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Abi Ilavarasan: I’m Abi Ilavarasan. I use she/her pronouns. I’m 22 years old. I was a Organizing Fellow at Asian American Organizing Project. I’m from Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota. I’m a graduate student at University of Iowa. I study masters in public health and I’m very passionate about social justice.
Tri Vo: Hi everyone, my name is Tri. He, they, she is fine. I was brought onto SEAD Project as a digital organizer which entails engaging with people on topics like abolition and other things as well, other kinds of justices as well over social media. I host a podcast called GLAMMUMP [spells]. All the m’s are like mouse and it’s about Asian and leftisit politics and music media in the upper midwest. I also interview people outside of those containers. And I’m also doing this puppet show featuring Vietnamese characters during the summer in the Twin Cities.
Tori Hong: Hi, my name is Tori Hong. I use she/they pronouns and I’ve been drawing from a young age but began my career in illustration in 2017. I began with a heavy focus on using art for activism, such as creating a nationally recognized graphic for ReleaseMN8 which was fighting against the deportation charges of eight Cambodian American men in Minnesota. That was in 2017. In 2018, I was organizing with and creating illustrations for the Minneapolis police abolition organizations called MPD 150 which is still active today. Most recently, in 2020, I created the illustrated abolitionist elder which depicts me in a futuristic vision of me as an elder sewing a story cloth that tells some of the stories of how police and ICE abolition happened. And the abolition of the prison systems and I will end with it’s always been my greatest joy to capture people, the land, and creatures at our most fantastical and our most authentic.
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Siena Iwasaki Milbauer: Welcome back to New Narratives: Justice for George Floyd. My name is Siena, I use she/her pronouns and I’m the Content Creator Intern at Asian American Organizing Project also known as AAOP, a Twin Cities based nonprofit run by youth, for youth. You were just introduced to today’s episode’s three guests, or rather you heard them introduce themselves. Abi, Tri, and Tori are all organizers, though at very different stages and in pretty different ways. Abi is a recent college graduate who participated in AAOP’s Organizing Fellowship during the summer of 2021. Tri is an organizer with the SEAD Project, a Minnesota organization dedicated to uplifting and empowering Southeast Asian diaspora communities. They are also a podcaster and puppeteer. And Tori is a illustrator and organizer whose art deeply engages with activism and visa versa.
What these three folks share in common, as Tori’s intro hints at, is that they have participated in ways big and small in abolition work. Abolition in its modern sense was once an obscure concept that only a handful of organizers and agitators knew about and dreamed of. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, abolition stepped into the mainstream. You’ve probably heard plenty of explanations about what abolition is, and why people support or don’t support it. So rather than bore you with another rundown of definitions and histories, we decided to ask the organizers who believe and fight for abolition of police, ICE, prisons, and more structural harms, why they do the work they do, what abolition means to them, and what exactly is their picture of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Let’s dive in!
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Siena: Most folks who get involved in abolition work have an origin story, a path they took to learning about, defining for themselves, and getting into the work. Part of Abi’s journey into abolition work happened as a participant in AAOP’s Organizing Fellowship program, working with other youth on a Participatory Action Research project, also known as PAR. PAR is a type of research which centers the voices of the community members the research is about and will affect. Abi was part of a PAR project about attitudes towards abolition in our Minnesota Asian American communities.
Abi: We did participatory action research which is we made a survey and we did listening sessions and we hosted a workshop for Asian American community members to get their positionality on how they feel about abolition, police abolition. And also their feelings about police and community safety and things like that. The workshop was open to all Minnesotans, not necessarily just Asian Americans. That was something we did at the OF program. I feel like at first, I didn’t really know what abolition work was and I was also very hesitant about saying “abolish the police” because I didn’t know how people would react when I would say “abolish the police” because I was very nervous people would reject me. I didn’t think it was a socially acceptable thing to say “abolish the police” and it definitely is not. But I think it’s okay to not be socially acceptable because that’s not what it is about. Community safety and abolishing the police, it’s about we’re saying those things cause we want people to be safe and things need to be said and that’s why we do this work. So now my feelings is that after doing this work and doing this research, 1) I feel more comfortable saying it out loud and 2) I think that I believe in it a lot more and I believe in the movement a lot more.
