Yellow Peril Against White Supremacy
Northern Virginia (NOVA) is a young bustling area where the vibe and attitude of DC has leaked past the borders into NOVA where young people like me live and commute to DC. There are zumba and salsa studios, fancy dessert parlors, hip new brunch places, and just the right amount of lowkey cafes. When you live in NOVA and work in DC, it is so easy to forget that Virginia is part of the South and that we do not live in the safe and accepting society we have created in our bubbles. This week, we were reminded of the sweeping and omnipresent existence of white supremacy.
Charlottesville, Virginia is 100 miles away from where some of us live; last week, we knew that area only as the liberal college town of UVA. Today, we know it as the place were hundreds of white supremacists gathered with tiki torches, guns, bats, semi automatics, and swastikas to march and chant racist, anti-Semitic white supremacist slogans. It’s the place where white supremacists beat black men with shields and clubs, and where a terrorist ran over a 32-year-old counterprotester. Following the events and the administration's functional endorsement of the white supremacist movement, leaders of the Asian American advocacy community released a joint letter calling the community to action “on the streets, in legislative chambers, and on the steps of the courts to stand up for our democracy”. We echo their statements and emphasize that as a community, we need to do better.
The Asian American community has notoriously been absent from social justice movements compared to our POC counterparts. Since the rise of the “model minority” myth in the 1960's, many of our voices have been marginalized, silenced, and outright erased as our communities have been used to drive wedges between communities of color to excuse away institutionalized and systemic racism. In some instances, Asian Americans have even promoted the side of the oppressors and espoused racist rhetoric. The impact of colonization and the global message of western white supremacy has been so deeply ingrained in our ancestral homelands that a social justice disconnect still exists between the older and younger generations of Asian Americans.
A picture of a signs against Filipinos in California during the 1930's
The model minority label has made some of us forget that we too are people of color and that our community has experienced and continues to experience overt and covert racism, like the Japanese internment camps where over 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes into camps for “security reasons” after the Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor. Filipino war veterans who were never properly compensated for serving this country. Media portrayals of angry, stupid Asian men who can’t speak English properly. Today it is the Hispanics “stealing” white jobs, but in the 1930's it was the Filipinos; there were literal hunting parties that would drag Filipinos from their homes to be beaten in the streets.
Racial slurs like “chink” are still thrown our way while we walk on the street. Muslim and Sikh Americans are racially profiled and called terrorists every single day and sometimes killed simply because they share the same hue as some extremists. These instances of injustice are direct results of living in a white supremacist society. Some of us have forgotten that the term “Asian American” resulted from Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans coming together in a joint coalition to fight racism inspired by the anti-Vietnam War and Black Power movements. Now more than ever, we need to show up to defend not just ourselves but also our fellow people of color.
Photo of protesters in Oakland CA in 1969
With more and more of these massive outbreaks of racism and hate, the Asian American community must lift up the mantle of human rights for ourselves and other communities of color. We must not contribute to or be complicit in the rhetoric espoused by those who hate people of color by playing into the model minority myth. We cannot stand by as all of our communities are under attack by bigots and white supremacists. It’s time that we as a community stand up to hate in all its forms, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And we can no longer stand on the sidelines. These issues matter and they affect us whether we like it or not. It’s time to wake up from political apathy, take action, and support organizations like Black Lives Matter and other similar organizations. We shouldn’t do it any other way.
It is easy to believe that our own safe bubbles are all that exist in the world, and that all violent instances of racism are distant isolated incidents. While the horrendous events in Charlottesville were a massive showing of the worst of humanity, there are normalized and accepted forms of de facto and institutionalized racism around us every day, whether in NOVA or California. It may not be Klan members with semi-automatic firearms and swastikas, but the prison system and racial profiling instead. We cannot stay in our sheltered bubbles any longer. For a lot of Asian Americans, it took the violence in Charlottesville to wake up and perceive racism and bigotry. Now, more than ever, it is time for us to rise and resist.
