All eyes right now are on Asian Americans. Widespread attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the mass shootings at Atlanta massage parlors in March, have increased awareness of the discrimination and harassment that have long characterized life in the United States for people like me.
But I fear that the response — including the rare bipartisan passage last month of federal legislation to address hate crimes against Asian Americans — will continue a problematic cycle: providing crumbs to the latest racial minority group grabbing headlines before shifting focus to the next group.
Asian Americans have experienced this before, including in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian people were targets of hate and harassment. Then, as now, money flowed from philanthropy and government to bolster existing organizations and seed new ones. But we lost an opportunity then, and seem to be losing one now, to build solidarity across racial groups in our fight for equality and justice.
To pretend that the targeting of Asian Americans is not a symptom of the same illness that results in Latinos being profiled by immigration authorities and Black people being hunted by police is to be complicit in the mythology of America as an inclusive country.
In the early 1990s, I made a choice to insert myself into the Asian American activist and academic world. But as a South Asian, born in India and raised in Belize, I didn’t always feel seen by other Asian Americans. While Indians are the largest segment of Asians, references to Asian Americans often focus on the experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans — and render other Asians invisible.
I started South Asian Youth Action, a youth development nonprofit for those who trace their ancestry to countries on the subcontinent. Eventually, I came to understand how immigrants’ shared experience creates opportunities for us to build political strength together. For 10 years, I ran New American Leaders, which works with immigrants of all backgrounds but seeks to lift up individual histories and experiences. As a light-skinned, middle-class, English-speaking woman, I know I can walk more safely in my adopted country than a French-speaking Black Haitian man. These differences matter. The hierarchy of oppression cannot be swept under the color-blind rug of a common immigrant experience.
Engaging in broader solidarity does not mean obliterating these individual stories but creating space for Asian Americans to address the threads of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that bind people of color together. By fighting only for our piece of the pie and bolstering our own fights with resources targeted only to our communities, we are harming rather than helping the American project.
For example, I could devote my advocacy efforts to more consistent inclusion and representationof South Asians in the too-broad category of Asian Americans, as some are doing now, or I could focus my energy on ensuring that no group faces oppression. We have a choice between protecting small patches of the American quilt or creating a new tapestry rooted in collective liberation. To avoid a new battle for scarce resources every decade or so, we must choose the latter.
Philanthropy right now is swept up in the AAPI giving tide, including $1 billionraised by the Asian American Foundation, which was launched last month by Asian American business leaders. While this is certainly welcome, it also underscores the problem. Grant makers need to invest long-term in dismantling the root causes of anti-Asian violence — specifically, white-supremacy culture — rather than sporadically and in short-term bursts pouring funds into the minority group du jour.
What does that look like in practice? Instead of only funding new projects and organizations to curb hate, seek out local groups that are serving Asian Americans and working every day to protect them. Instead of throwing support primarily behind feel-good campaigns that lift up the stories and contributions of people of color, help empower them to develop policy advocacy skills or run for office — and create more than inspiring stories.
Asian Americans must recognize that our privileged position as a group exists only relative to other people of color. Right now, there is no place at the top of the racial triangle for anyone but white people. Trying to make our way to the apex means climbing over other groups. With every demand for greater visibility, we must ask who we are rendering invisible. With every action that creates a false sense of movement to the top, we must consider who is left underfoot. Rather than focusing our work on getting to the top of the triangle, we need to eliminate that triangle altogether.
Moving us forward in that long-term struggle will require an approach to policy making, advocacy, and philanthropy that takes into account the overlapping identities of race, gender, and class. For example, we need to expend the same energy that went into hate-crime legislation toward confronting racist law enforcement and racial discrimination in economic and educational institutions. We need to build more long-term coalitions, both among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and beyond, based on shared interests and concerns, such as health care, environmental justice, and voting rights.
As AAPI activists and philanthropists, this is our moment to say we’re in this together — and to make sure we don’t leave our fellow Black, Latino, Indigenous and Arab Americans behind.