Siena: Tori’s broader organizing story, eventually leading to her involvement in abolition work, began in the classroom.
Tori: So I learned about abolition in an academic context. I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota taking the social justice minor in 2013. And in that class I read the book “Are Prisons Obsolete” by Angela Davis. And in that book, Davis, she just answers that questions, are they obsolete or not? And where did prisons come from? She talked about the history, she talked about how the prison industrial complex is connected to so many other issues that we experience, such as the school to prison pipeline. She talked about U.S. militarization. She talked about the exploitation of prison workers. So just weaving together all this information that I felt like wasn’t clear to me but I had felt it my whole life. I’d seen it, I’ve experienced it, but I didn’t have the framework for it. I grew up witnessing and experiencing a lot of racialized and gendered harassment in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. And so, like I said, just reading Davis’ work and her theories and her experience allowed me to just really put everything into context instead of feeling like I’m the person who is an issue because I’m Asian, or because I’m a women/girl, or because I’m queer. It became more about why do people think these things, and why do they treat people this way, and how does that lead to larger systemic issues.
Siena: Because every person takes a different path to abolition work, and has different lived experience, folks’ definitions of what exactly abolition work is can vary. But what all definitions seem to have in common is a recognition that abolition work is part of a broader fight to uplift marginalized communities.
Tri: The word itself, the concept itself, applied outside of slavery and outside of historical context, didn’t really emerge from me, and I figure a lot of people didn’t emerge until the past few years. As tensions arose between many different moments where Black people and different people were targeted and slain at the hands of the police. And justice was never really found, or however you want to describe it, against those systems that protect the police apparatus. Right now we know that the injustices against Black people and people who are heavily monitored by the police state, their quality of living is drastically low and the histories and legacies of slavery and such institutions still hold people down to this day.
Abi: Currently it’s about not having police in our lives. That’s kinda what I think abolition means. And its not necessarily we’re just getting rid of police right away, its about a slow divestment into other resources over time. Abolish the police would mean we are defunding the police over time and to a point where police would not exist. Acknowledging that police are hurting communities, especially communities of color. Abolish the police is especially acknowledging that we need to do better and we need to invest in other resources in our community and we need to prioritize our communities first.
Siena: Of course, all this is easier said than done. Abolition work is hard, and it can feel like an endless slog to get anything accomplished. Just look at the fight over the Minneapolis ballot measure this election, with organizers having to struggle up until the very last minute to get the measure on the ballot despite vocal public support. Abolition work is also something that just about everyone feels strongly about, one way or the other. This can cause great conflicts, not just between pro-abolitionists and those opposed to abolition, but also between folks working for abolition that have different visions and proposed solutions. That shouldn’t stop folks from continuing the work though, Tori explains.
Tori: I’m also noticing as I grow up that we must live, abolish, and create within these imperfect systems. And the only answers that we have are imperfect answers. And so, instead of waiting for the perfect idea or perfect opportunity, or criticizing myself or other people for not having those perfect solutions, I’ve found that abolition is actually an accumulation of practices and beliefs over time. And it means so much more when people are just doing the work and not letting themselves get distracted from that work.
Siena: Every organizer has a multitude of identities that they bring to the table. Organizing movements are strengthened but also complicated by the different perspectives and talents that swirl in any activist group. Tri and Tori both spoke to the specific, yet unique to each of them, lens their Asian heritage brings to their abolition work.
Tri: As it pertains to me as a Southeast Asian person, a Vietnamese person occupying turtle island soil, the relationship is not clear. Cause abolition for certain groups of Black folks and indigenous folks and low income folks is direct. The violence ravages and is always targeting those communities everyday. Whereas for Asian groups, different Asian groups, it is not as clear what our relationship is to the police. As defined by some circles I belong to, they protect the interests of those who own private property, and for a lot of Asians, the one path we have, this idea of model minority and assimilation, is to make sure we are on the safe side of that line between those who are targeted and persecuted by the state that wants to undermine Black and brown, low income folks, and Asians trying to assimilate upwards so they can avoid having to think about those issues, not have the material life circumstances that would give us a stake in fighting against these systems. So right now abolition to me means, what does it means to persuade people who have subscribed to this idea that the best way to avoid all the injustices of the states is to just assimilate and be absorbed into middle upper class statuses among other things.
