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In the past year, Asian people across the U.S. have been attacked, harassed, and murdered. We have been yelled at, beaten, stabbed, and shot. Stop AAPI Hate has cataloged 11,467 incidents from March 2020 to March 2022 (MSN).
Non-Asian people of all races participated in these assaults. The majority of assailants were white (NPR). But when activists correctly identified the attacks’ white supremacist origins, conservatives cried foul. If a Black person attacks an Asian elder, they asked, how could white racism possibly be to blame? “Describing this sort of thing as white supremacy,” said one far-right political scientist, “is stupid” (Commentary).
But white supremacy is a system, not a collection of individual acts of white violence. This system depends on settler-colonialism and the continued theft of Indigenous land, the enslavement and incarceration of Black people, and xenophobia and neocolonialism against those identified as foreign, like Asian people. Although it may be non-white people who uphold racism against other communities of color, that doesn’t mean it isn’t white supremacy. It means that white supremacy is a strong social system that structures our beliefs and lives, whether we are white or not.
TAKE ACTION
• Read about solidarity and transformative justice in the face of anti-Asian attacks.
• Watch “Korean Ajumma for Black Lives,” where Isabel Kang explains the necessity of building solidarity between Asian and Black people.
• Look into the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities project.
• Listen to our recent podcast episode on practicing solidarity.
The 1992 LA Uprising was precipitated by two events. One was the police beating of Rodney King (NPR). It was also influenced by the murder of Latasha Harlins, a Black girl incorrectly thought to be stealing a single bottle of juice, who was killed by Korean liquor store owner Soon Ja Du (LA Times). In the uprising, protestors set fire to LAPD headquarters and looted businesses that extracted wealth from working-class Black communities, with LA’s Koreatown as a particular target. When some armed Korean people defended their businesses, gun battles broke out. It took thousands of soldiers for the government to subdue the rebellion (Curbed).
Korean people in the U.S. own small businesses in communities of color because they could succeed in these industries in the face of racism from white suppliers and employers (NextShark). White America turns around and uses Korean small businesses to “prove” white supremacy doesn’t exist. They also use them to critique Black and Latinx communities that have less access to capital for not owning such businesses themselves. White supremacy’s “divide and control” strategy pits immigrant small business owners against working-class Black people (HuffPost).
This lesson became clear for many Korean people in Los Angeles during the uprising. The military and LAPD were let loose during the rebellion, killing at least 10 civilians in the streets. But when Koreatown went up in flames, the police stood by and did nothing.
Nothing in my life indicated I was a secondary citizen until the LA riots…They left us to burn. We learned a lesson in what the lack of political power and cultural misunderstandings between minority groups can do.”
Business owner Chang Lee (CNN)
Since the uprising, there have been intentional efforts between Black and Korean groups in the United States to build solidarity. After decades of such organizing work, there is still much more today. But today, nine out of 10 Korean-Americans recognize that Black Americans face discrimination, and Black people are the non-Asian group most likely to recognize that anti-Asian racism exists (Brookings). Conservatives love the false narrative that it’s Black people who mostly commit anti-Asian attacks because it strains a multi-racial coalition against white supremacy. It is used to suggest that Asian elders primarily need police protection from Black people and that Asian and Black struggles for collective liberation are inherently opposed. But as David Bryant of the Latasha Harlins Justice Committee said, “Our Korean brothers and sisters, we would like you to know: history doesn’t have to repeat itself. We can come together in unity” (Yahoo News).
The lesson here is that solidarity isn’t a given. It doesn’t appear from the simple fact of sharing a race, gender, employer, or country of origin with anyone else. And when we speak about building solidarity across differences in a country that pits us against each other, it is important to remember that solidarity isn’t just something we claim. It isn’t a demographic fact or a nice belief, no matter the words or letters in our Twitter bios.
Solidarity is a practice. It’s not something we are or believe: it’s something we do. We can stand with others to dismantle the political and economic institutions that harm them and us, or we can choose to look away. We can choose to appeal to whiteness for safety and resources, or we can build safety through fighting alongside one another to see whiteness and white supremacy abolished.“We can’t just say, ‘I’m in solidarity with you.’ Those are empty words unless we back it up with action… Because structurally, only the few at the top have all the power, money, and resources,” says Isabel Kang of LA’s Korean Resource Center (Faithfully Magazine). “Those who give out empty words of solidarity: will you be around when they start pointing guns at you?”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Though white people committed the most recent anti-Asian attacks, the existence of Black assailants was used to deny the role of white supremacy.
• People of color can hold anti-indigenous, anti-Black, and xenophobic views, but the root remains white supremacy.
• Building solidarity across differences requires education, organizing, and work, such as how Black and Korean communities came together after the LA Uprising.
*This piece was originally published on 6/4/21. It was updated and edited by The ARD on 8/5/22.