processing thoughts: anti-Asian violence
girl I need some self-care but I also need to stop spending money
Inspired by pun pa, a Laotian fish wrap dish
A brisk hello from the two of us! Happy hump day - this week could have been better.
If you learned something new from this today, share with your friends and follow us on Twitter @around_thetable or Insta @around_thetable_. Also! We have a Spotify playlist for AAPI artists here. Check out our ~playlist curation~ 💖
<3 Jamie and Melinda
News
✉️ Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, withdrew her nomination to the Office of Management and Budget after losing the support of Joe Manchin of W. Va over her past critical tweets about lawmakers like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders. Had the confirmation gone through, she would have been the first South Asian American woman to lead the OMB.
🎰 With heavy advertising by casino companies and stigma in seeking treatment, gambling is a prevalent but underreported and understudied issue among Asian American communities, especially among working-class immigrants. Treatment centers lack cultural knowledge and language skills, and community resources are growing but still lacking in their ability to address concerns and collect data.
🥺 These were really cute. Disney+ and Pixar launched two short films by Asian filmmakers as part of an ongoing effort to show solidarity with AAPI communities. Click on the links to watch Wind and Float.
🥕 As the pandemic shuts doors for restaurants, salons, and smaller factories, many Asian Americans facing food insecurity - seniors and children in particular - are turning towards local hunger relief and community organizations like Seamaac and VietAid. The director of the Asian American Federation, one of these nonprofits, states that
“Asian poverty statistics make people gasp. There’s a myth about wealthy Asian Americans that really stymies our community"
We didn't know much of this information before writing this newsletter, but the prevalence of AAPI poverty and unemployment levels is quite high and varied across different ethnic groups and nationalities. NYC Asian unemployment went up to 25% in 2020, and 83% of Asian Americans with high school degrees or less had filed for unemployment in CA, over twice as much as non-Asians.
Thoughts on the rise of anti-Asian violence
TLDR Anti-Asian violence has gone up a ton in the past few months, and attacks and hate crimes have been spiking since the Lunar New Year. We’ve covered this quite a bit in our previous newsletters, and if you want more information on what is going on, check out some of the links here. This will be a little bit of an information dump because we’re not entirely sure how to process it, so here are some things we read and a convo of us thinking things in real-time:
Since the start of the pandemic last spring, Asian Americans have faced racist violence at a much higher rate than previous years. The NYPD reported that hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian sentiment jumped 1,900% in New York City in 2020. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, received 2,808 reports of anti-Asian discrimination between March 19 and December 31, 2020. - Cady Lang, Time
Back when we wrote about anti-Asian violence in July 2020, I guess I didn't expect the violence to go up so drastically :( it makes me feel very sad. And it sort of feels like this time around, this spike is getting slightly more noticed outside of the Asian community. The Asians in Marketing ERG I'm a part of asked our CMO to address it openly at our recent quarterly all hands, and the main D&I initiative in the marketing group I'm in had a discussion on this.
That's interesting... I am also shocked (but not surprised) to see anti-Asian violence go up so much in the past few months. The past few weeks have been a little odd for me though (partially because I'm in a place where I'm pretty isolated and privileged to not experience any of this first hand) because I really don't notice anyone in my extended circle of friends talking about it (outside of posting on their Insta stories, but even that is not super common).
"Visibility matters. Yet obsessing over it sometimes obscures the long-standing challenges of organizing Asian Americans around a single, shared story. It’s difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent, historical account of what that racism actually looks like." - Hua Hsu, The New Yorker article
I also spoke about it at my team's town hall. It was sort of bizarre, and I felt like there was no time to explain the model minority myth, history of anti-Asian violence, etc. in a short amount of time. But I guess it's effective to just tell them how I feel about it. I want to believe that the folks in my team (who are mostly white) will want to spend some time reading more into it and take action (e.g. I sent the free bystander training linked at the bottom of this newsletter). While I feel like the workplace is good for spreading awareness, I wish there were more space to dig into the complexities and room to ask questions without judgment. I don't yet know how to think about creating social change within big corporations.
Ok, rt the corporation thing. I also think there's a lot of complexity that is unaddressed here. I haven't had a chance to really talk about this with anyone and def not my parents or classmates/coworkers, but re the judgment thing, how do you bring this up at work? I'm super uncomfortable talking about things related to personal identity in a workplace setting (also fyi working through this rn because I think it's an important thing to do), and especially with something like anti-Asian violence, I have no idea how to even start that discussion??
"The project to dismantle white supremacy requires us to stand against white supremacy, which threatens us as well as the very existence of our Black and Brown brethren." - Daniel Yu, as guest blogger on Reappropriate.co
Another thing I'm heartened to see is initiatives around Black and Asian solidarity. I joined a Facebook group called the Black and Asian Alliance, and I'm looking forward to how we can support and learn from each other, as well as engage with other communities of color, on the discrimination we each uniquely experience but can together envision and create a future that could uplift all of us.
