The following is a Letter from the Editor-in-Chief for the Opinions section.
Dear white people,
On March 16, a white supremacist opened fire in three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta. He killed eight people—six of whom were Asian women—in what he described as an attempt to “eliminate his temptations.” Later, the sheriff’s department would excuse the massacre as the culmination of one man’s “bad day.”
What would make you care? Should I describe how once the shock wore off, I didn’t think my tears would ever dry? Should I tell you how I waited for everyone, then anyone, to see my pain and was brutally disappointed? Or, do you want to know how everything seemed brighter and louder the day after, that I couldn’t walk past a white person without shaking on my way to work?
Take my sadness, anger or fear—whichever will be easiest for you to swallow. You cling to your fragility because it assuages your guilt.
Before I bare my heart open, I know how you will respond. Your face will contort into shock, discomfort or pity. Either consciously or subconsciously, my stories will confirm the assumptions you have already made about me. When I am sad, I have all the emotionality of a woman. When I am angry, I am the angry person of color. When I am afraid, you wonder why I make “everything about race.” Without my permission or consent, my identity as a Filipina woman will be warped to fit your stereotypes.
Perhaps, this meaning-making will happen covertly. You do not speak your racism out loud, so you do not think it exists. You believe you are color-blind, and in some ways this will hurt more. It becomes harder to distinguish between ally and oppressor. When, not if, your deceit shows itself, I will resent you without knowing why. I will be ashamed of my intuition because no one will believe me. I will desperately want it not to be true.
It is the unabashedly racist of you who frighten me most. You become violent, deadly and incessant; your hatred of us is visible. You kill Asian massage workers because you cannot reconcile your attraction with repulsion. You shout “yellow” at a group of Asians during a candlelit vigil for our murdered in what was once Denver’s Chinatown. You proudly participate in white supremacy.
But it is the subliminally racist of you who inflict the most cuts. You engage in microaggressions, use racially-coded language and deny that silence is violent. You are administrators who attend a support space and—being the only ones who feel comfortable and safe enough to turn your videos on—flood the Zoom call with your whiteness. It will remind us of your privilege and power as we grieve.
You are my friends, coworkers and professors; you exist everywhere, and I am still afraid.
If you had thought to ask how I was doing, cared enough about anti-Asian hate or seen me as a Asian woman who would be impacted by this, here is what we would have talked about.
The shooting cannot be defined as an either/or where one must pick between gender and race. The six were murdered because they were Asian women and massage parlor workers. Any conception that ignores one of these labels subscribes to a limited and incomplete lens. Intersectionality, a concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, teaches us that identifying with numerous marginalized groups multiplies the oppression which one experiences.
This means that there are more reasons than I can list for you as to why the dead were targeted. It includes xenophobia that labels Asians as “diseased,” as well as harmful language such as “China virus” that marks us as spreaders of COVID-19. The fetishization of Asian women and normalization of white men having “yellow fever.” The criminalization of sex work and the lack of protections that exist for sex workers. A legacy of violence against Asian countries—such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand—brought on by American imperialism and colonization.
We are othered in ways that I could never explain or make you understand. You do not live in this body, so you cannot claim to know what this collective trauma feels like. But the root of all of these histories is white supremacy.
When we point out your police’s hesitancy to use labels such as “hate crime” and “terrorism,” this is not our asking for such categorization. It is a line of questioning intended to pinpoint a double standard, as Black and Brown communities are not provided the same protections by law enforcement.
However, these terms make up the language of the state. When enacted into policy, the use of “hate crime” and “terrorism” in criminal and justice systems amplifies police presence and mechanisms of social control used on people of color. One such example is the $10 million that the former Trump administration allocated to the Countering Violent Extremism program. It led to the further criminalization of Muslims deemed “vulnerable to radicalization.” Relying on such flawed language only serves to harm BIPOC communities.
What we want is for you to see that racism and white supremacy has a pervasive history that is embedded in our systems, structures and institutions. We seek radical change, not reform, and that demands sacrifice of your power and privileges.
This pain is one that my ancestors felt. The massacre is harrowing, but this violence against Asians should not strike you as new or novel. It was made possible by a country that routinely justifies the disenfranchisement of people of color and has not reckoned with an oppressive legacy that persists today.
Our grief, rage and fear is not contained within this moment. People of color have always known that they could be the next headline.
If you had asked, these are the truths that I would have told you. But you didn’t. You were oblivious to the fact that checking in with the Asians and people of color in your life should be the bare minimum. And now, having forced you to hear me, my identity has become an educational tool instead of a lived reality.
What will you do with this counternarrative? Will you send me a belated apology that does no good because I have already done the work to pick myself back up? Will you use my words for the purposes of whiteness—twisting, criticizing or attributing them as your own? Or will you show up for my community to rectify the pain of when you couldn’t show up for me?
This is not my first letter to you. But I hope it will be one of my last.
In defiance and exhaustion,
Kiana Marsan
Editor-in-Chief
