Host: Anya Steinberg (she/her/hers)
Episode 2: The Root of the Problem
This episode explores anti-Blackness in Asian/Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities both in the U.S. and abroad. We discuss people’s personal experiences with anti-Blackness in the community, as well as the complex historical, socioeconomic, and political factors that create anti-Blackness. We also talk about what different AAPI activists are doing to combat anti-Blackness.
Guests include: Nhan Le (Carleton College ’21), Thet Htar Thet (activist), Nam Nguyen (Vietnamese Solidarity and Action Network), Jieyi Cai (PhD student at the U of MN Twin Cities).
Anya Steinberg: Hi, and welcome to New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. I’m your host, Anya Steinberg. I’m the storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a non-partisan, non-profit based out of St. Paul, Minnesota, and focused on supporting the Asian American/Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
(This episode contains mention of police brutality and historical trauma related to war, and also some instances of swear words.)
On May 25th, 2020, police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, murdering him in front of bystanders and with the compliance of 3 other police officers. These unspeakable actions sparked international outrage,a s well as an uprising in Minneapolis. In the Asian American community, it also manifested in a lot of really uncomfortable revelations, as there was a Hmong American officer, Tou Thao, present at the scene of Floyd’s murder. Asian Americans all over my Facebook and Instagram feed were deeply critical of Thao’s presence. It seemed like every post was a passionate manifesto about the Aisan American community’s reckoning with anti-blackness. One thing I was left wondering was, where does this anti-blackness actually come from? So today, we’ll be covering what anti-Blackness is, where it stems from in Asian American communities, and how Asian Americans can and should combat it.
I talked to a bunch of young Asian Americans from all different backgrounds about what their reactions were when they learned that Tou Thao was present at the murder of George Floyd. Here’s what they said.
Nhan Le: The fact that he was Asian, I don’t know, in a sense it doesn’t really surprise me.
Jieyi Cai: I think it was striking, but also not surprising.
Nam Anh Nguyen: I was so disappointed, but at the same time, I wasn’t surprised.
Thet-Htar Thet: I was like, I’m not fucking surprised. I wasn’t surprised.
Anya: And the reason they weren’t surprised was overwhelmingly because they had witnessed anti-Blackness in Asian America all their lives.
But to be specific, in Asian and Asian American communities, examples of anti-Blackness manifest themselves in very specific ways. These include, but are not limited to, sexual racism (the idea that Asian American parents balk at the thought of their children bringing home a Black partner) and colorism (the idea that lighter-skinned Asians are more favorable because they are closer in proximity to whiteness).
But real quick, what does the term anti-Blackness mean? When we talk about anti-Blackness, we’re talking about the internalization and perpetuation of white supremacy. Anti-Blackness is a system. Anti-Blackness exists all over America. It is ingrained in and upheld by the structures of our country. But where does this idea come from? As I tried to chase down the answer to that question, it quickly became a tangle of string that led me through history, through U.S. imperialism and colonialism, and through the complexities of the immigrant experience.
Each of the people I talked to gave me several different origins of anti-Blackness. One of the biggest things people mentioned was how anti-Blackness is related to the immigrant identity and how that leads to a lack of understanding or education about history in the U.S.
I talked to Nhan, my life-long best friend, about her experience with her mom, who is a Vietnamese refugee.
Nhan: We were picking a movie to watch, and we saw Django Unchained. And my mom was just so confused by this concept. Like, why is this white person getting to force all these Black people to do all these things? And I was like, it’s called slavery, mom. She knows that slavery happened, but it’s just hard for her to, even if slavery is over, conceptualize how it plays into Black people’s lives today, and how that is still present through other means.
Anya: Another person I talked to, Jieyi, is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. They spoke to me about their Chinese immigrant parents.
Jieyi: Sometimes people don’t really think of themselves as part of American society or part of American history. I think it is sort of easier to ignore those systemic processes that have been building up over the last 500 years, and just, sort of like, we came here to build a new life and that’s it. We don’t have to worry about these other things. I’ve definitely seen it manifest in my own family for all of those reasons.
I think my family is one of those families that really has been able to live the American Dream of coming here with nothing and then ascending to the upper class. So I think they really see themselves as deserving of what they have because they worked hard and overcame every barrier. Sometimes my parents will talk about racism they’ve experienced, but they never talk about it as a systemic issue. It’s just sort of like this one person said this to me, or whatever, but it doesn’t matter, I don’t care, I still was able to do this. So if other people don’t have what they have, that means they didn’t work hard enough, they weren’t able to overcome these barriers, and that’s their fault.
