What is the current Asian American civil rights movement?
In this piece, I skip over discussions of topics you’d learn in Asian American Ethnic Studies 101 — yes, we know Asian Americans is a political term; it is not a monolithic group; I’m choosing to use “Asian Americans” and not “Asian Americans Pacific Islanders” because I am largely talking about Asian Americans organizing and not in the context of Pacific Islanders history of resistance; I do not care to discuss the model minority myth; yes, there are progressive Asian American people and organizations; and indeed, there is long history of Asian Americans fighting for civil rights.
I have been in Asian American organizing spaces for the past seven years, and possibly earlier throughout college. It was not until law school when I was involved with the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA) and the Committee Against Institutional Racism (CAIR) where I first saw a glimpse of what Asian American solidarity and, even more, what the Asian American civil rights movement could look like. This was also during the time the Black Lives Matter movement started and when the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore occurred. We very much reacted and embodied the work that we felt was needed of our time. APALSA regularly organized in support and alongside other students of colors against cuts to funding intended to support and recruit more students of color. Outside of school, we took on internships at legal aid and nonprofit organizations challenging deportations and the death penalty and supported labor unions and services for poor people. It was these experiences that drove me to commit to a legal career in service and organizing within the Asian American community. Post-law school, I received a fellowship from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Law Foundation and worked at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Chicago and later on Advancing Justice-Atlanta. I’ve spent many years thinking about what it means to be Asian Americans, in the political sense. I have had opportunities to put into practice theories I’ve learned and ideas I’ve developed by working within Asian American spaces and in communities of color.
In these roles, I have fought to bring Asian Americans into multi-racial coalitions. At times, I have heard disparaging remarks from non-Asian people of color, such as,
“I did not know Asian Americans were considered people of color.”
“Asian Americans can be brown?”
“What does [this issue] have to do with Asian Americans?”
However, overall my experience has been overwhelmingly positive; particularly when people across different racial communities connect to each other’s experiences.
On the other side of it, I have heard Asian American organizers and community members position Asian American work against other communities of color. As a whole, we need more practice of solidarity in Asian American organizing. This piece draws on personal and professional experiences and it is not intended to call out any person or organization, but instead, I call on Asian American organizations to address the challenges we face and submit to the fact that we can do better.
Case Study
One example of my own experience of practicing solidarity politics is the campaign to amend the Welcoming City Ordinance in Chicago. In 2013, a Chinese-American woman, Jessica Klyzek, was attacked by plain-clothed Chicago police officers during a raid of the tanning salon and massage parlor where she worked. Seen on security camera footages, a police officer yelled profanities at Ms. Klyzek while he pinned her to the ground with her arms behind her back. The following exchange is heard: [Trigger warning for the use of profane language and police violence.]
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Officer DiPasquale: You’re not fucking American! I’ll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the fuck you came from!
Ms. Klyzek: I’m a citizen, OK?
DiPasquale: No you’re not! No, you’re not a citizen! No, you’re not! No, you’re not! You’re here on our borrowed time. So mind your fucking business before I shut this whole fucking place down. And I’ll take this place and then whoever owns it will fucking kill you because they don’t care about you, OK? I’ll take this building. You’ll be dead and your family will be dead.
— — —
As this happened, other officers are seen standing around doing nothing. The video was released to the public a year later and when a small group of young people began plastering pictures of Ms. Klyzek’s face beatened and bruised throughout Chinatown, it sparked anger in the Asian American communities. Chinese Americans from Chinatown to the Japanese Americans on the North Side of Chicago began to organize, demanding accountability. What began as a town hall hosted by different Asian American communities throughout Chicago, became a two-year long effort to amend Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, commonly known as Chicago’s sanctuary policy. Asian Americans presented a proposal seeking to bar police officers from threatening deportation and questioning individuals’ immigration status and called for police accountability.
I came into the campaign in late 2015 when it was still only a group of Asian American organizations, most of which were service organizations. For several months, we held a series of community meetings to call attention to what happened to Ms. Klyzek, and how it affected the Asian American community. We also met with city officials, including the Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, to discuss our demands. But something about what we were doing felt off. In Chicago, you cannot talk about police accountability and police brutality without looking at the long history of how it has affected the Black community there; and you cannot talk about immigrants’ rights and threats of deportations without looking to the Latinx community and the organizing that has taken place for years under the Obama Administration. I felt then that there was no winning for Ms. Klyzek or the Asian American community in a meaningful way without connecting to larger efforts and the experiences of other communities of color.
And so, the Asian American community through a few Asian American organizations as its anchor linked up with an existing coalition table made up of more than twenty immigrant-rights organizations throughout Chicago, known as the Chicago Immigration Policy Working Group. We joined together two proposals, ours and one led by Latinx organizations calling to abolish the list of individuals exempt from protections under the Welcoming City Ordinance, or referred to as “the carve-outs,” which created loopholes for immigration enforcement to arrest people in Chicago although the City touted itself as a sanctuary.