In ways, it can be easier to talk about abolition in the countries of Southeast Asia because those are the lands we have a relationship with at least at a ethnic heritage level. Abolition isn’t just a U.S. thing. A lot of the– if you can stop the gears of the police state in the U.S. from turning as much here, it can slow down elsewhere. And that’s’ important to keep in mind that we are standing in solidarity not just with people internal to the U.S. or Western countries, but that corrupt military states are doing bad things across the world. We need to connect those dots.
Tori: So, I’m talking about this as an Asian person who was born in the United States and born to Asian parents who were refugees and immigrants themselves and raised me in the U.S. And so, when I was starting to do police abolition art and organizing with MPD 150, my reason for joining that organization was because I understood how intimately police in general and the U.S. military are heavily connected. My family on both sides have been impacted by U.S. war and imperialism in our homelands and like I said earlier, my family is a refugee family. So when I think about abolishing police in the place where I live, it also means we get to abolish a major link in U.S. colonialism and imperialism abroad.
The other thing that I think about with being Asian and Asian American is how in my family I’ve seen tangibly how they will give resources or share resources with each other. Whether it’s job opportunities, or housing, or a car even. So I just think about the collectivism, but what comes out of that are these networks. These deep and broad networks of care and support. And how do we tap our abilities to create connect these networks and how do we tap these networks to start moving towards abolition and sharing resources to people who need it the most.
Siena: Another thing which is deeply specific to each organizer working towards abolition is what motivates them to keep moving forward even when the work feels unbearably hard or downright impossible. For Tri, it’s a sense of urgency.
Tri: The explosion so to speak of the uprisings were a passionate cry for things to change. However, we are at a stage where there’s a lot of risk for concessionism. Concessions being sacrificing one thing in order to get the scraps of what the power that be are allowed to give you. And people not knowing what else to do so they resign themselves to these scraps and compromises. And to keep it short, my warning to people that we got to stay vigilant, listen to the people on the ground and make sure we’re not being co-opted by people who may look like they are acting of our communities but are really giving the antagonists all the power even more power.
Siena: For Abi, it’s about a strong sense of how current systems don’t match what supportive systems should be like. She’s in it for the long haul, one tiny step at a time.
Abi: One thing that we should definitely have decentralized solution instead of just calling the police every time we have a problem. We should definitely have a decentralized solution. Relying on our communities, relying on different services, relying on our support system. And in terms of myself, I think I’m a person that will continue to disseminate information and will continue to do research on it and continue to educate myself.
Siena: Finally, Tori grounds themselves in realism while also envisioning a better, brighter future worth working towards.
Tori: My hopes for public safety is that the generations that come after us have the tools, resources, ingenuity, and courage to create new systems and structures. And maybe that starts out on a small scale. I see that happening even now. But ultimately, I’m learning more and more each day how I don’t have the answers and how it’s not on any of us to prescribe what anyone in the future is going to need. So I think as long as I as a person in the river of time can share my resources, my knowledge, my skills, my love, my talent, my laughter; if I can just bring that all to this river, this garden, and to allow myself to notice and share the world as I see it, those are my gifts that I have to offer. And I want to bring space and opportunities for other people to also have those opportunities of noticing, offering suggestions, and creating more.
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Siena: Thanks for listening to New Narratives: Justice for George Floyd. This special series is brought to you by Asian American Organizing Project, in collaboration with Buddhist Justice Reporter, a project led by BIPOC Buddhists, looking to report on the police, criminal injustice, and the carceral state from a Buddhist lens, and with support from the Minneapolis Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College. Featured in this episode were Abinaya Ilavarasan, Tori Hong, and Tri Vo. See you next time!