Andy Kang is the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Chicago, a nonprofit committed to building power through collective advocacy and organizing to achieve racial equity.
In the 1980s, the American auto industry was severely struggling and many politicians and business leaders aggressively blamed Japan, publicly saying things like “little yellow men” were “taking over the country” and engaging in nothing less than an “economic Pearl Harbor.” This sort of rhetoric resulted in the brutal murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American who was celebrating his upcoming wedding in Detroit before he was chased down and bludgeoned by two white men who claimed that Americans were losing their jobs because of people like him. Most recently, we have witnessed nearly two decades of anti-Muslim political rhetoric post-9/11, with an accompanying rise in hate crimes and heavy law enforcement surveillance and spying on Muslim Americans, which includes South Asian and other Asian American Muslim communities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created many more opportunities for us to tackle racial injustice. What is happening now has highlighted the deadly consequences of centuries of anti-Blackness and unaddressed health and economic disparities for the African American community, while at the same time flushing out the dormant anti-Asian xenophobia in our society. This is a moment for Asian Americans to actively build solidarity with Black communities to confront two sides of the same problem: the legacies of white supremacy that are hurting our communities.
