the construction of Asian America: a personal history

On June 8, 2012, I delivered a 15-minute monologue on my Asian American identity as my final presentation for a 10-month program. Not exactly what I was supposed to do, but anyway, here it is - I hope it can speak to some people out there:

The number of times I have to say Asian/Pacific Islander American in the course of my day really makes me wish that we had a more concise name for our community. The name gives away the fact that we are not really one coherent community, but a synthesis of countless identities. While I cannot fully understand the breadth of this construct, it is deeply infused into all that I am. When I’m not working at Asian Americans for Equality, I’m often working on something else as a board member of OCA-NY or as co-director of the New York chapter of Asian Pacific Americans for Progress. Along with these three intersecting roles, I am always analyzing questions of race, power, and privilege in every day life, and though I sometimes wish I could choose to stop seeing these things, I can’t.

Before I left for college, however, the concept of an Asian American identity did not exist for me. I grew up in a largely Korean community of LA where we were bound together by the personal and extremely specific stories we held in common. We created an intimate community for ourselves and lived by one another’s needs and hands. We created our own culture and support systems that were neither typically Korean nor typically American. All my friends were second generation Korean Americans who understood much of my identity without me needing to explain it to them. I had never been to a doctor, dentist, optometrist or hair salon outside of Koreatown, a world and economy unto itself.

Despite being children of the LA riots and living in a place so clearly delineated by ethnic lines, my friends and I were not very politically aware. We did not have the vocabulary to talk about race relations, and our immigrant parents, who were often working tirelessly to give us possibilities they had never dreamed of, could not possibly prepare us for the racialized world they had brought us into. Nevertheless, we recognized the reality in which we existed. We could feel the backlash against our quickly growing immigrant community. We could see the racist smear campaigns on TV against Asian Americans running for local office. We could read in our local papers about how scared white people were getting about all those foreign language signs in the neighborhood.

When I switched coasts to start school at Columbia, it was like entering a new world. I began experiencing the clash between my Korean background and an elite institution that consciously pressured us to identify with upper-class, white privilege, starting with the posh garden parties for our pre-orientation to the very essence of our core curriculum, a blatant fetishization of the Western world. I heard many people, including professors and administrators, joke about how our core curriculum was really supposed to prepare us for “cocktail parties,” and though they seemed to state this ironically, they also seemed to enjoy it. While I was only able to be at Columbia because I received a full-ride in financial aid, I realized many people around me hadn’t even considered applying for it. In both subtle and overt ways, I was made to feel ashamed about all the ways in which I fell short of privilege.

Removed from my Korean American bubble, I realized that people used the word Asian a lot, even to refer to me. I had only ever heard this term used to mean harm, to mock the existence of Korean Americans in our community and brand us with stereotypes that didn’t even bastardize the right country. I also heard, for the first time, the identifier, “people of color,” which manifested itself on Columbia’s campus in very bizarre ways. Many people of color at Columbia seemed to wear their ethnic identities like a badge and talk about their identities in dogmatic jargon. And if you couldn’t talk the talk, it seemed you were not welcome in those spaces, despite the fact that the people most identified with those spaces were often the most privileged people of color.  It was jarring to me that spaces meant for inclusion and empowerment would do so little to include and empower those they claimed to represent, who may not have had the same privileges to arrive at that point in the first place. My Korean identity had never been an entity to be held apart from me in order to be evaluated and used at will. It was just who I was, an identity all-consuming, deeper than any jargon could capture.

As I began to learn more about this Asian American identity, however, I began to understand that it had to exist precisely because of perception. To most people, it didn’t really matter whether we were born here or somewhere else, whether we spoke English or something else, whether we were here as refugees or postgraduate students. All people needed to know in order to form their conclusions was that we were yellow.

I began to realize that the ignorance of others, and their complacence about their ignorance, had defined my existence in this country in very real and often institutionalized ways. It disturbed me that our experiences of the world should be so dramatically shaped by what others decided you were, regardless of what you actually were. This realization began to make sense of a lifetime of discrimination that I had not really had the vocabulary to confront before.

I realized my experiences of discrimination and racism were not isolated or imaginary but real, historical, and systemically experienced. I realized that these experiences had nothing to do with my identity, but the identity others had made for me.

During college, I only took a few Asian American and ethnic studies classes, but they had a significant impact on me—not just because of the content but the experience of being primary in an academic environment for the first time in my life. In those classes, my opinions and experiences, in their unadulterated form, were suddenly relevant to an academic discussion. I didn’t have to phrase all my comments and present my opinions in a way that I had learned from the white mainstream rather than from my own parents and community in order to be heard. I didn’t have to preface every comment with an explanation of why I might have a different perspective. And I was for once an expert about the world I inhabited.

