True Left

Column: Asian and Black Americans experience racism differently. But we need to unite against hate

Can Black Americans and Asian Americans make common cause in battling white supremacy?

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A vigil and rally Tran organized in Alhambra last weekend drew primarily Asian American support, but she was heartened by the sight of a lone Black face in the crowd.

"It feels so important to be together against the issue of white supremacy," she said.
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�We don�t have to agree on everything,� insists Tran, whose family came here as refugees from Vietnam. �It doesn�t have to be either/or,� she said. �That�s where we get stuck.�

Racism �is experienced by us differently,� she said. �But the source is the same.
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As a Black woman, I can't help but feel that these deaths have drawn Asian Americans into our fold. The stories of the victims� lives spotlight the common ground our groups share as targets of mass violence fueled by racism and inhumanity.
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I grieve now for these Atlanta women � just as I grieved the nine Black worshipers murdered at a Charleston, S.C., church. And the 23 people killed by a gunman targeting Latinos at an El Paso shopping center. And the 49 people massacred at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

And the 11 Jewish worshipers shot to death during a Shabbat service at their Pittsburgh synagogue.

Now the question is: Can we join together and move forward, with white supremacy � not each other � as the enemy?

How Black and Asian American women are working together to overcome racism

Black and Asian women know what it means to be “othered.” We have each had harmful stereotypes cast upon us that continue to affect our lives today.

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Black and Asian communities, especially women, not only have a shared history of oppression in America but also a long and storied tradition of solidarity.

Black and Asian women know what it means to be �othered.� We have each had harmful stereotypes cast upon us that date back centuries and continue to affect our lives today.
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Both Black and Asian women report being discriminated against, pigeonholed in the workplace or simply held back in their careers due to assumptions made by their bosses or peers.

Black and Asian women are also woefully underpaid, with Asian women making as low as 52 cents and Black women earning just 63 cents for every dollar earned by white men.

We�ve both felt the sting of being called a racial slur or told that we are �articulate� because someone is surprised at how well we speak English. But these painful experiences are not the only things that bind us.

The famed Third World Women�s Alliance was born out of the Black feminist movement and the efforts of Black women leaders to create space for other women of color, including Asian women, who were interested in civic engagement, combatting racism and sexism, and ensuring liberation of all forms.

Asian American activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama fought alongside Black women activists and lent their voices to the movement for civil rights. We�ve built alliances and worked together to not only identify the problems that plague both communities and hold women back, but also to exchange ideas on how to create a society that works for everyone.

Many Asians and Asian Americans attended last summer�s Black Lives Matter rallies across the country and joined Black Americans in the call for an end to police brutality.

And now, as Asians and Asian Americans increasingly suffer attacks, Black activists have shown up and marched with them. When our communities stand together, we are more powerful than we know.
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We�ve also seen the many ways that Black and Asian women in elected office have supported each other and the causes that matter to their communities. At Emerge and Run AAPI, we want to continue to empower Black and Asian women to run for office so that they can keep speaking truth to power, build even stronger alliances and make it possible to combat white supremacy through policy and political reform.

Time and time again, generations of Black and Asian women have come together during the darkest times in our nation�s history to create incredible progress and move our democracy forward. As white supremacy continues to be as big a threat as ever before, our solidarity will be essential to defeat it.

Third World Women's Alliance (U.S.) - Social Networks and Archival Context

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Amtrak releases map of expanded US rail network it says it can build with $80 billion from Biden's infrastructure plan

President Joe Biden on Wednesday unveiled his $2 trillion plan, which includes federal spending on infrastructure like roads, bridges, and ports.

Business Insider · businessinsider.com

Amtrak releases map of expanded US rail network it says it can build with $80 billion from Biden's infrastructure plan

President Joe Biden on Wednesday unveiled his $2 trillion plan, which includes federal spending on infrastructure like roads, bridges, and ports.

Yahoo News · news.yahoo.com

• Amtrak has released a map of a proposed expanded US rail network.
• It says it could be built with $80 billion from President Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
• The company said the new network could expand or improve service for about 20 million people.

Amtrak has released a map of an expanded US rail network that it says it can build with $80 billion from President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

The light-blue lines represent what would be new services, while the orange lines show services that would be extended.

Amtrak said it could create more than 30 new routes and connect 160 new communities, and expand or improve rail service for some 20 million people. Materials prepped for the announcement said the plan would bolster transportation options for diverse populations throughout the country.

The new routes include cities that haven't before been connected to the national rail service, including western outposts like Las Vegas and Phoenix, Amtrak said.

It would also break ground on routes throughout the southern US, including ones to Nashville, Tennessee; Montgomery, Alabama; and Macon, Georgia.

Biden unveiled his $2 trillion plan on Wednesday, as the first part of a likely $4 trillion plan.

The first part is called the American Jobs Plan, and plans federal spending on infrastructure like roads, bridges, and ports, and on cutting US carbon emissions.

Biden called it a "once-in-a-generation investment in America."

