We need to learn more, care more, and do more to end anti-Asian bigotry and violence
It would be a mistake to let the most recent mass shooting in Colorado make us forget about the one that came before it in Atlanta — the one that left six Asian-American women dead. While every lost life merits grief and sorrow, the violent racism and misogyny that led to those Asian women’s deaths is heart-stopping.
That tragedy — the dreadful culmination of a year of rising anti-Asian attacks — is a compelling reason to learn more about local Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and to consider how we can all act together to counter anti-Asian hate.
We have not uncovered any anti-Asian assaults on our community, but it’s impossible to know whether some have gone unreported because of fear of retaliation. However, there was a recent instance of hateful graffiti, including Nazi symbols, painted on the wall of US Martial Arts, a business owned by the Korean-American Lee family.
“That was definitely an upsetting moment,” says Angie Lee. “In our 37 years in business, nothing like this has ever happened before. We are definitely going to speak up; it’s what we teach our students to do, to be positive members of the community.”
We also got an earful about fear and anger. A local Asian-American attorney says, “I’m actively worried about my stepdaughter and her mother, who own and staff a small Asian restaurant and may be vulnerable to some jackass inspired by recent events and by that (unprintable term for former President Trump).”
Yet support for the AAPI community is close at hand as well. The South Puget Sound Chapter of Asian Pacific Islander Coalition (APIC) issued a statement soon after the Atlanta shootings that includes this encouraging call to action:
“We recognize that the racism we experience is intertwined, and all of it is due to the common issue of white supremacy and white nationalism. We must fight against this violence, and call out the strategy of those in power who would like to see our communities turn against each other instead of moving forward together. We are much more powerful when we band together than when we are torn apart, and the support we have seen over the past 48 hours has shown a powerful future of what coalition and solidarity can and should look like.”
Practical solidarity includes being willing to intervene when Asians and Pacific Islanders are insulted, defamed, or attacked. Asian-Americans Advancing Justice offers tutorials about how to do this on its website.
In the long term, though, advancing justice is best served by learning more about our AAPI neighbors and their histories.
Olympia’s earliest Asian immigrants were Chinese men, recruited to come to the U. S. in the 1870s to build railroads, but reviled a decade later when they were perceived as competing with Americans for jobs. In Olympia, as in Tacoma and Seattle, vigilantes attempted to expel them. In Olympia, they failed. Sheriff William Billings deputized downtown Olympia merchants to hold off an angry mob, and saved our fledgling Chinese community from violence.
This act was arguably heroic, but its motivations were not. A resolution drafted at a town meeting had chillingly declared “we are decidedly opposed to their expulsion by force or by intimidation, or by any other unlawful means, but we will at all times give our aid and support to any measures looking to a peaceable and lawful riddance of that element and a final solution of the ‘Chinese question.’
That story is told frankly on the Olympia Historical Society website. But there are huge gaps in our access to histories of our other Asian and Pacific Islander neighbors. We hope Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, Filipino, Marshallese and other AAPI people who live here will write and publish their histories on the Historical Society’s website, where they can be read by adults and K-12 students alike.
We envy the richer resources on AAPI history on the statewide non-profit website historylink.org. That’s where we found an entry about “America is in the Heart,” a semi-autobiographical novel by Carlos Bulosan, a poet and writer from the Philippines who immigrated to Seattle just as the Great Depression began.
Even the title of that book moves us. America is indeed in our hearts — and our hearts need to be better educated, more open, and more concerned about every one of the approximately 20,000 of our Thurston County neighbors who are Asian-American or Pacific Islander.
We all need to learn more, care more, and do more to end the current wave of anti-Asian bigotry and violence, and to prevent future waves from forming.