George Floyd. Knee on the neck. I can’t breathe. The symbolic cues that signalled a massive protest by those still considered slaves and unworthy by white supremacists. Countless names of blacks who suffered police brutality and did not make it alive. Countless others who daily walk American streets with fear in their hearts, especially young black boys who are a threatened species. Reading American Actor, Gabrielle Union’s biography, “We’re going to need more wine”, I had a lump in my throat when she described her fear every day when her sons walk down their upper class neighbourhood which is mostly upper crust white.
Breaking it down, she explains that it was as if she needed permission to be comfortable in her own country, to work hard with her husband and earn her space in that neighbourhood. It was almost like a crime. She described the looks she gets from her white neighbours when she goes out to get the groceries. And finally how at some point she was afraid for her boys because two black boys just knocking at a neighbour’s door in their own neighbourhood can get the police screeching down. They must be intruders. There is no way they live here. It was all very scary and creepy.
In America, race is a big problem and when Donald Trump became President, he escalated negative race relations times 100. It was insane. Red necks felt entitled, the south became more racist; baring their fangs and white supremacists wanted any immigrant and African Americans out of their country.
I love to travel. A lot. But I have come to realize that whatever fortunes need to be pursued can be pursued here because the fact that we are all black reduces the barrier we have to face to get where we are going. In America being black, or coloured or brown is a true and present danger. And therein lies the crux of our conversation today.
Racism is a disease of hate and illiteracy and in case you have not noticed, so is Ethnic jingoism
So last week a white gunman opened fire on three Asian massage parlours and killed eight persons, six of whom were Asian women. In the days before, news broke of an old Asian woman who was attacked on her way to the supermarket. The Asian grandmother rendered her attacker hospital- bound in a tale that broke the internet. Both attacks are considered racially motivated although the white right wing body is denying the racial profile of the attacks. Expected.
I just read a poignant piece by an Asian American woman R.O. Kwon, about racial ties and sisterhood and solidarity and immigration and her Korean home and all its values. It was a tear jerk piece. Writing in Vanity Fair, her piece “A letter to my fellow Asian women whose hearts are still breaking” is one of the finest pieces about grief and solidarity and togetherness and sisterhood and humanity that I have read in a long time. Here are excerpts. “I am not spending any more of my limited time alive defending the humanity of marginalized people, arguing once again with those who don’t already see it that we are all fully realized people deserving of human rights.” In how Asians are viewed in America, she had this universal truism. “It is a standing, pain-riddled joke with close Asian women friends that if we haven’t yet been mistaken for each other, we’re not really friends… and they keep mixing us up.” She says although Korean, she has been mistaken for mixed race, Indian and Sri- Lankan by “the willful, lazy illogic of racism.” Have you noticed that white people can’t tell us black people apart either? But we can tell that Caucasians are completely different people. Ridiculous!
In this heartbreaking piece, Ms. Kwon remembers her Korean background, the food and the love and “our care for one another.” Then she quotes her Hispanic friend who told her “in a moment that felt like a crowd breaking like clarity, you matter to me, we matter to me and I would so much rather have us and our allies on our side than any of them. For we already belong.” Such a powerful piece about racism, immigrants and humanity.
Racism is a disease of hate and illiteracy and in case you have not noticed, so is Ethnic jingoism. Our tribes have blinded us to the point that we can no longer tolerate each other and online we peddle hate towards those we do not know anything about based on tribe or religion. Ethnicity is no excuse for letting idiots get away with murder because they are “ours”. Time to take our country back!
