Today, Yesterday and Always
Like so many others, I’ve been carried along by an avalanche of rage and frustration over the last two weeks, while simultaneously feeling frozen by sadness and exhaustion. The bitterly long and lonely marathon that has been the fight against police brutality and systemic racism has suddenly burst into the kind of mainstream movement that comes along maybe once a generation. My weapon of choice has always been words, but I’ve wondered these past weeks if what is needed from me now is to be quiet and uplift the voices of those who are most marginalized, to center the voices of our Black community members who have always taken on nearly the sole burden of the antiracist work that should fall least on their shoulders. What is there for me to say, except: I recognize and am enraged by your oppression, my dear Black sisters and brothers, and I will continue to stand with you, even when it is not popular, even when the fight is not in the streets and courts but in homes and offices and other private spaces.
Much has been written, yelled, podcasted and homilized on the deep and vast subject of white complicity, and justifiably so. But I realize that it is past time to deeply examine my own ethnic community’s investment in white supremacy, our relationship to the police, and the limits and erasures in our solidarity with Black people. Or rather, my ethnic communities — because none of us is a member of a single community. My South Asian and/or Muslim community has certainly experienced the eye and arm of law enforcement in a different way than some of my broader Asian American community, in ways that’s directly related to the reckless militarization of the police post-9/11, and which has escalated the types of violence wreaked upon protestors in Ferguson, in Baltimore, and today all over the country: Americans did not face tanks and automatic rifles at marches in the 1960s. And we certainly recognize how all this is connected to American military aggression in our own ancestral homelands. Yet most if not all Asian Americans and non-Black Muslims have experienced, at some time in our lives, the kind of adjacence to whiteness that Black Americans never have — and we’ve benefited from the anti-Blackness that props up this white supremacist society by the very nature of our immigrant experiences.
Sure, our parents, our grandparents, we ourselves didn’t know when we first came here that the rights we enjoy are those that African Americans throughout history sacrificed their lives to gain, inch by painful inch. We didn’t understand that by working hard and dreaming the American dream, we were buying into a narrative that systematically excluded our Black neighbors because of housing segregation. We didn’t get that the police officer that smiled at us on the street and came to check on us when the car on our driveway was egged by teenagers had a completely different relationship to the Black community in another part of town. Did we ever even question why that was another part of town from where we wanted to live, where we wanted our kids to go to school? #housingsegregationineverything
And of course Asian Americans are not a monolith. We are rich and poor, documented and undocumented, brown and white-passing and somewhere in between; we live in so many different identities that shape our experiences. The same goes for my non-Black Muslim community. But we have never been dehumanized the way that African Americans have, and that has allowed many of us the comfort of denial. We can always choose to look away. Or worse, watch and do nothing.
It’s not enough to feel sad and angry when we repeatedly see Black bodies being brutalized by police on video, and then move on. It’s not enough to verbally disapprove of anti-Black racism, but remain silent when we see it play out in our communities — or even engage in it ourselves. It’s not even enough to acknowledge that systemic racism exists and kills people, but be unwilling to support the kind of radical reimagination of these systems that true justice requires. On a local level, on the ground — supporting and joining those who have already been doing the work for years. Doing the work in our personal and professional lives, in every aspect we have the ability to change the way we and those around us behave.
Whatever power God gave us, we’re accountable for the way we use it — whether we decide to further our own self-interest at the expense of others, or if we will use that power to uplift our fellow human beings to the level everyone deserves. To put ourselves on the line for human dignity for our African American sisters and brothers, because it’s ridiculous and enraging that they even have to demand it in the first place. Because Black lives matter today, they mattered yesterday, and they will always matter. We can’t be any later to the cause of justice, or we will destroy ourselves and others in the process.
