national response to events of injustice, so we need to make sure they do their job.

The second thing I learned is that community action can be the essential means to an end. I know that, as an activist, this should be obvious to me. But as a community organizer, the goals of my activism have revolved around the process of empowering members of our communities, so much so that the goals in terms of what our organized power can achieve often become secondary. In the world of community organizing, it seems standard to start from community engagement first and then to find issues for the purposes of empowering people in the community, rather than starting with the issues and then finding the people to support those issues because their support is absolutely necessary. The actual demands of the action, and the interactions we have with elected officials and other power players around that action, sometimes seem more like exercises than critical steps to achieve a definite goal.

But this time, the issue was the catalyst, and the people who came out to demand justice for Private Danny Chen made the difference. When over 400 people walked through the streets chanting “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE” and congregated for a vigil that ignited our passion, the media had no choice but to start taking interest in the case, and it was only a matter of time before we heard back from the Army, who had been trying to sweep this embarrassment under the rug.

During our planning for the march and rally, we considered the fact that people had to know this was not just an Asian American issue. The death of a US soldier at the hands of his superiors is an affront to our civil rights, national security, government transparency, and so much more than that, and just because it happened to an Asian American body does not mean the rest of our country is exempt from having to care. Originally, we had been planning to have the action in Columbus Park in Chinatown, to make it accessible to residents of that community who were most affected by the death of one of their community members, but the concern arose that it would be seen as just a “Chinese” thing. We ultimately decided to start a march from the Army Recruiting Center in TriBeCa, as a way of bringing it beyond the Chinatown borders. Still, the turnout was mostly Asian Americans, with some valuable support from Occupy Wall Street and other concerned individuals. What was even more troubling was that as we stood on the street outside the Army Recruiting Center with our signs and candles, most people hurriedly pushed past us, expressing their annoyance that we were blocking the sidewalk rather than taking a second to realize why we were there.

The sad truth is that these incidents of gross violence and injustice happen so often that it takes a lot to overcome people’s threshold for caring. And especially when these issues get boxed into racial categories, people who don’t identify with the race in question feel it’s okay to stop listening completely. Race in America is a factor that makes issues that concern all of us somehow concern only some of us, when the reality is that the presence of race as a motivating factor for injustice should be even more a reason for nationwide concern, considering the deeper implications that it has on the state of our country’s civil rights and the reflection it bears on our humanity as Americans.

We all need to pay attention when anyone in this country is attacked for his or her identity, not just when the attacks are against people who are like us. When a gay college student is tormented by his peers to the point of suicide, we all need to respond. When a black man is beaten by power-crazed police due to prejudice, we all need to respond. When a state decides to chase out its undocumented immigrants, the very people on whose backs its economy depends, based on obviously false economic justifications, we all need to respond. And not only that, but we also have to respond to the daily reality and culture of oppression in this country, including stop-and-frisk, bullying, and hate speech, which make life for marginalized people impossible. We all need to respond to these things because they are not isolated events – they are symptomatic of something else that is dangerously wrong at the core of this country. We need to emphasize the fact that these attacks on people from our communities should not and, in reality, do not affect only our communities.

I am haunted by the words of Former Commander of U.S. Forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, on why we shouldn’t sweat killing all those Vietnamese people: “Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful; life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” Racially motivated hate and violence does not start with individuals. It is written into the establishment of our country. The spread of racist ideas was necessary in order to justify slavery, American imperialism, our ongoing wars abroad, and the continued reliance of our economy on the perpetual underclass. These incidents are not anomalies but the predictable results of the way our country has been set up. With this in mind, each and every one of us needs to act, for each other and with each other, in order to achieve fundamental changes in this country. Only then will we be able to say, NEVER AGAIN.

Rest in peace Danny.

Private Danny Chen, and why I will never again reach out to OWS about something that matters to me

cross-posted on racialicious

I can't stress enough that the following article only represents my opinions as an individual, and are not to be affiliated with any other person, organization or community:
December 15, 2011

Tonight was the march and vigil for Private Danny Chen, who was killed in the army on October 3, 2011. We don't know how he died. The army is withholding all evidence, which it owes to the family, that could answer this question. What we do know is that he did not die in combat. We know he was constantly harassed and discriminated against by his fellow soldiers for being Chinese. We know some really twisted, violent hazing was committed against him by his superiors, right before he was found dead. We decided to hold a march and vigil because the army is currently carrying out an investigation, and we have to show them that the public is watching and that they cannot get away with another cover-up.

