Week 9: Alice Kuang

Alice Kuang
Section A01
Week 9

Through reading "Building a Culture of Solidarity: Racial Discourse, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Social Justice" by Santos F. Ramos and "While Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans"" by Soya Jung, I was able to reflect on the importance of building solidarity movements, especially in the social justice activist spaces that I'm a part of. I also reflected on the inevitable difficulties in building such movements, as I've experienced many times before. When a group of people is able to build towards a collective vision while taking in their various cultural similarities and differences  to account, they are able to build power under hegemonic power structures like white supremacy, and that's the core of community organizing. However, this is much easier said than done.

Often, social justice activist/community organizing spaces within campus settings, focus too much on identity politics, rather than focusing on visionary organizing/coalition building. Rather than thinking of our identities as our synthesized experiences, and that due to these varying subjective experiences, we've felt the systems of oppression in varying degrees, we're focused on the very labels/identities themselves, which makes these spaces feel tokenizing and trivializing. Although our experiences and subsequent identities are valid, we've become too focused on uplifting ourselves/identities within the dominant oppressive narratives (of colonialism, imperialism ex.), as seen in the co-opting of struggles and the ignoring of the relative experiences of others under these systems. It is imperative that we position ourselves in relation to others within these systems, recognize these relationships, acknowledging the varying degrees of power. privilege, and oppression. #API4Black Lives demonstrates this well, as they don't place themselves at the forefront of Black liberation, but rather place themselves in a place of support for uplifting Black folks who are experiencing the brute of systemic racism and state sanctioned violence. As APIs, they recognize their own position under state violence, and by placing themselves in relation to Black folks, they are able to reflect on the API experience with racism as well, and build cross-cultural power/solidarity accordingly. This recognition doesn't negate the struggles of APIs, but rather reiterates the fact that APIs have their own dialogues to hold---battles to win, and they're not done solitarily.

https://lettersforblacklives.com/
http://www.seeding-change.org/asiansforblacklives/ (S/O to Seeding Change & CPA for being my political home! <3)

Question: How does this building solidarity dialogue happen within our own communities?

References: 

Ramos, Santos F. "Building a Culture of Solidarity: Racial Discourse, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Social Justice." Building a Culture of Solidarity: Racial Discourse, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Social Justice | Enculturation. Enculturation, 20 Apr. 2016. Web. 28 May 2017.

Jung, Soya. "Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans." Mike Brown | Race Files. Race Files , 20 Aug. 2014. Web. 27 May 2017.