Week 9 - Leigh Bagood

Leigh Bagood
Section 2
Week 9

Week 9 - Soya Jung. “Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans.”

In this article, Soya Jung expresses her opinion on Ferguson from an Asian American perspective and Asian Americans’ position in the Black Lives Matter movement to promote solidarity among communities of color. As an Asian American, one might wonder why the pattern of violence against Black Americans, the criminalization and mass incarceration of Black Americans, and the dehumanization of Black Americans should matter to them when they are not Black. However, Jung explains how it is a result of white supremacy, a human rights crisis. And this should matter to Asian Americans not because we can equate Asian American struggles to the oppression of Black Americans, but because white supremacy is also a driving force for our invisibility. And what happens is that Asian Americans are caught between the Black-White dichotomy “largely invisible and struggling to dodge the crossfire, or diving in to eagerly reap the rewards of non-blackness,” the latter a reference to he model minority myth. But she calls on Asian Americans to stand on the correct side of the color line as resistance against the oppression of basic humanity and justice. What striked me as especially important was Jung’s point of political solidarity among Asian Americans despite not being a monolith. Although we can acknowledge that the Asian American is extremely diverse in itself and that most of us identity by ethnicity, we much also acknowledge that we are held together by certain politics and values that requires us to establish our position “when faced with the separate but unequal worlds of whiteness and blackness.” I also think its important to note that expressing solidarity with something like the Black Lives Matter movement means also confronting the anti-black sentiment within our own communities. The model minority myth reinforces this as it does black criminality, but as Jung says, even our own narratives of hate encounters are rendered invisible when our lives fall out outside the model minority, and we must recognize how this is all white supremacy at play.

Question: How can Asian Americans express solidarity without appropriating Black lives struggle, and better understand why anti-Blackness should matter to them as non-Blacks?

References:

1. Jung, S. (2014). Why Ferguson Matters to Asian Americans. Retrieved November 19, 2017.
2. [Digital image]. (2016, September). Retrieved November 19, 2017, from http://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/asians4blacklives.jpg