apolitical asians and how to get them to give a fuck
by isabelle lee
why i am starting this zine right now, july 13, 2017 in my school library: 1. I am always salty and need to put that salt into something productive
2. I recently went on a tinder date with Asian boy “J”, who found it “cute” that I was studying “women’s rights” and then proceeded to complain to me that I was too “pc” and said I can’t change anything :)))) ya fuck u “J”
3. ASIAN PEOPLE STAY IGNORANT
4. As a part of my summer program I’ve been required to chaperone students to different factories around the city. The amount of poor Asian women I’ve seen doing manual labor in these “factories” to make nice lingerie and runway clothes that’ll go straight to white capitalist hands makes me angry that rich, privileged Asian people don’t know that these women exist or choose to not acknowledge them, but they’re in our DIRECT communities!! They exist!!!
5. I’M TIRED OF THE ANTI-BLACKNESS
6. I’m still working on my own communities and how to talk with them about unlearning anti-blackness and other forms of ingrained, violent discrimination. This is mostly a perzine to share things that have worked or things that I’m just thinking of.
Disclaimer kinda thing: I am East Asian, my experiences are purely from a cishet East Asian POV. When I say “Asian” I most often am referring to East Asians, especially those that are upper-middle classs. This is because East Asians are provided more privileges than our black/brown, poor, queer friends, and thus tend to be less political. Also East Asians are the most problematic Asians that’s it bye.
we are kind of shitty (first realize we don’t deserve to bask in our privilege and general shittiness) So I don’t think it’s news anymore, Asian people are the most racist to black and brown people after white people themselves. We really eat that model-minority shit up. Some radical Asian folks hate talking about the model minority myth because they think they have better things to invest their labor in, but guess what... the model minority myth is still relevant, especially if we’re talking about trying to talk with our inner communities who may not even understand the “basics”. Other points of relevance include: the protests from Asian communities for Peter Liang after the death of Akai Gurley, the LA riots and its aftermath, and Asian people’s unapologetic attitudes towards appropriating black culture almost as frequently and often more violently than current white Americans (STOP BLACKFACE ALREADY!! I’M LOOKING AT YOU KPOP!!). We talk some shit about white people but don’t consider the ways we operate as white people #2 (quoted by racist white terrorist dylan roof himself). And no, this is not ok. (I mean, are you ok with being acknowledged as a racist group of people by possibly the most racist terrorist of our generation????) THIS ISN’T OK, OK? And Asian people need to stop sitting around twiddling our thumbs ignoring the way we participate in this great shitstorm called racism in America, because it’s not just going to go away because... at least we aren’t white? No, we are still shitty, and simply ignoring the problematic members of our community doesn’t do anything but passively affirm to them that whatever racist nonsense they’re doing or saying is okay. If you are willing to do the labor, try to start a dialogue with your communities. asian ppl when a black person gets shot by the police
asian ppl when a black comedian makes one asian joke
me
unlearning what “Asian” means to us Asians
Poor Asians exist!!! Black Asians exist!!! Poor Asians exist!!! Black Asians exist!!! Poor Asians exist!!! Black Asians exist!!! Poor Asians exist!!! Black Asians exist!!! A big problem within Asian-American communities - especially those that are more homogenous in highly Asian-populated cities like Los Angeles or Atlanta - is thinking that only ONE kind of Asian exists and that is all there is to the Asian experience in the US. No... Asian Americans are not all cishet, light skinned and beautiful, upper-middle class and privileged perfect minority beings.
In NYC, more than 25% of Asian Americans are living in poverty, greater than any other Race/Ethnicity. Maybe for those who have only been exposed to their upper-middle class peers where coming from a two income household is the norm and the racial profile of “Poor” = Black/Brown - the thought of “Poor” = Asian is something they can’t even picture.
Lastly, Asian people who disassociate themselves from Black Lives Matter or defend their indifference by saying it doesn’t affect them.... R U KIDDING ME?? Black Asians literally exist. They are in your direct communities. They as just as (ehtnicity here) as you are (ethnicity here). Get that anti-blackness out of here and acknowledge #1 Black Asians exist. This is also your fight.
