Solidarity is the solution

What can we learn from the recent violence against Asian women and the policy response?

It’s coming up on a year since Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park,and Yong Ae Yue were killed in Georgia. Though the media coverage has long since subsided, I think about them often. I think about the overwhelming cries to “stop Asian hate” that took over my social media feeds for a few weeks. 

What I wanted then was a conversation about the longstanding and unending vulnerability that women who are sex workers must face, with little support from law enforcement, and often at its hands. I wanted a conversation about the lives of immigrants in the South, who we are and what we navigate. I wanted a conversation about the warped and twisted mythology of a model minority which was subsuming the conversation about white patriarchal violence. Those conversations happened in activist circles, on occasion, and were shouted about on Twitter, a bit. But they almost never reached any mainstream coverage of the violence.

In that aftermath, and never to miss an opportunity to increase the reach criminal legal system,  President Joe Biden called on Congress to swiftly pass the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. It doesn’t, of course, appear to be solving the problem of hate, or white supremacist violence (between 2020 and 2021 there was  567% increase in incidents of anti-Asian hate). 

But now, here we are again, with more violence against Asian women in the news, and in my despair, I find myself wanting more, again.

I have now read 20, or 30 articles about the murders of Asian women, like Michelle Go and Christina Yuna Lee, that make short work of describing the gruesome violence, and even shorter work of telling about the lives of the slain women, before moving past their lives, making a hard pivot.

This pivot is almost impossible to bear when one is reading, bereft, with tears in her eyes. Bracing for the inevitable equivocation and manipulation of tragedy: Somehow within the span of a paragraph or two, the women, murdered, have been deployed to make a case for more policing.

In February of last year, a man who lived in a shelter stabbed four homeless people who were in or near subway stations. Then Mayor Bill DeBlasio sent 500 more police officers to patrol the subways. Later that same year, despite the hundreds of additional officers, there were more attacks in the subways, the Mayor, doubling down, sent another 250 more police officers underground. Currently, the number of police in the subway system is at its highest in the history of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. 

Yesterday, NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ new “subway safety plan” went into effect. The plan includes  includes police issuing summonses for fare-beaters and stopping people from sleeping across multiple seats. As part of the plan, anyone who doesn't get off the train at the end of the line will be escorted off. An astounding strategy given that people who are homeless and those with mental illnesses are much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. 

The U.S. already spends $180 billion every year on policing and incarceration. There is an ever-growing trove of data about how increasing police does not make communities safer. There is much evidence that spending our resources on police, when clearly what we need are safety net services like shelters and access to health care, is a bad, and ineffective strategy. What makes the moment more painful than enraging, though, is the willful manipulation of tragedy in the media. And there is more than one tragedy.

There is the anti-Chinese sentiment stoked by the Trump administration and conservative media, which has become a constant hum throughout media coverage of China. Also, there is the ever confusing category of “Asian American” which is increasingly leveraged as a political identity, but not created as such. There have been so many times in my life where I’ve engaged the identity of Asian American, or tried to organize around it, but found it so broad, tethered by neither language, nor continent, nor even hemisphere. 

When there is violence against Asian women, I feel both vulnerability and solidarity. I remember the challenges of navigating Islamophobia inside the South Asian community at the start of the War on Terror, when some non-Muslim members of the community were eager to distinguish themselves, despite the fact that the racist, white-supremacist violence would not. Conflating hate crimes with civil rights violations is a tricky maneuver that can make some of us feel validated in the oppression we have faced. Visible, but not supported. Validated, perhaps, but not addressed.

And yet so many are eager to include ourselves under some protected category, through hate crimes legislation. This is a false promise, like so many others made to communities of color in the US.

As it turns out, hate crimes legislation is most often used to legitimize police, protect white people, and criminalize Black people. In 2016 it became a hate crime in Louisiana to attack a police officer. In Utah, a19-year-old is facing charges for crumpling up a “Back the Blue” sign. Hate crimes reached their highest documented levels in more than decade in 2020. Not counted in those numbers were the incidents of police brutality, however. Between 2015 and 2020, Black people in the U.S. were shot and killed by police at a rate three times higher than white people were, according to a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

I know, in these moments, that solidarity is the solution. When our laws and lawmakers fail us, when they manipulate terror and violence to their own ends, all we can do is make meaningful collaborations to take care of each other.

I think about the women gone too soon, their immigrant families, and their migration stories. I think about my own. I think of how many of us have walked through our cities, sometimes our very hometowns, at night with a deafening blood beat in our ears, hoping to make it home safe after seeing stories of violence splashed across the papers in the morning.

And then to read, that the solution that our elected officials have come up with is to pour more officers into the streets, armed to the hilt, and I can find no ease, no quiet, no justice, and no peace.