As I began to tune into the world of not just Asian America but the movements and struggles of different communities of color, I realized the deep commonalities in the experiences of such a diverse range of people, who had all been impacted by where they fell in relation to whiteness or histories of colonization. In finding my place in history for the first time, central parts of my life finally began to make sense, and it hit me that I had never before felt entitled to a place in the only country that was my own.

After I graduated, I moved into the Lower East Side, and one day, I noticed a building with a sign that read, “Asian Americans for Equality.” It was a significant moment to come upon such a sign, in such an unexpected place, a sign that seemed to point directly to my experience and physically draw out a space intended for me. I wouldn’t be in this position today if I hadn’t seen that sign.

A few moments later, I walked into a bar where my sister was holding her engagement party. As I tried to make my way back to my sister’s group, a white woman looked at me and turned to tell her friends, “There’s a group of Asians back there. You really can’t get away from that these days.” It was a tired moment, a constant presence in the lives of people who are not white in this country, a moment in which someone expresses that your marked body does not have the right to simply occupy space. The collision of these two moments illustrated a constant struggle–-the struggle to establish and define myself against the constant attempts of people to define me as less than themselves. It is a mentality that has been ingrained into all of us, a story woven around histories of conquest and occupation, slavery, and the violent demarcation of borders, which has stealthily bled into the globalized capitalism of today.

The reason why I chose to reflect on my identity as a final overview of the past 10 months is that knowing myself and my past gives me the confidence to go on and create the reality I want to live.

It is a significant experience in and of itself to work with staff and community members who look like me, to no longer be constantly subject to the racial power dynamics that have been normalized in our society. To have a supervisor and coworkers who respect my beliefs and my identity and don’t trivialize my work. It has felt like shedding blinders, and the feeling of empowerment that I’ve gained by doing so has bled into other areas of my life as well.

This sort of empowerment often scares people. We are made to feel crazy or paranoid for feeling the way we do, despite the fact that these realizations are made independently across communities and borders. After we undergo a long process of unlearning and reclaiming ourselves, we are then told that the power structures we have finally recognized are nonexistent or unimportant. And when we challenge those structures or create communities for ourselves in order to forgo the need to submit to them, people call it reverse racism.

The Mexican American studies program in Tucson high schools was banned because people were scared that it was “promot[ing] the overthrow of the U.S. government”. It is pretty unbelievable to hear the statements made by education administrators and politicians on this issue, and it is telling that to teach the truth about history, and document the existence of other cultures and experiences, is considered an overthrow of our country. What these people can’t recognize is that the every day privileges they take for granted – to just be normal, relevant and acceptable in the country that is theirs – are not available for everyone.

Asian American identity is not based on ancient manuscripts or passed down traditions or really any inherent ties– it is an identity based on constant choice and invention, an identity with a purpose. It has only a few decades under its belt and is therefore very young and impressionable, and it is a movement that I have seen myself tangibly affect.

By asserting a collective Asian American identity, we use the power of our numbers to assert the equal standing of our diverse community and reject the notion that any one of us is subsidiary, or in need of assimilation.

By identifying with other ethnicities, nationalities, customs, cultures, colors, and religions within our shared community, we choose to not only accept, but identify with, difference.

On the flip side, I think we need to recognize the responsibilities we have when we identify ourselves and others under a shared umbrella. We cannot ignore the fragile identities at stake and the assumptions we create when we do so. We cannot name our organizations Asian American without being vigilant about whether or not we are working with and for a community that is meaningfully so, and admitting the extreme limitations we have to ever doing this perfectly.

In 2 weeks it will be the anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin. Vincent Chin was a Chinese American who was attacked and ultimately killed because 2 white autoworkers thought he was Japanese and forced him to bear the cross of the Japanese auto industry, during a time when American autoworkers were losing their jobs. This was a time when the people of Detroit were publicly bashing Japanese cars to express their insatiable, territorial rage. In Vincent Chin’s case, it was an entire community and our judicial system that worked in tandem with 2 murderers, allowing them off with no jail time, no recognition that to beat an Asian body to death with a baseball bat was wrong. When people are discriminated against, harmed, or even killed because they are identified as Asian, I think we need to recognize how our choice to define ourselves as a shared community may perpetuate the ignorance leading to those circumstances.

I think we must remain most accountable to the most disenfranchised among us, especially recent immigrant communities who might not be talking about politics in the same ways as our organizations, or people like my mother, who don’t identify as Asian Americans, or really even feel entitled to call themselves Americans.

I also think our Asian American identity is in desperate need of artistic inspiration. I don’t think we can have a movement that is meaningful and truly communal without nurturing our writers, our artists, our music, and our media. And I leave this experience with a greater investment in helping to support the art and culture around social change, believing that these are central to the success of our movements.