beyond United Airlines, Fox News, and Hawaii Five-O I’m often impressed by exactly how many of my Facebook friends are secret radical leftists. Because every time some news about some Asian person getting wronged is released, people are jumping at the chance to wax long social media posts about misrepresentation! racism! America hates Asian ppl!!! People of CoLoR!! That being said, it’s not that I don’t think these are legitimate problems: racially based violence, blatant fetishistic and orientalist racism in mass media, or racist wage differences for Asian actors - my issue instead lies with the people who cry for “equality” and justice, but stay silent when a black person is wrongfully killed. Social or racial justice isn’t something you should care about only when it affects you. But for so many Asian people it seems like it’s so easy to just switch the on/off button depending on the skin color of the victim. It’s the worst when Asian people legitimately think the kind of racism we face is comparable to black and brown people. Like, are you actually serious??? I think that kind of entitlement comes not only from the anti-blackness that we’ve been fed since birth - or stepping foot onto Amerikkka - but also a kind of petulant feeling that we’ve been wronged by being labeled the “model minority”, that we didn’t ask for that title. This might explain the obsessive way in which Asian people get up in arms about how the model minority myth was created by white folks, but don’t step back and look at the way Asian people were the ones who actually co-opted the myth to try and distance themselves from black folks. Despite this annoyance towards my silent peers, I do have a sense of hope when I see glimmers of politics on feeds of people who were once completely silent. We all start somewhere after all. The question is, how do we get them to care outside the Asian-American microcosm of politics, but to bigger scale movements? How do we get people to realize there is no liberation without black liberation?
~If I see #AsianLivesMatter I might die~ :)
talking thru generational divides with older folks in your community Even more difficult than politicizing Asian American youth is mobilizing the older folks within the community, especially for those who may be immigrants and feel detached from American politics. We get angry at them for being old and just not “getting it”, while they may say we aren’t really (Asian Ethnicity Here) but (Asian Ethnicity Here)-American, which is why we think more “progressively”. Well firstly I just wanna talk about being careful about blaming your parents/elders’ “authentic Asianness” as a possible reason for their more conservative politics. This idea that our parents are more conservative solely on the basis that they’re 100% culturally Asian feeds into the idea that any Eastern culture is inherently regressive compared to the Great American Progressive Society. This East/West binary of what’s conservative versus liberal is just really frickin racist and xenophobic don’t you think? I guess for a nice little anecdote about how my parents personally became politicized... We got poor! Yes, my dad’s business went bankrupt, and suddenly we were no longer fake model minority family in the southern suburbs, but struggling just like all those black and brown people my parents used to complain about. This was surely a wake up call, and only in a matter of months was my dad reading Noam Chomsky and telling me how the “system is rigged!” and how classism works with racism in America to make it harder for People of Color to get back on their feet. Go Dad! On the other hand, I think my mom was initially a bit wary of my dad’s sudden obsession with more radical politics and told me she was worried about the amount of Democracy Now! he watched in a day. But lo and behold, South Korea’s politics got f u c k e d. Yeah, Park Geun Hye’s scandal shook Korea and immigrant Koreans in America to the core and suddenly my mom was talking about how she wanted to go to a protest, yeah, a PROTEST. Winter break my sophoremore year of college was me sitting at the dining table watching Netflix while my dad watched Democracy Now! on his laptop and my mom listening to political podcasts while knitting. This isn’t to say, hey, get poor and hope your parents’ home nation’s government gets fucked and then maybe your parents will care - but just to say that maybe they need to have a more personal understanding in order to feel more involved with what’s around them. For example, I knew my mom cared about issues surrounding comfort women in Korea, so I did a research paper when I had the chance and used it as a way to talk to her about ways imperialism works globally and not only limited to Japan. I’ve sat my parents down to watch 13th with me and now my Dad’s reading my copy of Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Absolete? Did I just use this page to brag about my parents? Yes, kind of.
things that worked for me (and maybe work 4 u 2) Step 1: Find something they really care about in a political sense. Step 2: Find something you really care about in a political sense. Step 3: Find a way (ANY WAY) to connect the two. Step 4: Gently approach
this is what i did
My mom cares about comfort women in South Korea.
1. My mom has some beef against Japan, so we talked about the similarities between Japanese nationalism & American Exceptionalism. 2. My mom doesn’t talk a lot about non-Korean comfort women, so we talked about the ways in which even Korean men today participate in violence against Southeast Asian women with mail order brides and sex tourism. As well as more generally, discrimination against SE Asians by East Asians.
My dad cares about general classism in America.
1. My dad cares about the welfare system, so we talked about the way America created the “welfare queen” as a racist way to discredit welfare users, esp black women. 2. My dad talks about the difficultly of getting back on your feet after having a bankruptcy on your record, so we talked about the prison industrial complex!
