The mass shooting yesterday targeting Asian women is a continuation of a disgusting pattern of increasing anti-Asian violence in the last year. RIP to the souls lost. #StopAsianHate - resources if you swipe through.
I cannot speak to the experience of being Asian in the US. Here are some people that can, who use their platform to educate. Please follow and listen, this is a hard time for the Asian community:
@intersectional.abc
@hownottotravellikeabasicbitch
@tonyrosaspeaks
@kimsaira
All I can tell you is a little story about this city.
This is LA’s Chinatown. It’s not the original location. The first Chinatown was in the current Olvera Street area, built in the mid 1800s.
Chinese people were exploited in US agriculture and mining, paid less and given worse living conditions than their white counterparts in those industries as well as when building US infrastructure such as the Transcontinental Railroad.
While the US needed and relied on Chinese labor, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 to prevent Chinese people from becoming US citizens. It wouldn’t be repealed until 1943. It also meant Chinese people could not buy land. Many landlords also prevented ethnically Chinese people from living in their apartment buildings.
In 1871 in LA’s Chinatown, a mob of 500 Angelenos descended on the neighborhood, destroyed buildings, and robbed, beat and killed around 18 Chinese people.
Though a few men were found guilty for the Chinese Massacre, their convictions were overturned. A few decades later, Chinese residents were forcibly evicted and their neighborhood leveled to make way for the train station. So Chinatown was rebuilt, slowly, painstakingly, in its current location.
This is one story of one ethnic Asian group in one city. There are countless. And I do not know them because they have been left out of history, covered up. Many white people hold Asian immigrants up as the “model minority”, whitewashing history and even current facts to give any evidence of prosperity in an Asian community as proof the US can’t(!) be racist.
The horrific events of yesterday, the past year, and history disagree & point to a widespread problem. Stop. Asian. Hate.
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