Btw thanks for inviting me to the FB group. TBH I really think that I can and should be a better advocate. Talking about Asian discrimination has been difficult for me because I have an ingrained tendency to brush it off and downplay things related to identity.
I've always had this weird discomfort with sharing and posting on social media. With this, I'm even more hesitant about the accidental comparison of experiences with ethnic/racial violence (and the more regular occurrences of discrimination/microaggressions). There are also a lot of different dimensions to this - especially with the role of policing in different communities and the visibility of violence - that I'm just not sure how to put into words.
To comment on above, I don't think it's necessarily about comparing ("oppression olympics"). It's acknowledging that these instances happen to us, and they may be different, but we can stand together to make things better.
Yea, you're right. The intention is never to compare, but I feel (??) like many of these posts/articles/even my own damn thoughts unwittingly go towards comparison. I kinda hate that tho. ACK
Anyhow, to end this section, sharing the end of a caption from one of Jeremy Lin's recent Facebook posts. I like how he ended it.
Source: Jeremy Lin, via More Than Yellow Blog
Small Feelings
I got a bit annoyed at some guy in the subtle asian baking Facebook group who made a matcha encrusted youtiao (fried dough popular in China). The kicker is that he then promoted it on his baking blog and the Facebook group as "Asian churro." No, it is not a churro - he said he used a youtiao recipe... to a group of Asian people... We really gotta decolonize the mind for even the smallest of things :( please just call it a youtiao and refrain from westernizing things.
Unrelated but I am looking for a hairdresser that knows how to do a soft perm on asian hair. Also i have a headache from my ponytail
✨ S P O T L I G H T ✨
Jake Zyrus
Singer, Sunshine Corazon on Glee
Source: USA Today
Born in the Philippines in 1992, Jake is a trans singer and actor. He grew up supporting his family by doing more than 80 amateur singing contests. When Jake was just 3, his mother fled with him and his younger brother away from their abusive father. When he was 15, his performance on the Korean show Star King went viral. Ellen Degeneres discovered this video and invited him to be on her show in 2007. (Rightfully so because oh my gosh, this person's voice is incredible.)
Soon later, Oprah invited him to be on her show as well (and even later... Oprahs becomes his godparent. like what?!). In 2010, he was featured as Sunshine Corazon on Glee. He's performed with Taylor Swift, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, and more and worked with Bruno Mars and Nick Jonas. He became the first Asian artist to reach the top 10 on the Billboard 200, reaching 8th with his album Charice.
In 2013, when Jake was still seen as a cisgender woman, he came out as lesbian. A year later, he told Oprah that "basically, my soul is male." Finally in 2017, he sent out his first tweet under his chosen name, Jake Zyrus! He got engaged to Shyre Aquino in 2018 ❤️ In 2020, a documentary about him called Jake and Charice was nominated for an International Emmy Award.
Chef's Specials
🎦 Chloé Zhao became the second woman & first Asian woman to win Best Director, Motion Picture at the Golden Globes. Her film Nomadland also won for Best Picture, Drama.
💇🏿♀️ I had no idea that "after Hong Kong, India is the top global supplier of human hair, and a significant amount of raw, unprocessed hair is flown to Black communities across the U.S. and Africa." Check out the Juggernaut's post on "Black Women, Indian Hair"
📚 A review of Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen's works and an interview of his life and literary career. Read his works "The Sympathizer", "The Refugees", and "The Committed".
🥬 Read this for a longer account of Minari with the history of Asian American farmers and reactions from older Korean migrants.
Podcast Episode Recommendation
Events
📢 Today, March 3 at 6pm ET: Justice for Christian Hall - join APIPA "to discuss this incident, hear from community leaders, and learn how you can take action to get justice for Christian and his family."
📢 March 4 at 9am PST: Rally for Justice with Thai Americans Against Hate in San Francisco
💪 Asian Americans Advancing Justice is running 3 free workshops on bystander intervention training this month with the org iHollaback. I’ve been to one of them before, and it was really helpful! One of them is specifically for Asian Americans facing harassment:
Bystander Intervention Virtual Training: March 15th at 6:00pm ET/5:00pm CT/ 3:00pm MT/ 2:00pm PT/12:00pm HST. Register Here
Bystander Intervention 2.0 - Conflict De-Escalation Workshop: March 17th, 2021. 2:00 PM ET/ 1:00pm CT/ 12:00pm MT/ 11:00 am PT/ 9:00 am HST. Register Here
How to Respond to Harassment for People Experiencing Anti-Asian/American Harassment Training Workshop: March 19th, 2021. 04:00pm ET/03:00pm CT/ 02:00pm MT/ 01:00am PT/ 11:00am HST Register Here