I realize it is not that simple to talk politics with your parents, especially as there can be outside factors as language barriers, fear of sounding “elitist”, or general differences. I’m lucky to have parents who are open to discussion and often humored me when I went on long political rants to them. I think throughout the years of humoring me, they absorbed some of what I said to them and now have come into their own political consciousness. All that to say, don’t be afraid to talk politics with them! Please don’t give up before you’ve tried by saying you “know it’ll be impossible”. You never know until you try.
talking with younger Asian people in your community..... even typing that exhausts me I’m not even gonna lie, I’ve become so bitter and lost patience for most Asian men that the mere thought of an Asian boi rapping along to his favorite Kendrick song, dropping all the n-words in his hiphop dance streetwear outfit asking his other Asian buddies “what’s good fam?” as they drive off into the sunset of peak toxic masculine anti-blackness makes me want to puke on the spot. Hey but ignorance doesn’t discriminate, you can find proof on many social media platforms such as @PoliticalKathy, a Twitter handle that I can’t dignify providing more space on this zine than just this little text block to shame her. She’s an East Asian woman who is happy to be called a model minority and repeatedly complains about BLM much to her white male following’s happiness. When Asian people, especially from the west coast and other “urban” areas excuse their usage of the n-word or AAVE (African American Vernacular English) due to their “geographical” and “cultural” upbringing... I don’t know what to say other than UR still not BLACK. Sometimes I am genuinely made speechless when I see the most blatant forms of anti-black racism from non-black people of color, specifically East Asian folks. I’ve said this to a friend and I’ll say it again: East Asians are the white feminists in the fight for racial justice. I’ll repeat:
East Asians are the white feminists in the fight for racial justice!!! Seriously, I realized this one day when I was sitting in a women’s studies class, questioning why the white women in my class thought the rest of us really wanted to hear their experiences with “Practicing Intersectionality” (yes that was the class name, i know). And as I wondered for the tenth time why white women seemed to only speak to seek validation or a head-nod for their experiences from the women of color in the class, I realized the sort of nuisance white women caused me was the same way I may come off to my non East Asian friends of color. For being possibly the least radical group, East Asians can be the loudest in the spaces they’re a part of. Some seem to just love talking on and on about how much they’ve suffered in their childhood because the Western beauty standards imposed on them... but hey, at least you’ve never had to worry about dying because of the way you look.
this has been more of a rant because i actually Do Not know what to do haha Step 1: Try and talk to them????????????? Step 2: Haha that didn’t work Yes, I have no frickin clue how to politicize younger Asians. Maybe it seems even more difficult than speaking with older folks to me because many just assume that people become more politicized when they enter more liberal spaces in high school and college. And when that doesn’t work then... how the fuck am I supposed to get you to care about something? Especially as when there are more liberal or radical folks, they coexist with the assholes who complain about “snowflakes” and “PC” culture. Hey, maybe we’re just Not Assholes and would like to not hurt people and contribute to preexisting violent social structures if that means being more careful with our words! But okay. All I can say is to create more dialogue in the spaces you occupy, whether that comes easily because the people in your community are open to it, or if you have to cause disruption and be the annoying one that makes everything political. Challenge those around you to look beyond just what affects them. Whether it’s a book, documentary, YouTube video - find ways that may be more interesting for the crowd you are approaching. Add humor to it! Politics don’t need to be serious all the time.
a short rant on asians 2 political 4 u Well firstly I hope that I don’t come off as this kind of Asian and I guess I don’t satisfy it in that I am Poor, anyways - Asians who love telling everyone how radical they are and how much they care about black politics and then complain about other Asians who aren’t at their level of radicalness - have some empathy please!! Not everyone may have been raised in a big city, not everyone may have been raised rich and able to read the kind of texts you were as a tween, and some people just simply didn’t know better. You complaining about their innocent ignorance while doing nothing to help them out of it changes nothing - yet you put your labor into shaming them every chance you get, what’s the logic in that? Yes, I give my peers some shit on their ignorance sometimes but I don’t blindly think my elitist ass is too good to engage in political discussion with them because they are not ~~~~radical like me~~~~. Maybe you’ve been going to these political conferences and workshops since you were 10, but others may have not been afforded those same privileges. Don’t get angry that an Asian person is speaking out about their identity or whatever other identity politics you look down on - this is just the beginning for some people. Complain when identity politics end up being the only thing they care about, otherwise, let them understand/embrace their identites and then let’s talk about black liberation.
me, contemplating how to talk to asian people about politics
sources http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/us/la-riots-korean-americans/index.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/asian-american-poverty-nyc_ us_58ff7f40e4b0c46f0782a5b6 http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/CEO-Poverty-Measure-2016.pdf
Thank you for reading my rambles