Lastly, I believe that we should only identify as Asian American as a strategic act of resistance against racism. In all other occasions, we should not settle for less than accurate identifications of ourselves. It gives me hope that one of the central aspects of Asian American identity is the deconstruction of the model minority stereotype, an act that denies the myth of meritocracy and gives a voice to the segments of our population struggling most, whose very existence is denied by this myth. It is also an act of coalition building because it undermines the white power structure and media, which use the apparent successes of one community to deny the institutionalized oppression and systemic poverty affecting others.

I believe it is one of the most important acts of resistance in this country to recognize the ways in which communities of color have been pitted against each other. By doing so, we dismantle some of the biggest lies on which inequality and injustice are founded.

I am only at the beginning of a long journey. But what I treasure most about the last 10 months is the greater confidence it has given me to assert my beliefs and innovate toward a visionary idea of change and a more rational reality. It has led me to a place where I, as someone who doesn’t really like to talk very much, would choose to give a 15-minute monologue as my final presentation.

I won’t stop questioning why people want to deny others the simple indication that they are worth physical, mental, and spiritual space in this country. I hope that in all I do, I can help others find their place, right where they are.

On Marion Barry's Dirty Asian Problem

In response to Marion Barry's racist statement and subsequent justifications: “We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops,” Barry said. “They ought to go. I’m going to say that right now. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too.” (more here)

shorter version posted on 8asians

Dear Council Member Marion Barry,

Let me begin by telling you that I think you’re right… sort of. You are right to want healthy food for your community. You are right to have a problem with Plexiglass walls in stores. You are right to be concerned that there are not more businesses owned by African American residents in an African American community. However, your string of hateful remarks about Asian storeowners was based on nothing more than your own racism, and you have yet to identify the real problems affecting your community.

It is an uncomfortable thing to see Asian-owned stores in low-income African American communities. We easily picture this situation as one of exploitation, and start thinking that the problems in the area must be caused by the most visible “other.” Without some critical thinking, it’s easy to assume that this “other” must be the one siphoning all the wealth away from the community. The visibility of the Asian “other” in a poor community makes them easy targets and convenient explanations for all economic problems, and the visible disconnect between these "others" and the rest of the community makes them the clearest enemy.

These Asian storeowners are an especially easy target for you as a politician because you recognize they are immigrants without much of a political voice, and you understand what you can gain by igniting racial tensions between African American and Asian American communities. This is a tension that has been happily exploited by the white mainstream for decades, and has created a division that has damaged us both.

So let’s take a closer look at your proposed solution: if you go ahead and evict all these Asian businesses from your community, would life for your constituents actually get better? Would an organic fruit market rush in to fill the void left by the Chinese take-out joint? Would Whole Foods eagerly heed the call to come save your district? If these dirty Asian businesses left your ward, would this magically give the people from the community the resources to start their own businesses in their place? After all, the only thing in their way must have been that the prime real estate was being occupied by these dirty Asian stores. And if none of these things happened as you imagined they would, would you then be appeased if a McDonald’s came in to provide your community with other forms of cheap shit? Never mind the fact that McDonald’s makes billions of dollars of profit each year, special thanks to poor communities everywhere.

Now, let’s talk about the Plexiglass. You retweeted one person’s comment to the effect that Asian business owners put up Plexiglass because they’re scared that all these “animals” will rob and kill them. That’s really inflammatory, and I’m sure great politics. I would love to live in a world without Plexiglass, locks and gates. Plexiglass is a very obvious statement that the person behind it is trying not to get robbed, and I’m really sorry that the people in your community have to deal with that. But does that mean that the storeowners are fundamentally racist and scared of every person who comes through their doors? Or are they just aware that they are a place of business in a place where robberies happen, and if there’s just one person out there looking to rob them, they can lose everything, even their lives.

As an Asian American, I can’t help but feel deeply pained by all the stories of loss in my community, as I’m sure you feel for the losses in yours. And I become more frustrated and angry every time I see yet another story about an Asian storeowner or delivery man who was senselessly murdered on the job. These are just people with families working hard for a fair shot at life. There is a troubling pattern of violence against Asian Americans, and when the perpetrators are African American as they often are, many express their inability to see these Asian bodies as fully human. And it’s our youth who are suffering the most, stories like South Philadelphia high school come to mind.

I’ve stayed silent on this issue too often, and I see other Asian Americans doing the same. Our community is the last to make waves about the injustices we face. In our country’s black-white dichotomy, many Asian Americans don’t feel entitled enough to even enter the conversation, and racism against our community is never taken very seriously, even when it results in lost lives. Also, Asian Americans like myself often seek to be allies before all else in conversations about racial justice, so we hesitate to talk about the racism and violence against us by other people of color. But will we ever change anything by remaining silent? Or will the void of understanding between these two communities continue to be filled by simmering resentments that eventually explode?