Just yesterday, board members of OCA-NY along with Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and Council Member Margaret Chin went to the Pentagon to meet with high-ranking army officials, where they made demands that may fundamentally transform the way that hazing and bias crimes are dealt with in the military. We need them to know that the public and the media are watching, and that if they do not meet our demands, we will redirect our campaign to focus on our young men and women who are thinking of enlisting. These young people need to know before they enlist, the Army will not protect them from harm by fellow soldiers.

Before the vigil, we reached out to many organizations to support, and 36 signed onto our cause. We also reached out to Occupy Wall Street because justice and government transparency are in its mission, and we thought we could use the numbers and networks in OWS to bring out more support for our vigil, and we also wanted to show our solidarity with OWS.

So imagine my surprise when protesters from OWS showed up with OWS signs, not to stand with others lining up for the march to Columbus Park in support, but to stand in front of everyone, trying to direct them. These people, who had not, until that very moment, put in one bit of effort into organizing this action, who had no idea what the plan was, who had no idea who we were or who the family was, decided that they were going to make this an OWS event.

Conflict erupted when one of the OWS-affiliated protesters came with a giant Communist Party of China flag. This white man decided that he was entitled to represent us, at this protest for an American soldier, with a flag that has been used by this country to vilify the Chinese American community. When people began asking him not to demonstrate that flag because it was not the purpose of the event and we were in no way representing China or political parties, he began screaming at us about how we were ANTI-COMMUNIST and trying to take away his first amendment rights. We told him that Danny Chen was an American soldier and we wanted to respect the family and their wishes, but he continued screaming violent accusations at us at the top of his lungs and disrupting the event, until one of Danny Chen’s family members, on the verge of tears, finally convinced him to leave.

Then I overheard another OWS protester, who had earlier been trying to direct the protesters, give a video interview, and heard him saying, ever so solemnly, “They don’t want me here.” My question is: who are we and who are you? How do you expect to be welcomed as one of “us” when you have, from the beginning, made every effort to set yourself apart? Why do you think that you as an individual should be primary in this march for Private Danny Chen and his family? Why are you here giving video interviews?

Another white OWS protester began trying to use the human mic to direct the protest, and told me that I shouldn’t be using the blowhorn because the cops were going to take it away. I told her that, no, we had a parade permit and sound permit, which was why the police were there clearing the streets for our march. She looked confused and stopped yelling.

OWS protesters often make it seem like they are the birth of social justice activism, that they are here to teach us how to protest because none of us know what the fuck we are doing and need their wealth of experience to help us out. I was not at all surprised when that woman so naturally assumed that she, as a white woman, knew better than me - she thought that I had found a blowhorn somewhere and decided to play around with it. It didn’t occur to her that we had been planning this for weeks and thinking critically about every step, that it was led by a civil rights organization that has been at work for decades, that we had applied for 4 different kinds of permits so that our event could safely and effectively achieve its purpose.

The actions of these OWS protesters showed that they were at the march and vigil, not to show their support for Danny Chen’s family or the ongoing work on their case, but to provoke and garner attention for themselves and their brand, and then try to turn our strategic work and planning into a nonsensical, self-righteous tantrum. They acted like tourists on vacation in the social justice world, and our efforts and long-term goals were expendable in light of their self-interested pursuit of an interesting experience.

This is the problem I’ve always had with OWS—that it was a movement that came to earth as Christ himself, here to save us, to make the history of struggle, and the ongoing social justice work in this country by marginalized communities, irrelevant, and then to take the moral high ground and act as if we were the face of THEIR oppression when we took issue with their tactics.

I understand many people who came to the vigil from OWS were there with the right intentions, and it was great to have their support and solidarity. But these incidents of ignorance from OWS have been way too frequent and predictable to be isolated events. These incidents show that the OWS movement, while creating new opportunities to change the unjust world we live in, is, in many ways, the beloved child of our racist, sexist, intolerant capitalist society.

