OK, enough about Frank.
I said I got 5500 words for you, and here they are. I wrote for TIME magazine about being #AsianAmerican in the time of #kungflu, our perilous status as a #modelminority, the history of anti-Asian racism, and #TouThao, the #HmongAmerican policeman who guarded #DerekChauvin as he killed #GeorgeFloyd. Plus I talk about what it meant to grow up in San Jose, California, the son of Vietnamese shopkeepers, and seeing a sign in another store window: "Another American Driven Out of Business by the Vietnamese."
The tl;dr version is: Asian Americans have always faced a moral choice between allying with white supremacy and fighting for radical social and economic justice. So choose.
Thanks to Janelle Wong Bao Phi Gary Singh and Mai Der Vang for their help, and to Bao Nhia Moua, Shoua Lee, Sharon Simonson and Ben Carrington as well. I regret that 500 words I wrote on Hawaii and the Pacific Islands was cut. I am also grateful to Anna Purna Kambhampaty for fact checking and my editor at TIME, Ben Goldberger.
Please share widely.
Here are some highlights:
"Asian Americans are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy."
"Racism makes us focus on the differences in our faces rather than our similarities, and in the alchemical experiment of the US, racial difference mixes with labor exploitation to produce an explosive mix of profit and atrocity."
“It is easier to blame a foreign country or a minority… than to identify the real power: corporations & economic elites who shift jobs, maximize profit at the expense of workers & care nothing for working Americans.”
"The problem is race, and class, and war–a country almost always at war overseas that then pits its poor of all races and its exploited minorities against each other in a domestic war over scarce resources."
Check out the print issue on July 6. My article is incorporated with a great spread of photos and comments documenting Asian Americans who have been attacked for being Asian.
By the way--fuck Frank.
https://time.com/5859206/anti-asian-racism-america/