Amtrak said that its proposal would be more energy efficient than people driving or flying, and that it would bring economic benefits to regions.

It also said it would serve the US's growing population and fill in "gaps" left by falling numbers of bus and plane routes.

Amtrak CEO Bill Flynn said in a statement shared with Insider: "President Biden's infrastructure plan is what this nation has been waiting for. Amtrak must rebuild and improve the Northeast Corridor, our National Network and expand our service to more of America."

"With this federal investment, Amtrak will create jobs and improve equity across cities, regions, and the entire country � and we are ready to deliver," he added. "America needs a rail network that offers frequent, reliable, sustainable and equitable train service. Now is our time, let's make rail the solution."

As a US senator, Biden traveled from Delaware to Washington, DC, every day, earning him the nickname "Amtrak Joe."

Republicans say they will probably vote against any tax increases that would finance the project.

White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US

As fears of anti-Asian violence grow, police seek to be more visible to deter attacks. AP Photo/Kathy WillensAmid the disturbing rise in attacks on Asian Americans since March 2020 is a troubling c...

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White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US
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The point I�ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.
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White supremacy is an ideology, a pattern of values and beliefs that are ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S. It is a belief that to be white is to be human and invested with inalienable universal rights and that to be not-white means you are less than human � a disposable object for others to abuse and misuse.

The dehumanization of Asian people by U.S. society is driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians.

During the pandemic, �yellow peril� rhetoric that blamed China for COVID-19 led to a 150% rise in anti-Asian harassment incidents reported to police in 2020. In particular, East Asian Americans or anyone who appeared to be of East Asian heritage or descent became targets for the misplaced anger of people blaming Chinese people or those they thought looked Chinese, even if they were of other ethnic backgrounds, like Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Burmese, Thai or Filipino.
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This same rhetoric of blaming anyone perceived to be Chinese for COVID-19 and attacking them has been found in countless reports of harassment, including one by a Vietnamese American woman who was spat at by a white man as she tried to enter a grocery store in March 2021. Four days later, video footage showed a 76-year-old Chinese woman who was punched in the face by a 39-year-old white man, on the same day that a white man killed eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta.This same rhetoric of blaming anyone perceived to be Chinese for COVID-19 and attacking them has been found in countless reports of harassment, including one by a Vietnamese American woman who was spat at by a white man as she tried to enter a grocery store in March 2021. Four days later, video footage showed a 76-year-old Chinese woman who was punched in the face by a 39-year-old white man, on the same day that a white man killed eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta.

Stories of individual harassment and violence perpetrated against Asian Americans by white assailants don�t always get the same attention as the viral videos of Black aggression toward Asians.

But underlying all these incidents is white supremacy, just as white supremacy is responsible for Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd�s neck for over eight minutes: White supremacy made Floyd into a Black male threat rather than a human being.

Understanding the depth and reach of this ideology of racism can be challenging, but doing so brings each person, and the nation as a whole, closer to addressing systemic inequity. It�s not Black people whom Asian Americans need to fear. It�s white supremacy.

Sery Kim is a Lesson for Those Who Think Pandering to Whiteness Will Save Them from Anti-Asian Hate

During a Republican forum last Wednesday, Texas congressional candidate and former Trump official Sery Kim made racist remarks about Chinese immigrants. As a Korean American and lifelong Texan, he...

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Sery Kim is a Lesson for Those Who Think Pandering to Whiteness Will Save Them from Anti-Asian Hate
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During a Republican forum last Wednesday, Texas congressional candidate and former Trump official Sery Kim made racist remarks about Chinese immigrants. �I don�t want them here at all,� she said. �They steal our intellectual property, they give us coronavirus, they don�t hold themselves accountable.�

These comments are straight out of Trump�s playbook. They�re false, xenophobic, and used for cheap political points. They�re also grotesquely irresponsible at a time when targeted violence against the Asian American community is at a terrifying high, in large part due to rhetoric like this.

Kim justified that rhetoric by adding, �Quite frankly, I can say that because I�m Korean.�

That last part. As a Korean American and lifelong Texan, hearing Kim justify her absurd statements with her Koreanness filled me with rage. When it comes to anti-Asian racism, it doesn�t matter whether you�re Korean or Chinese. To our attackers, we all have the same foreign faces. How could she say something so thoughtless and dangerous, so divisive? But Kim appeared to be laboring under the delusion that pandering to conservative voters would give her power that her white GOP counterparts enjoy.

It gives me no joy to say that she was proved wrong in the most vitriolic way. Her speech went viral, and she has since been met with violent, racist messages online. Nobody deserves to be subjected to such treatment, but I cannot say that I�m surprised. Throwing her fellow Asian Americans under the bus did not save her from racism or endear her to white America. In addition to becoming the target of hateful trolls, Kim has been thoroughly criticized by the Korean American community and lost the endorsement of two Republican congresswomen of Korean descent.
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our fates are tied together by the fact that here, we are racialized in the same way. We are treated as perpetual foreigners, and whatever acceptance we gain from our white neighbors is conditional and can be revoked at the drop of a hat. Proximity to whiteness will not save us. The only thing that will save us is our solidarity with one another.