As marginalized people in this country rise, new forms of oppression are at work – those who have not experienced systemic oppression are claiming it anyway, turning social justice on its head and diluting the messages and movements that have been our hearts and souls. I think this quote from the New Jim Crow sheds a lot of light on why OWS emerged the way that it did: "Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold."

I tried to love the movement. Since I wrote about OWS last, I’ve been attending OWS meetings and marches. I reached out to OWS about this action. I tried so hard to understand the movement, to check my own biases and question any negative feelings I had towards it, to engage with it as much as time would allow. I had so many conversations with people in OWS spaces, which usually just left me feeling perplexed, as the basic factors involved in social and economic inequity always seemed to be news to the people I was speaking to or a curious piece of trivia to be quickly passed over, and people would instead start talking to me about things like herbal medicine as if I had any fucking clue, or would say really ignorant things that would leave me feeling attacked.

I deal with ignorant bigots every day and am willing to do so as part of my own commitment to my work, but when bigots come posing as allies and then very dramatically play the martyr when we call out their bullshit, it really derails our ability to do our work.

I now realize that my time cannot be wasted trying to work in spaces that are paralyzed by ignorance. I will continue to engage in my activism using my experiences and empathy to guide the way I choose to live and work. But I’ll choose to do it in spaces where bigotry, drama, and ignorance do not masquerade as the thing I love. And I’ll choose to work with people who join community actions to respect and support those communities, not to objectify and use them as ornaments for their movement bereft of genuine compassion and understanding.

Besides the oppression brought by some OWS protesters, the march and vigil were beautiful. Over 400 people came out, and the interactions were passionate and heartfelt. I am proud to be an Asian American and glad to be involved in the struggle for a military and a world that does not ruthlessly exclude and exterminate those who are different in any way. I feel blessed to have a fierce mentor who, during the meeting with the Pentagon, told the Assistant Secretary of the Army to sit back down when he tried to leave their meeting early, and he actually listened. I think that our capacity for resistance is growing and we are finally feeling empowered and entitled in this country. We have taken far too much shit, and we are unapologetically asking to be seen as fully human. I am excited for the future of our communities and look forward to growing with each other and our true allies, and despite the importance of building relationships with the more enfranchised, we should never have to tolerate that kind of oppression, least of all in the spaces where we are trying to fight it.

Photos courtesy of Kwong Eng

Click here for coverage about the march and vigil (LOVE the title of this article, btw.)

http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2011/12/protesters-demand-justice-for-danny-chen-military-reforms.html#more-50714

http://www.dnainfo.com/20111216/lower-east-side-east-village/march-for-chinatown-solider-danny-chen-draws-hundreds-calling-for-answers

Arundhati Roy

"I know that I don't want to be worn to the bone where I lose my sense of humor. But once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something."

From The Progressive's interview with Arundhati Roy: http://www.progressive.org/intv0401.html

Among the 99%

cross-posted on racialicious

(Note: These are my undeveloped thoughts about Occupy Wall Street, which may be unfair to many people. I would love to have my views checked and challenged by anyone who might see things differently. Thanks.)

For the past few months, the vague idea of a revolution had been constantly on my mind, and though I didn’t know how exactly it would be carried out or what specific changes it could achieve, it seemed like the only way out of the ridiculous state of our country. So it should have seemed like a serendipitous turn of events event for Occupy Wall Street, the vague idea of a revolution incarnate, to pop up in New York and very rapidly gain widespread support. Yet for some reason, I felt very hesitant to sign onto the movement in any way. I would never want to discourage or discount the efforts of people who recognize the need for change in our country and actually take a stand for it. But try as I might, I couldn’t seem to connect to the whole thing. It wasn’t a matter of being jaded or cynical – my ideals easily and constantly compel me into action, but nothing about Occupy Wall Street seemed to compel me. In fact, what I was seeing and hearing about it made me feel even more disempowered. I didn’t know how to explain it exactly, but thought it might have something to do with:

· the fact that it was popularized by admittedly privileged organizations and individuals

· the empty and misleading symbolism of “Wall Street”

· the demographics drawn to it and the exclusive methods of communication used to reach out to them

· and the disconnect I observed between this movement and the historic work of marginalized communities throughout the country, especially in this city, which continues to be carried out day by day with very little attention.

