Background:

Over the course of U.S. history, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have been both discriminated against and privileged. As these communities have grown – in size and power – over time, they’ve had to choose whether they will stand in solidarity with other oppressed communities or strive to appeal to whiteness.

Essay:

While race in the United States often operates in a hierarchy, with whiteness at the top and Blackness at the bottom, it has also operated as a white versus non-white binary. In a racial hierarchy, some Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities fall closer to whiteness than other communities of color, or even other ethnic groups within the AAPI umbrella. However, when it comes to the white and non-white binary, AAPIs fall into the same category as communities of color including Latinx, Black, and Native Americans. These dynamics have allowed the AAPI community to be used as a racial wedge, dividing communities of color by privileging them over other groups – especially against the Black community. As such, communities of color are often pitted against each other instead of coalescing to fight against white supremacy. Yet, even when they are being used as a racial wedge, AAPIs bear the impacts of structural racism that affect, to different degrees, all non-white people in the United States.

Since the earliest AAPI communities’ existence in the United States, they have had to choose whether to align themselves with other people of color, isolate themselves, or try to appeal to white society. These choices were made out of necessity, weighing the benefits and the harms that could affect their families and wider communities. In making such choices, some AAPIs have perpetuated anti-Black rhetoric that would allow them to distance themselves from Black communities in an effort to demonstrate and gain some proximity to whiteness.

Yet, this choice does not protect AAPIs from structural racism in the forms of segregated schools, exclusionary immigration policies, discrimination in employment, and race-based violence. AAPIs would neither be seen nor treated as white in the United States. As such, many AAPI activists have chosen to create and accept relationships of solidarity with Black, Latinx, and Native peoples, both in the United States and beyond.

A lesser-known example of discrimination and cross-cultural solidarity is the case of Vietnamese refugee shrimpers in Galveston Bay, Texas. Some Vietnamese refugees escaping Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War settled in the Gulf Coast due to its climate and fishing and shrimping industry, both of which were familiar to many of them. However, at the time, ecological harms to the region made it harder to catch seafood, resulting in local white fishermen seeing Vietnamese fishers as unwanted competition and a threat to their livelihoods. White fishermen intimidated and harassed the Vietnamese fishers, even going as far as burning down the house of a Vietnamese family. In 1979, one of these altercations ended in the death of a white fisherman at the hands of Sau Van Nguyen (c. 1959-?) and Chihn Van Nguyen (c. 1958-?), two Vietnamese fishers. While the Nguyens were found to be acting in self-defense and were acquitted of charges, the verdict caused the Ku Klux Klan to become involved as they sought to investigate the case for themselves.

The Klan, a white supremacist organization, was primarily known for targeting, harassing, and killing Black people. However, it has also been known to target Jewish people, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community as an effort to maintain white power in the United States. As such, the Vietnamese refugees in Galveston Bay who were being blamed for the economic hardships of white fishers became a target of the Klan. The group openly wore their Klan robes and carried weapons as they harassed and intimidated the Vietnamese in the area. They held rallies, set fire to Vietnamese shrimp boats, burned crosses, patrolled the bay in Klan boats, and more. In other towns in the Galveston Bay, Vietnamese fishermen were similarly targeted.

The Klan held a rally in February 1981 with a thousand attendees and set fire to an effigy of a Vietnamese boat, giving the Vietnamese ninety days to leave the Bay. Instead, the Vietnamese community and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) sued the Klan and other individuals in the town who were behind the harassment and threats. The Vietnamese Fishermen's Association was persuaded to pursue the lawsuit when the SPLC founder Morris Dees described how Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black community had fought for their rights in the face of Klan terrorism. This inspired the Vietnamese to fight the Klan’s harassment instead of dropping the case.

The judge in the case, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, was a Black woman who had worked as a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. When the case was randomly assigned to her, she granted the request to expedite it to start the hearings before the start of the shrimping season, which coincided with the Klan's ninety-day threat. Judge McDonald faced harassment and racism from Klan members, even receiving hate mail, due to her race and commitment to a fair trial. A metal detector was installed in the courthouse for the first time due to the Klan's behavior. Yet, the judge refused to step down and even worked to prevent Klan members who attended hearings from intimidating Vietnamese fishermen and SPLC lawyers in the courtroom. Judge McDonald ruled in favor of the Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association and issued an injunction against the Klan to prevent them from further harassing the fishermen, to end Klan boat patrols, and to disband the militia that the Klan had been training. This was not only an immense victory for the Vietnamese community but also for all other groups who had been targeted by the Klan’s white supremacist violence.

