I am fcking tired of white men killing people.

I am fcking exhausted of all the white supremacist violence my body and our bodies have been forced to withstand in such an already exhausting pandemic year. This is the third special edition of Also.Also.Also that I have had to do in 10 months (!!!) because white men can’t stop killing. AND I AM FUCKING OVER IT.

I spent all of yesterday and large chunks of today gently reaching out to Asian American writers in our network, first checking in on them as my friends and people I deeply care about, but also offering to hold space for them if they wanted to work through their thoughts and feelings on our platform. So far, they’ve gracefully so far declined — as is absolutely their right, because who should have to hold on to this shit? Who should have to shoulder this burden? It’s always us. It’s always women and trans people of color.

So today I’m asking that those of us who are not Asian take time to listen, to learn, and act. This is ours to carry.

Maybe it's all of it — the long American history of dehumanization, the "Kung Flu" narrative, the exotification of Asian women, the xenophobia, our poor immigration laws, a lack of living wage, criminalization of sex work. Maybe it's just…all of it.

— Ankita Rao (@anrao) March 17, 2021

To Donate and Act

Chinatown Community for Equitable Development is an all-volunteer group of residents, students, teachers, and businesses united for a better Chinatown. Here’s where you can donate.

Stop AAPI Hate is the leading aggregator and reporting center on hate crimes committed against AAPI communities, developed in response to the escalating these hate crimes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their approach centers and recognizes that in order to effectively address anti-Asian racism, we must work to end all forms of structural racism leveled at Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. Here is where you can donate.

AAPI Women Lead works to end racial and gender violence, specifically for Asians and Pacific Islanders, in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. Here’s where you can donate.

If you’re looking for something active to do, the organization Hollaback is hosting hour-long, facilitated trainings in bystander interventions at 101 and 102 levels that are specifically targeted at the kind of hate being experienced towards Asian American communities during Covid.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice is the 1st legal advocacy nonprofit dedicated to the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) in Georgia and the Southeast. They believe in grassroots, bottom-to-top partnerships within the community. Here’s where you can donate.

Butterfly in Toronto, Canada was formed by sex workers, social workers, legal and health professional to provide provides support and advocacy for the rights of Asian and migrant sex workers. Here’s where you can donate.

The National Coalition for Asian Pacific Americans Community Development (National CAPACD) is a coalition of nearly 100 community-based organizations spanning 21 states and the Pacific Islands. Here’s where you can donate.

Red Canary Song in New York City. Red Canary Song is a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers that centers basebuilding with migrant workers through a labor rights framework and mutual aid. Here’s where you can donate.

CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities works to build grassroots community power across poor and working class Asian immigrant and refugee communities in New York City. Here’s where you can donate.

KIWA is a longstanding organization advocacy group for Korean immigrant workers in LA. They combine multi-level organizing, leadership development, services, and policy advocacy in order to improve the lives of immigrant workers in low-wage industries in Koreatown as a foundation for social change. Here’s where you can donate.

Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) works with immigrant workers in the Bay Area’s garment, home care, hotel, restaurant, assembly and other low-wage industries to empower women and young people through education, leadership development and collective action. Here’s where you can donate.

The Chinese Progressive Association (founded in 1972!) works to build collective power for low income and working class immigrant Chinese communities in San Francisco. Here’s where you can donate.

SWAN in Vancouver, Canada is “providing culturally-specialized supports and advocacy to im/migrant women engaged in sex work.” Here’s where you can donate.

Equality Labs is an Dalit civil rights organization focusing on building progressive power through community research, cultural and political organizing, popular education and digital security to fight the oppressions of caste apartheid, islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. And here’s where you can donate.

North Carolina Asian Americans Together is committed to supporting equity and justice for all by fostering community among Asian Americans and allies in North Carolina through civic engagement, leadership development, grassroots mobilization and political participation. Here’s where you can donate.

The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) works intersectionally on three focus areas (Reproductive Health and Rights, Economic Justice, and Immigrant Rights and Racial Justice) to ensure the values and priorities of AAPI women and girls are seen, heard, and reflected in policy and structural change at the local, state, and federal levels. Here’s where you can donate.

Denouncing violence against Asian diaspora is more than just denouncing direct violence.

It's denouncing "funny accents"

It's denouncing "jokes" about massage parlors

It's denouncing people that surround themselves in Asian culture and refuse to speak in defense of it.

