Come July, their dedication to LGBTQ+ social justice issues has vanished.
I see a lot of that every June, when large corporations buy a Pride float and festoon their logo with rainbows.
But after coming up short on advice other than to be careful, I turned to my Asian friends to talk about how to address this issue in our local communities, which includes academia.Īndrew: And I’ve been struggling with ways to avoid slipping into performative activism and allyship. Like Vilma, my mom attends church regularly, even during the week because she’s super Catholic. Nick: Like many of my Filipino friends, I spoke with my mother after hearing about Vilma Kari, a Filipino American in NYC who was attacked on her way to church. It’s also when we commemorate the life of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American murdered on June 19, 1982, because two White men at a bar near Detroit resented the Japanese auto industry for “stealing” American jobs. We note that it’s June: Pride month, a time to commemorate the Stonewall uprising in 1969. We want so desperately for Atlanta to be the last time anti-Asian hate crimes make national news. Writers, editors, and social media users chose to write and share pieces that elevated misogynistic discourses about sex work and dehumanized Asian women. But the first news stories that broke were about the murderer and his “troubled” background or the social ills of sex work. They had families and loved ones they worked in the spa industry or were its patrons. News media were quick to name and describe the shooter, while the names, faces, and stories of the victims remained unknown. Hernandez-Ortiz (30), Hyun Jung Grant (51), Soon Chung Park (74), Suncha Kim (69), and Yong Ae Yue (63) were murdered by a White gunman in the Atlanta metropolitan area. On March 16, Xiaoji Tan (49), Daoyou Feng (44), Paul Andre Michels (54), Elcias R. Little did we know that January wasn’t the end of it, not even the peak. People kept saying that Room at the Table was “so timely” and sorely needed at a time of such high tensions in the Asian American community. It was part of a larger workshop, called Room at the Table, that critically analyzed the positionality of Asian Americans in our field. In January of 2021, we were invited to co-facilitate a teach-in that focused on the intersection of queer and Asian American identities at the LSA Annual Meeting. Exclusion and xenophobia have been part and parcel of the Asian experience in America since before American history began. Although public scrutiny was sparse in the beginning months of the ordeal, scholars and activists have helped to raise awareness not only about the alarming rise of racially-motivated attacks, but also about the entrenchment of anti-Asian racism in American history. The botched governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic was directly responsible for an increase in hate crimes against people of Asian descent in the United States. It has been a tumultuous year for Asian America. By: Andrew Cheng, UC Irvine and Nick Mararac, Georgetown University