I think they’ve also absorbed a lot of the white, upper class politics of respectability and trust in the system because the system has worked for them as far as they’re concerned. I think when they see Black people facing police violence or rioting because of state violence, they assume the Black people must have done something wrong because they haven’t had to experience police brutality or anything like that.
Anya: As somebody who grew up in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine the difficulty grappling with the historical and cultural contexts when English is not even your first language, or when maybe you don’t have access to educational institutions in the U.S. This immigrant identity thread led me to the myth of the American Dream, and how the internalization of that myth also perpetuates and fuels anti-Blackness in many Asian americans. Nhan spoke to me again about her mom and someone else close to her, who is also a Vietnamese refugee, but who Nhan prefers to remain anonymous.
Nhan: This person thinks they’re the different kind of immigrant that came long, not yesterday, but a long time ago, so they deserve to be here more, which is just not true. At least for this person, I think it’s something that they do in order to feel like they belong, by pushing these others, like Black people, to a lower standard to feel like “I’m better.” And I think that’s why the person says the things that they do, believes the things that they do. They just want to feel like they belong, even though Trump doesn’t like immigrants… but they are one?
Now, I think my mom feels okay with where we are in life. But, she’s not doing the dream that she came here with. She’s not a nurse. She still can’t speak English or read English or write English that well. She never got to go to school, she’s a single mom, she’s not making a ton of money. It doesn’t seem like our life is going to change anytime. But i think the fact that it’s not changing for the worse is what makes her feel okay.
So, I don’t know, this other person who knows everything about this is still thinking that somehow we’re different or better. Personally, I don’t believe that’s true.
Anya: It seems part of the problem stems from the golden ideal of America that is created for immigrants when they arrive here. For many people, there’s a need to make themselves feel superior when they face the fact that the American Dream didn’t happen for them. Jieyi also points out that, for many immigrants, it almost seems necessary to hold onto the American Dream, and its anti-Blackness, with an iron grip.
Jieyi: The ideology of the American Dream or meritocracy try to lure Asian Americans into this trap of thinking that we can make it in America and we can be part of white America, or become somehow as privileged as white people. The ideals of meritocracy, they’re not really compatible with recognizing systemic racism. Ideas like the model minority myth are also really inherently anti-Black. I think it’s really hard to push against the idea in our communities because so many of our families gave up everything in their home countries to come here to live that dream. I think that is a really challenging conversation to have.
Anya: America’s effect on Asian anti-Blackness extends beyond the U.S. borders, too. Nam Anh is a Viet organizer and activist based in Minneapolis. She was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, but immigrated to America to attend highschool and eventually attended Carleton College. She’s currently part of the Vietnamese Solidarity and Action Network, she talked to me about what she sees in Vietnam when she goes back to visit.
Nam Anh: Even when I was in Vietnam, there’s so much discrimination and bias against Black people, even when we have never interacted with a Black person in our lives before. So I think it’s so ingrained in the culture and the media. I think a lot of the media is very whitewashed, it’s very biased. Since we are consumers of Western media and Western culture, there’s a sense of us white-worshipping. Yeah, so we just take whatever we are given of the media and the culture and we start believing it. At the same time, with these beliefs, there are so many biases that come with it.
Anya: I also spoke to Thet-Htar, an activist who is usually based out of the Twin Cities, but who is currently in Myanmar, due to the pandemic. She grew up in Myanmar, under a dictatorship, and moved to Minnesota to attend college. Moving to the U.S. meant she needed to recode her entire understanding of race and ethnicity.
Thet-Htar: Race and ethnicity to me didn’t have the same connotations as it does in the United States. That, to me, was a lot to process as to how that was being internalized in me and just also how quickly I fed into it. How quickly I fell into the trap of assimilating with this American conception of race and ethnicity and this hierarchy of people of color versus white people. I mean, thinking about sociology things in Myanmar, and just the ways in which race and ethnicity and nationality are conceived here. Because we have 135 ethnic groups, you’re less inclined to adhere to “This is my race,” you’re more inclined to be, “This is my ethnic group.”
I’m part of the majority ethnic group, and that comes down to more of the divisions that occurred both because we decided to separate ourselves into different ethnic groups just historically over thousands of years, but also because of colonialism, and the way in which they created a hierarchy amongst the ethnicities in Myanmar.
For me, my mother is Koren, which now, when people think of the Koren ethnic group, their mind automatically goes to: Koren people are the new refugees that are coming to the United States. They’re being persecuted, and the reason why they’re being persecuted is because the British privileged them during colonial times and now the reverse is happening and now we’ve had the longest civil ethnic conflict in the world. Not a great record to have. So, those were the ways in which I think I internalized ethnicity and race was just more on those historical conflict lines.
