Time for another edition of “Letters to the editor”, where I cough up some word salad that may-or-may-not be published by my local paper.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I am writing a week after the Atlanta area shootings that took the lives of 8 people, 6 of whom were women of Asian descent.

A week of seeing hashtags of #StopAsianHate make the rounds on social media.

A week of solidarity that comforts the soul, and an outpouring of words from media personalities and elected officials that have at times seemed almost overwhelming, both for good and for bad.

But it has also been a week of mostly white commenters pushing the narrative that anti-Asian violence is committed not by them but by Black Americans. This is a narrative that has been pushed by white nationalist pundits such as Tucker Carlson, and by high profile incidents cherry-picked to prove that point.

There is also the troubling — but understandable — response from some in Black communities that Asian Americans on the whole don’t show up when Black lives are under attack, so why should they show up for us?

It is hard to deny that fact when we see the face of an Asian American police officer standing guard while Derek Chauvin brutally murdered George Floyd.

There is a history here that cannot be ignored.

White supremacy has always relied on pitting marginalized groups against each other. From the purposeful segregation of Black communities into low-income neighborhoods, to the insertion of Asian immigrants into those neighborhoods as business owners when Black residents could not get the loans to start those businesses themselves. To the cultivating of the “model minority” myth which seeks to place a monolithic Asian American community as paragons of the family and education and self-reliance, but only serves to use Asian Americans as a defense against charges of racism, and a cudgel against Black people.

This is what white supremacy does.

But what Atlanta reveals, and what the past year of anti-Asian propaganda reveals, and the entire history of our country reveals, is that we are only the model minority as long as it is “convenient”.

And what is often lost are the moments of solidarity that have united Asian and Black Americans. From the “Third World Liberation Front” in California in the late 60’s, to historic activists like Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, to the modern rise of the hashtag “Asians4BlackLives” in support of #BlackLivesMatter.

White supremacy demands that some group is always at the bottom of the hierarchy, and in America, that is Black people. For all the trauma that Asian Americans (particularly women) have undergone this past week and year and in many cases their whole lives, we are still complicit in a system and a culture that demeans and dehumanizes our Black, Brown, and Indigenous siblings to an even greater degree.

And everything we do HAS to understand that complicity, and what we will have to give up.

Solidarity will always come at a cost.

But the cost will be worth it if we are to make America what it could be, a place where all lives will actually matter.