Over 2,500 Asian American New Yorkers Sign Letter Demanding Inclusion in History Curriculum

More than 2,500 residents of New York City have come together to sign an open letter calling for the inclusion of Asian American history in public schools on Monday. The letter, addressed to Mayor...

Yahoo News · yahoo.com

More than 2,500 residents of New York City have come together to sign an open letter calling for the inclusion of Asian American history in public schools on Monday.

The letter, addressed to Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter, argues that the surge in anti-Asian incidents has highlighted the �woefully inadequate� education of Asian American history in the school curriculum � and that instruction must start in the earliest grades.

"The future of our city and our nation depends on what our children learn in school today," reads the letter, which was mostly signed by parents. �Asian American children must know their history in this country so they can be proud of their heritage and stand up to discrimination and hate."

It adds that students not of Asian descent must learn the history as well, in order to "better understand and respect the racial and ethnic background and identity of their Asian American peers."

�The stories of how Asian Americans have stood up against racism and discrimination and fought to realize their dreams must be told. Asian American history is American history.�
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�We believe that by learning about the history of each member of our community� how we arrived at this land and how we helped to build this nation and city together� we will be more united, empathetic and respectful to each other; we will be better able to fight racism, discrimination and inequality,� it states.

How Will Wokeism Die? – The Occidental Observer

theoccidentalobserver.net

my predictions are that the death of Wokeism will include some of the following elements:

    In Europe and elsewhere it will take on a form of anti-Americanism. Those using �woke� jargon will be denounced as lapdogs of the American Empire and its sick culture, and accused of resorting to �American words� when they make their usual power plays. They will be associated with America�s Globohomo Imperium. This is not as unlikely as it may sound to some Americans because it is undeniable that Wokeism is all part and parcel of US attempts at globally projecting its �anti-cultural� power.

After Asian American hate, I'm reclaiming racial solidarity and the term 'people of color'

BIPOC focused on Black and Indigenous oppression. People of color includes every group that's racialized and subjugated to keep white supremacy alive.

Yahoo News · us.yahoo.com

After a year of chafing and muttering about it to myself, I am ready to say this out loud. I am refusing the acronym BIPOC. I am taking it out of my mouth. I�m laying it down. I am recommitting to the much maligned term "people of color." I�m not doing this because I�m old-fashioned or politically retrograde. As a Black woman who loves Black people, I am acutely aware of the unique and specific ways that racism harms Black people. I�m refusing BIPOC to reclaim a strength: the political power of solidarity.

BIPOC � an acronym for Black, Indigenous and other people of color � was part of how we talked about race during the COVID-19 spring of 2020. The term was useful to bring focus to the deadly experiences of oppression faced by Black and Indigenous people. Although some people didn�t like it or didn�t understand it, the term BIPOC filled the streets with multiracial rage about the murder of George Floyd and anti-Black policing. BIPOC reminded us to open our Zoom with acknowledgements that wherever we are, we are on Indigenous land.

COVID, Trump sparked anti-Asian hate

But another racial pattern was also emerging that spring. World leaders, including then-President Donald Trump, used the pandemic to revive racist stereotypes of Chinese people as sources of disease. Economic boycotts of Asian-owned business soon followed. Then newspapers began to report physical attacks on individuals of Asian and Pacific Island heritage as hate crimes.

In the middle of a national uprising against racism, it took another year and the mass killing of six Asian women before we paid serious attention to racism expressed as anti-Asian hate.

Certainly, many grassroots organizers mentioned individual attacks as examples of white supremacy. But there was no consistent frame that integrated individual hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into the larger picture of structural racism and anti-colonialism that our nation was revolting against.

In moments like these, words matter. They shape what we can imagine. The phrase �people of color� was created by Black, Latina, Asian and Indigenous women who had to invent new language to describe their political coalition in the face of white feminism.

Words can invent, words can destroy. There are real-world consequences to the words we choose. In a moment of intense white backlash, our cutting-edge discourse about ending white supremacy used a word that marginalized Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into the racialized stereotype of �other,� even among people of color. �BIPOC� inadvertently replaced the power of solidarity with a comfortable, familiar racial hierarchy.

Move past BIPOC to show solidarity

Legendary scholar/artist/activist Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote: �If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.� People of color is not a racial identity but a political one. It describes a tenuous, deeply uncomfortable state of coalition held together by the knowledge that it will take all of us standing together to wear down and tear down the structures of white supremacy.

Refusing BIPOC means when I write about the shared experience of the multiethnic, multinational group of people of African descent, I will talk about Black people. When pointing to the ongoing harms of settler colonialism, I will specify Indigenous people and Indigenous land. But when I want to describe an alliance that includes people from every group that is racialized and subjugated to keep white supremacy alive � people of African, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander and Arab heritage � I will talk about people of color.