It's interesting how you continue to refer to these wok and deli owners as “businessmen.” You are projecting onto them privilege and opportunity that they do not have. If they had more options in life, would they have chosen to work in these stores? How much money do you think these people actually make? They are doing the best they can to support themselves, with the cards that this world has dealt them. They are not cheating your community or brainwashing you to buy their products, they are working in Plexiglass boxes selling things like really cheap Chinese food to people who want to buy cheap Chinese food.

They are often immigrants, not by choice, but economic necessity. The causes of all the injustices in our world are wrapped up into many of the same root causes, from slavery and colonialism to the global capitalism of today. The fact that immigrants come to the United States, leaving behind their lives and all they know, to work in places where they are disrespected, unwanted, and targeted, should signal a much larger problem in this world that has hurt both your community and mine. As a self-proclaimed civil rights activist, you should understand that there is always so much more going on than what others, bent on hating you, will recognize.

As someone with options in life, I promise to you I will never come to your ward to make money off of your constituents. I’m privileged and educated and enfranchised enough to make my money elsewhere. I can choose a career that I love, in a great neighborhood to which I can also belong. I can choose a job in which I go around “helping” people, even though the reality is that my non-profit job is more complicit in the capitalist system, which continues to impoverish your community, than those Chinese takeout owners will ever be.

The real enforcers and beneficiaries of institutionalized racism and systemic poverty in this country will probably never step foot in your ward. They have created a world in which they never actually have to interact with poor people, or black people for that matter, and they can simply forget that you even exist. They can continue to exploit poor communities en masse and watch from above as the poor fight for crumbs. They never have to deal with the hard work and small change of running a takeout business. They sit in skyscrapers and in our government, enriching themselves off of poor communities of color by making our laws and our prisons, creating our debt, producing our music and movies, owning our big food corporations, and determining our fashions. Why don’t you take issue with them, and not the people who are struggling to eke out a living in this world?

I’m a Korean American and when I go to a Chinese-owned restaurant, I’m not shocked when the person behind the counter is curt with me, and I don’t expect much communication beyond placing my order because we don’t speak the same language. When I’m not given any fake smiles or small talk, I don’t take it as a sign of disrespect – I take it as the reality of living in a world of many different cultures and ways of being and people who are just trying to get by. And I even feel a little guilty for existing in a world in which these people have to sit in their “dirty” stores and make cheap food for me because the money in my pocket commands that they do so.

In your attempts to villainize these Asian storeowners, you contrast them against a picture of your community that appears to be a lot like Mister Roger’s neighborhood, where everyone loves each other and is working together to build the community, except for the Asian exploiters. What would you like these storeowners to do to participate in a way you find appropriate? Come to a block party? And since we live in a country in which English is not the official language, should this friendly engagement have to take place in a language that these immigrants do not speak?

I’m tired of Asian American communities constantly being scapegoated for problems that are so much larger than ourselves, problems from which our communities suffer as well. I’m tired of people wanting to heap our nation’s injustices onto my struggling immigrant parents and the hardworking, resilient, struggling community in which I was raised.

My parents came here with absolutely nothing. My dad worked at a gas station attendant and both my parents worked and saved until they were able to open their own auto repair shop in Koreatown, Los Angeles, home of the LA Riots. Now that my father has passed away, my mother works 60+ hours per week at a clothes store and doesn’t have health insurance, which is taking a harsh toll on her body. My parents were always largely unaware of our country’s toxic race relations (one thing about them that might be considered un-American). They were too focused on making sure that I had a chance to make it in this world, and too good of people to treat anyone with anything less than kindness and respect. I’m tired of having people project their own racist upbringing onto others and forcing us into a broken narrative that is not ours, though we do have a responsibility to make it better.

I’m tired of politicians like you who do not help marginalized communities to build and heal, but exploit your own people and gain reelection by stirring up hate and misunderstanding against other marginalized groups. This will only hurt the people you claim to be advocating for. The person who is truly exploiting these people is you.

And please don’t say one more word about your “track record” with the Asian American community if, at the end of the day, you will throw us all under a bus and resort to hateful, exploitative race-baiting to take care of yourself.

As an elected official who claims to be representing the best interests of his people, I ask that YOU “do better,” and actually do some critical thinking to come up with some solutions that will create real opportunities for your community, rather than resorting to hateful memes that will inevitably lead to more violence and misunderstanding and no solutions. And lastly, I ask that you extend your noble desire for the African American community to be understood and justly treated to other communities as well.

Sincerely,

Esther

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.