When I came to the States, it was that sense of categorization and grouping that I don’t think was as emphasized in my home country as it is in the United States. You think of the term people of color and how loaded that is. To have to be in a country where the standard of normalcy is always going to be white people is fascinating, but in a really morbid and tragic way that everything is compared to white people.
Anya: So not only is it just a complete cultural shift to come to the U.S. and learn what it means to be part of the U.S. as a racialized being, but it’s understandably very difficult to also unpack and work against being indoctrinated into the culture of white supremacy that drives the U.S.
Thet-Htar also talked about how anti-Blackness abroad and other Western ideas of racial hierarchy were often brought to countries like Myanmar through colonization. However, she noted that it’s important to not just displace blame from the Asian/Asian American community. Even if colonialism instilled these ideas of race superiority, everyt ime we focus on that, it divorces us from the responsibility we have for perpetuating these structures both abroad and in the U.S.
Thinking about the links between anti-Blackness and U.S. imperialism abroad brought me to a particularly painful string in this massive knot: historical trauma, and how that informs people’s anti-Blackness.
Many Asian countries have lived through generations of U.S. imperialism, a legacy that continues today. For many Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans specifically, the legacy of the Vietnam Aar drives them to be stuanchly anti-communist. Today, the anti-communist party is also synonymous with the Republican Party, and more specifically Trump. Nam Anh spoke to me about why her dad is a Trump supporter, all the way in Vietnam, and the reality of anti-communism in Viet communities.
Nam Anh: I think a lot of the anti-Blackness also comes from people, at least in the Vietnamese community, being Trump supporters. When they listen to his rhetoric, when they listen to what the right wing is saying, they’re also taking in what they’re telling the community about how they should feel about Black people. And that means there’s a lot of false information and fake news, and a lot of bias. Even for my dad, he is a Trump supporter although he’s still in Vietnam. I think my dad, he has experienced so much trauma just from the war. He lost his dad in the war, and he tried to go on a boat, and it wasn’t successful. He was in one of those re-education camps. I think that caused him so much trauma that he doesn’t talk about it a lot, but I know that it’s made such an impact. He’s very, very staunchly anti-communist.
Us organizers, we’ve had so many conversations about communism and people blindly following whatever party is anti-communist. Even in the Facebook group, Viet Solidarity and Action Network, there are so many heated discussions that happen everyday on communism. I remember also when the founder of Black Lives Matter came out as a Marxist, there were so many heated arguments about it. They were like, “What do you think? What are we doing now? Why can’t we just support Black people but still be anti-communist?” There’s just so much resentment that still exists because of the historical trauma.
Anya: For Nhan, it’s painful and frustrating to watch this person who is close to her internalize Trump’s hateful and anti-Black messaging.
Nhan: This person posted a fake video of protesters lighting a woman on fire, which was just–it was fake. There were cuts, there were edits that you could tell were not real. He just showed it to me and was like, “You see? This is what protesting does.” I’m not educated enough to understand why it is the way that it is, but I feel like Trump is so anti-China or pro-America that it makes them feel safe. I think they’re really afraid of war, and so you just fall under these ideas of what America they think should be, or what they want it to be. But, in reality, America is not this beautiful American Dream that I feel like a lot of Vietnamese people who come think it is.
Anya: But, if there’s anything we learned from the previous episode of New Narratives, it’s that one ethnic group’s experience doesn’t neatly generalize across all of Asian America. Jieyi helped me understand some of the ways in which other Asian American communities internalize and perpetuate anti-Blackness. When they learned that Tou Thao was a Hmong American officer, it reminded them of something that happened not too long ago regarding the Chinese American community.
Jieyi: I was like, “Oh, we’ve seen this before.” I’m Chinese American, and this happened when Peter Liang murdered Akai Gurley. It was sort of interesting and distressing to see what happened there because a lot of Chinese Americans rallied around Peter Liang and were like, “If white cops can get away with murder, then Peter LIang should also get away with murder.” I think it really highlighted how a lot of Chinese Americans sort of want to be part of whiteness and their response to racism is that they want the privileges that white people have instead of wanting to dismantle white supremacy.
They don’t see how ultimately solidarity with other people of color will be what liberates us. I think especially because there’s these class dynamics that really play out in Chinese American communities especially, where only upper or middle class Chinese Americans are visible. Undocumented Chinese people or Chinese people who work in the restaurant industry, etc. are not really centered. I think a lot of Chinese Americans have a lot of class interests to protect by being invested in this system. They want this system to keep working the way it is because it has worked for them. It’s allowed them to accumulate this social status.