Solidarity between Black and AAPI communities has not always been easy, as these two communities have been strategically pitted against each other, especially through the Model Minority stereotype which positioned the AAPI community as high-achieving and a group to emulate. Lateefah Simon (born 1978), a Black activist in Oakland, California, said, “We don’t know each other in our communities, and we need to do a better job of humanizing each other and not pointing fingers.”

Despite barriers, solidarity between Black and AAPI communities in the fight for racial justice is notable in our history. In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party, a Black power political organization, joined forces with the Red Guard Party, a Chinese American youth organization, to push for better living conditions in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In 2014, Asians for Black Lives emerged to support Black Lives Matter (2013 to present).

In 2020, the murder of George Floyd (1973-2020), a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, sparked a national outrage. Following his murder, there were uprisings and protests, largely led by Black Lives Matter. One of the groups who stood in solidarity with them were K-pop fans, composed of all racial groups and nationalities but largely Asian and AAPI. BTS, one of the most popular K-pop groups, has a worldwide following and used their platform to support the cause.

After the Dallas Police Department requested people to send videos of “illegal activity from the protests” in an effort to penalize protesters, K-pop fans flooded the app used by the police department with videos from their favorite artists, GIFs from TV shows, and more. The app system became overloaded and unusable by the police. Additionally, people began leaving one-star ratings for the app and reviews with anti-police and pro-Black Lives Matter messages.

In another instance, K-pop fans used their social media reach to take over and drown out the “whitelivesmatter” hashtag on Twitter (now known as X). Thousands of K-pop fans tweeted using their hashtag to post anti-racist videos and messages, as well as memes, GIFs, and videos from their favorite artists, to effectively bury white supremacist posts.

In both examples, K-pop fans used their knowledge of social media algorithms to quickly mobilize the massive fandoms of various Korean pop groups to support the Black community’s demands for racial justice. These acts of solidarity fall into the larger context of AAPIs across the United States supporting the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, just as communities of color have supported rallies and marches demanding an end to anti-Asian violence.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 in late 2019, there was racist rhetoric (i.e., referring to COVID as “Kung Flu” or the “China Virus”) blaming Asians and Asian Americans for the pandemic. This led to escalating anti-Asian hate against AAPIs, especially the elder community. This hate manifested as attacks, verbal assaults, spitting, etc. The Stop Asian Hate campaign (2021 to present) emerged as a slogan and name for a series of demonstrations, protests, rallies, and more. In 2021, a gunman killed eight people at spas in Atlanta, Georgia - six of the victims were Asian American women. In response to the Atlanta spa shooting, people across the country took up “Stop Asian Hate” slogans, hosting vigils, marches, and more in honor of the victims. Additionally, volunteers from all racial groups stepped up to safely escort AAPI elders, provide neighborhood patrols, and more. In New York City, Black filmmaker and activist Coffey dedicated his monthly "Running to Protest" event to addressing the surge in anti-Asian violence and building Black and Asian solidarity. Coffey founded Running to Protest in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and organized monthly runs to raise awareness of different causes and issues. The March 2021 run was attended by over 1,000 people who championed safety for Asian communities alongside slogans of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Despite these moments of solidarity and struggling together, the use of AAPIs as a racial wedge will continue to be an issue so long as AAPIs adopt anti-Blackness and allow themselves to be used to denigrate other communities of color. This anti-Blackness is often rooted in a lack of understanding of the racial dynamics and history of the United States, especially as it pertains to the historic and continual discrimination against and disenfranchisement of Black people. Additionally, some AAPIs may be more motivated to gain social and economic mobility in the United States than to challenge issues that they don’t believe affect them. However, in order to achieve a more equitable and just future, building solidarity with other communities is key. It is necessary to recognize, acknowledge, and repair the rifts between communities, and among other communities of color, that are caused by white supremacy and continue to build relationships of transformational solidarity.