Struggling with these feelings and recognizing my own biases, I approached the protest as open-mindedly as possible. I showed up at Liberty Plaza last Friday night, with some people from my program, and we made our way through the almost theatrical encampment at Liberty Plaza and sat in for the occupation’s general assembly. Once there, however, I realized that the representation was even more limited than I had expected. The crowd was overwhelmingly and undeniably white and, from the looks of it, “hip” in a way that privilege enables people to be. All the moderators were young, educated white people, as were all those who seemed to be playing a more direct role in the assembly.

As one who has been subjected to spaces dominated by white privilege all my life, I felt a guttural negative reaction to the scene, and could not help but feel oppressed by it, despite my hope and desire to feel solidarity with the people there. I can’t fully explain or justify my feelings, and I know a lot of it is a matter of my own biases, which have developed through a long process of struggling against white dominance and power in my own country, city, school, etc. and having to overcome feelings of Otherness in all spaces. I don’t want to take away from the presence of people of color at the protest, who I am sure have been actively involved and dedicated to the process. In my personal experience of the protest, however, Occupy Wall Street was just another place in the world where I felt marginal and tokenized, where the terms of the game were once again being dictated to me by the white majority.

I recognize that these feelings are personal and in need of more critical exploration, and I’m sure many people of color would disagree with me completely. Aside from these feelings, my hesitance toward Occupy Wall Street has to do with my own vision of an American revolution. I believe that a true revolution cannot be carried out by those who are comfortable enough with the power structures that exist. It cannot have been initiated by a privileged organization of educated people who are shielded from the worst aspects of our unjust society, who have plenty of options in life and to whom the fact of oppression is not much more than an intellectual entity. A true revolution must be carefully and gradually mobilized by those who have been most oppressed and marginalized by the current state of our government and economy, whose continued existence in this world really depends on a radical change. Otherwise, we are replicating the structures of power that continue to oppress us.

It was shocking to me to see how poorly immigrant communities and communities of color had been included in Occupy Wall Street. I guess the reasoning or justification is that, since all the dispossessed masses and people of color are covered by the “99%”, this protest is all-inclusive. But the fact is that amongst that 99% exist great inequalities of their own and extreme gradations of wealth and privilege, which are inextricably tied to race, despite the general assembly’s blatant attempt to suggest we live in a country “formerly divided by race” (Read this: http://henaashraf.com/2011/09/30/brown-power-at-occupy-wall-street/). To act as if we share one experience and one problem and therefore seek the same solution would be a terrible lie and an extremely weak and superficial grounds for collective action, especially if the voices that have begun to dominate the movement have the least to lose if the movement were to fail. It’s great to feel solidarity with one another against the people who rule over the 99%, but within the 99% are plenty of people who rule over the rest in their own way, and this makeshift solidarity can only go so far.

The fact that there is no clear demand reveals the lack of urgency on the part of those who are shaping it. It’s a movement fueled by ambiguity and theater, and it’s hard to say that this movement could survive the process of forming real demands that can significantly improve the lives of the 99%. The reality is that there are a lot of VERY urgent demands out there, which have been very carefully researched and formulated by marginalized communities, but this movement seems to have all the time in the world when it comes to deciding on what it really wants to take action for. I saw signs about college graduates not having jobs and signs protesting the lack of funding for art students, and it is great that these people are taking a stand to change a world that does not allow them to achieve their dreams even though they did everything in their power to make it happen. But while those people might be unemployed or underemployed because they can’t find a decent job in the field of their choice, on the other hand there are people cleaning toilets and being subject to all sorts of abuse, who have never had the option to pursue their dreams, and as evidenced by the turnout, don’t have the time to come perform their feelings about the injustices they live.

After the general assembly, we stopped by a dinky little sushi restaurant nearby, where an Asian immigrant woman was working frantically into the late hours of the night to prepare noodles and make the last of her day’s earnings. It struck me that this woman, working around the clock and living a life in the United States that could not have been the life she had imagined for herself, could not participate in, much less lead or help determine, the movement being carried out a block away in her name - a movement which would more readily include her as a nameless point in their argument than a voice in its future.