I’ve been really concerned the last few years about this conservative chinese American political mobilization, which is often really anti-Black. Even with the college admissions anti-affirmative action stuff, that’s also really anti-Black. I think it has a lot to do with the class interests of Chinese Americans who are doing that stuff. It’s to their advantage to push to end affirmative action because then they can buy their kids’ ways into college and rely on test scores to get into college, and not have to engage with the systemic racism in America.
Anya: We’ve heard a few reasons why anti-Blackness exists in Asian and Asian American communities. The root cause of anti-Blackness is not just one thing, it’s a complex web that weaves together histories of Western nations’ colonialism and imperialism, historical trauma from war, fake news and historical miseducation, the realities of being an immigrant to the U.S., and the complicated class interests in some more privileged Asian American groups.
To be clear, none of these reasons should serve as excuses for the community’s beliefs and actions. These reasons are things we have to interrogate, they are starting points for how we can begin to dismantle anti-Blackness step by step. Here’s the part, though, where I want to deconstruct a very popular narrative that I see plastered all over social media: that Asians are this silent mass of disengaged, uninterested, white-adjacent sheep.
As we’ve discussed, there are way too many Asian Americans that are complicit in anti-Blackness. And, to be clear, anti-Blackness is something our community is always going to have to push back against. But, many people are quick to say that all Asians are complacent and they have always been that way. This erases the rich history of Asian American activism in this country and plays right into harmful stereotypes of Asians as quiet, submissive, subservient and politically disengaged. As Jieyi told me, spoiler alert, that’s exactly what they want you to believe.
So, what are they doing? And what can you do? The first thing many people mentioned was the importance and difficulty of simple conversations. For Nhan, Jieyi, and Nam Anh, conversations with their parents and extended family members have created increasingly strained relationships full of hard feelings on both sides.
Nhan and Nam Anh explained to me two factors that make conversation sometimes tricky or ineffective.
Nam Anh: I think there’s a mentality that younger people need to respect and listen to older folk because of their experience and wisdom, and because of the piety mentality and respect for elders mentality in Asian communities. I’ve seen a lot fhtat in the group I’m in, too. Older folks are being anti-Black, but they’re like, “You don’t know, because I’ve experienced more and because I’ve lived longer than you, so you should listen to me.” I think that is especially ahrd because I am coming from a perspective of a younger person, so there’s a power dynamic where I need to address them with respect, but also try to have a conversation with them where we’re on equal footing, where they start to actually listen to my point of view also.
Nhan: If they spend literally their entire working day, like 8 hours, solely listening to this one news source, I don’t know how to spend an hour trying to tell them that what they’ve been listening to for the past ten years is not true or can be misleading. I have no idea how you would do that.
Anya: Nhan also uses social media to bolster her social justice education, but is quick to say that education isn’t everything
Nhan: To be honest, I go on Instagram for 3 hours everyday. Recently, all I do is go on people’s stories and then read the posts they do about all of these different ways that racism is perpetuated in the U.S. You know, all those links that people have been putting out on how to educate yourself more. I feel like I’m trying to learn and unlearn a lot of the stuff that I grew up thinking was true. You can know about things and educate yourself, but that, to me, is not being woke until you put that in practice or actually try and do more than just going on your phone and reading about it. I need to work on putting what I’m learning into practice.
I think a lot of people realize in this moment that your money means a lot. What’s more important, you going out to eat with your friends right now or you actually putting it somewhere good?
Anya: On the other hand, Jieyi, a former history major themselves, stressed the importance of learning about our past.
Jieyi: To me, coming into college as a classic Chinese American, I was like, “I have no concept of Asian Americans protesting police brutality or anything like that.” But then, in my classes, I saw pictures of Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s protesting police brutality. That’s a history that we have no access to, I think oftentimes until college, when we can take Asian American studies classes. I think it can be really empowering to have access to that history, learn about people like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama, and learn about how Asian Americans were part of these things and ask why this history was erased. Like, why don’t we get to know about these things? Spoiler, it’s because they don’t want us to do those things.
Having some kind of sense of continuity… it’s not like we just showed up here and this is the first time Asian Americans have existed here. We have existed here for a long time and it’s not that our individual grandparents necessarily lived here, but that there is a legacy of Asian American presence here and Aisan American labor activism, immigration activism, all this stuff.