In October 2016, after a series of negotiations with the then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office, half of the our joint proposal passed. You can take a guess at which half — the one the Asian American community had originally put forward, but with the accountability piece cut out. As a coalition, we made a decision to take the win as we were also seeing the rise of white nationalism and anticipating the possible-incoming of a President Trump. For our part, the Asian American community claimed a win for leading on such a major effort, but when that phase of the campaign was over Asian Americans’ support to continue organizing for changes to the Welcoming City Ordinance disappeared. While the Welcoming City Ordinance campaign led to pushes for the Illinois Trust Act, which was also a success in large part by the efforts of a statewide multi-racial coalition, I do feel that the Asian American community‘s promise to continue the second phase of the campaign to get rid of the carve-outs was left unfulfilled. Asian American solidarity on the issue of police accountability drifted, too.
Lessons Learned
1) So much of organizing Asian Americans is about making Asian Americans visible for others to see how we too are affected. In our campaign to amend the Welcoming City Ordinance, many of our talking points were about how Asian Americans are criminalized, too. The place where Ms. Klyzek worked was raided because there was suspected sex work taking place.
2) Organizing Asian Americans to call for police accountability of what happened to Ms. Klyzek was an entry point to talking to Asian Americans about police violence in Chicago. It made our community aware. On the flip side, throughout the campaign I met many Latinx and Black people who shared that they learned how police violence also affects Asian Americans.
3) Asian Americans become powerful when we stand in solidarity with other oppressed groups. When we called for the firing of the officers involved in the beating of Ms. Klyzek, the Mayor’s Office and the Police Department did not take our demand seriously. The Chicago police kills Black people at an alarming rate, and even then there is very little justice for the victims and their families. It was the moments in which we showed up alongside other communities of color that we felt the power of the movement, from the series of press conferences held by Asian American and Latinx organizations to when people at a packed townhall, many of whom were Black residents in Chicago, cheered and applauded a youth from Chinatown for her testimony before City Council members, recounting the ways the police doesn’t protect Chinese residents and, in fact, only serve to intimidate us.
Reflections on Movement Building
For the past two years, I’ve been thinking about what it means to build on these efforts. I think about how to carve out an Asian American-led organizing space and one that would contribute to larger movements.
But from Asian American leaders and organizers, I often hear, “What about us?” in expressing a frustration for being left out of Black and Brown organizing spaces. It is this precise feeling and the lack of analysis inherently attached to such sentiment that has allowed conservative Asian American groups to organize and move Asian Americans to support policies against Black and Brown communities. In mainstream and national movements, Asian Americans are visible on the wrong side of racial justice. Take for examples conservative Asian American organizing in support of Peter Liang, the police officer in New York City who shot and killed Akai Gurley, and against affirmative action. Conservative groups have been able to capitalize on our feelings of isolation to move really terrible policies.
In fact, it is wrong to think Asian Americans are isolated in movements. Asian Americans gain so much from the movement work of other Black and Brown communities. We should acknowledge it and build with it. There are many pressing issues affecting Asian Americans — Chinese American residents are being pushed out of Chinatown and their neighborhoods because of rising housing costs and gentrification; the lack of access to affordable health care and elderly care for our aging population; deportations of Southeast Asians in disproportionate numbers; language access in voting rights; access to human services; labor issues, such illegal work practices, wage theft, low pay; domestic violence; sex trafficking; and the list goes on. All of which presents opportunities to build across different racial divides.
When we organize within the Asian American community and connect it to larger coalitions, I guarantee we will find good, strong organizers in other communities to support us. During one of the last moments of Welcoming City Ordinance amendment campaign, at the working group table an organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations, Rosi Carrasco (who later becomes my mother-in-law), looked at me and asked, “This is also Advancing Justice’s proposal and you’ve worked on it for the past two years, I want to ask you whether you think we should take this offer.” It was really her blessings for Asian Americans to take the win that we did. Rosi is a lead organizer in Latinx and undocumented spaces and she was one of the first organizers to welcome the Asian American community into the working group. It was from working with her that opened the door for the Asian American community to build alliances with other organizations on issue of police accountability and racial equity. She invited us to be a part of other Black and Brown campaigns and vouched for us among organizations perplexed to see radical Asian Americans organizing.
Moving Forward
The reality is that Asian Americans make up 5% of the U.S. population. It is difficult to be visible where statistically we do not show up in the same way on issues. And yet, numbers don’t cancel out our humanity and we stand to be counted. That means we must do the difficult work of developing our own community through organizing and committing to building with other communities of color.
In practice, there is no one approach. In order to dismantle racial oppression in the United States, we have to understand the hundreds of years of chattel slavery and anti-black policies leading up to present day; we have to understand U.S. imperialism and the U.S.’s relationship to Mexico and Central America; and so much more. We don’t need to show up in any space regurgitating historical facts and figures, but we need to understand the historical roles Asian Americans have been played into and course-correct where we ourselves play in oppressing others. And yes, we need to understand the history of anti-Asian sentiments in the U.S. and how that’s our beef with white supremacy and not other communities of color.
Putting it into everyday exercise, solidarity means sometimes taking the time to base-build and educate your base; sometimes taking leadership from other communities of color; and sometimes just not taking funding from others. There are Asian American groups and individuals who do this really well and build really strong relationships across different movements, see D.R.U.M. and the Minnesota 8 campaign. Their successes show in the ways Black and Brown-led spaces have opened itself up to Asian Americans. More important, it is in the gains made in the movement over the “What about us?” politics.