I think that’s something that I would want young Asian Americans to be able to have, is access to that history. Once I started learning about those things, it also gave me a sense of a wider community now. There are Asian American scholars and activists and community organizers who think about these things all the time and who have written biographies of Yuri Kochiyama and stuff like that. They’re also out here trying to share that knowledge and community history with people.
It’s so wild how that is kept away from people.
Anya: What Jieyi is referring to, the coalitions between Black and Asian activists in the 1960s, are the root of the slogans that we see being pulled out today, like: Yellow Peril for Black Lives. While some see calling upon the storng history of Black/Asian solidarity as a way to highlight how the communities are tied together in the present, others see it as a distraction from the real problem. As slogans like “Yellow Peril for Black Lives” and “#AsiansForBlackLives” have been popularized in the protests following George Floyd’s murder, controversy has also emerged over what these slogans really signify. Thet-Htar supports the pushback against #AsiansforBackLives.
Thet-Htar: We get so siloed into these ideas of what it means to be an Asian American for Black LIves. Don’t get me wrong, I have definitely fallen into the traps of using “#AsianForBlackLives” or “#SoutheastAsianForBlackLives”. But then thinking about it, now, after reflection and having really awesome, challenging conversations with my queer Asian friends, it’s like, no. Every time we use those types of phrases, we’re centering ourselves. I think Asian folks, we tend to center ourselves a lot when it comes to Black Lives Matter. We center ourselves in terms of even the branding of #AsianForBlackLives or “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power.” That, in a way, centers us. We need to stop doing that.
We need to start thinking beyond what we think activism and organizing looks like. I think another one of the things, which is really tragic, that white supremacy has also done, is that it’s stolen our sense of collective imagination of what community care can look like, of what organizing can look like from an Asian American lens.
Anya: Her viewpoint illuminates the complicated balance of being activists and allies versus co-opting the current movement to center Asian Americans in the conversation about anti-Blackness. On one hand, talking about Yellow Peril for Blck Lives is paying tribute to the rich history of Asian American and Black solidarity. It signifies that Asian Americans have stood and will continue to stand for Black lives, even if some Asian Americans like Tou Thao have been found on the wrong side of history. It’s also a way for Asian Americans themselves to engage with their history and feel empowered by their predecessors in the movement to act today.
However, it can also monopolize the conversation. Suddenly, Black Lives Matter becomes about all that Asians have done for Black lives, rather than about the BLM cause itself. It’s a way for Asian Americans to virtue signal, or signify to the world that they’re one of the good ones. That stance comes more from a place of guilt and self interest than from a place of wanting to be allies with BLM. That stance is also dangerous because it can be immobilizing. People become discouraged from doing more internal and external activism because they feel like now that they’ve signaled their virtues, they aren’t responsible for anything further. Thet-Htar also brought up how conversations, as useful as they can be, can also bog us down in the same way.
Thet-Htar: I think the thing that irritates me the most sometimes about online Asian American activist spaces is that we think the pinnacle of our anti-Blackness work is making our parents and families less racist. That seems to dominate a lot of the graphics I see on Instagram or the posts on Facebook, like Subtle Asian Traits is this never-ending “Oh my god, I tried to have a conversation with my mom about Black Lives Matter.” And I’m like, okay sweetie, but what else are you doing apart from having conversations with your family? Because that’s important. Dismantling and decolonizing our own backyard or our own people is super important, and we as Asian people have a responsibility to collect our own. But I also think we tend to fetishize conversation so much to the point that it immobilizes us from going anywhere forward past that.
Anya: From abroad, Thet-Htar organized mutual aid efforts via Facebook. She coordinated supply drops and drivers to transport protesters who had just gotten out of jail on bail, or away from clash zones with the police. Being in Myanmar allowed her to be active during our late night and early morning, which helped her group of organizers coordinate relief efforts 24/7. The wisdom that drives her activism is as follows.
Thet-Htar: Don’t fetishize conversations and think that’s going to be the answer in terms of making you more radical or making you move past a certain level. This isn’t a videogame where we’re moving past these obstacles, it’s a cyclical process. There are going to be times where I know I’m sliding back.
Take accountability for the things you fucked up on. Apologize when you need to and make sure you’re not centering yourself when you make that apology, and then marinate in it. And then, just move forward. Keep being there, regardless of how much criticism you might get or how guilty you feel or how lost you are, the important thing is that you don’t just give up and decide to escape and go back to “normalcy,” whatever the fuckt aht even means. To my view, we should be there for Black Lives Matter because Black lives do matter, because they’re people. There doesn’t have to be anything extra than that, anything past that is just extra shit that I think people like to get bogged down into.