— Steel A Jeeg (Navigating the Hellscape) (@DogBarkingBees) March 17, 2021

To Read

Dr. Kevin Nadal, a queer Filipino scholar who’s a Professor of Psychology at both John Jay College and Graduate Center at the City University of New York, reminds us: “Most people know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But did you know about the Page Act of 1875? It was the first federal law to restrict immigration in general, and it specifically targeted Asian women who were believed to be entering the US for prostitution or polygamy.”

• “Chinese women were seen as a threat to the institution of marriage, and a danger to white males.” (Spotlight on the 1875 Page Act)
• “By identifying and excluding Chinese women as prostitutes, the law prevented the birth of Chinese American children and stunted the growth of Chinese American communities.” (Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law, this one is locked by Jstor but there’s a brief available.)

“To be an Asian woman in America means hearing men, especially white men, try to tell you their war stories from Korea, Vietnam and sometimes the Middle East. I have been approached numerous times by white male veterans in the South asking me if I was either Korean or Vietnamese. When I tell them I’m Chinese American, they are disappointed but still tell me about their Asian war stories and how I remind them of these Korean or Vietnamese women they once knew. I always extricate myself from these conversations as soon as possible.
…
To be an Asian woman in America means you can’t just be what you are: a fully enfranchised human being. It means you are a blank screen on which others project their stories, especially, too often, their sexualized fantasies — because US culture has long presented Asian women as sexualized objects for White male enjoyment.“

To Be an Asian Woman in America by Jennifer Ho for CNN. Dr. Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the president of the Association for Asian American Studies.

“Most people… have failed to grasp, the horrid and racist details of wars that helped bring many Asians to this country. Our experiences, including those of Southeast Asian refugees, are rarely told or acknowledged. Instead, distant family members recount their refugee stories to one another, sharing harrowing narratives of escaping pirates at the sea or famine and starvation. These same communities have been and are facing detentions and deportations. Even in recent years, as mainstream society has begun to acknowledge the need to address white supremacy and systemic racism, Asians and Asian Americans are often left out of the conversation. As Dr. Mimi Kim, who works on community accountability and transformative justice, once said about the Korean War and its impacts: ‘The violence is also in the forgetting.‘”

Ignoring The History Of Anti-Asian Racism Is Another Form Of Violence by Connie Wun for Elle.

“It’s very clear to me that six Asian women were killed, and there were specific Asian businesses that were targeted. I cannot stress enough how pervasive this fear has been. We’re afraid to go in public and go to our jobs. Just simple day-to-day living has been compromised in the past year. Yesterday really solidifies that.“

“The Most Resonating Emotion That We Felt Has Actually Been Fear”: An Organizer Explains How Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities around Atlanta Are Responding to Yesterday’s Shooting by Aaron Mal for Vox.

“In tandem with domestic racism, the United States has consistently exported white supremacy through war, colonialism, and domination in Asia, and this bipartisan imperialism has only amplified violence against Asian Americans at home. How can we, as Asian Americans, expect justice when there was no justice for the hundreds of thousands who were killed and poisoned in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How can we expect justice when there was no justice for the victims of the My Lai Massacre? Or for the victims of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange during and after the Vietnam War? Or for the Marshallese communities that were exposed to nuclear radiation by U.S. nuclear weapons testing?”

Recent Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Doesn’t Mean Anti-Asian Racism Is New by Nicholas Hatcher for Teen Vogue

“In the Atlanta shootings, the suspect claims to have carried out attacks on businesses he saw as cause for “temptation.” According to police statements, Long aimed to remove this temptation from his life by using violence.

That impression, both of these establishments as venues for “temptation” and of the people who were on site, stems from entrenched tropes about spas and Asian American women, who have been depicted as hypersexualized beings.

Such stereotypes about Asian American women emerged in the 1800s, and have since been reinforced again and again during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, in American soldiers’ treatment of Asian women, and in depictions in popular culture, like that of the geisha in Madame Butterfly. Asian American women are painted as subservient, docile, and the focus of objectification and colonization, rather than people deserving of genuine understanding and engagement.”

The Atlanta Shootings Can’t Be Divorced from Racism and Misogyny by Li Zhou for Vox

“I don’t want to overcomplicate this. There are two ways of talking about this. The act of violence itself is wrong. You cannot excuse it. I think many Asian Americans have never talked about it, and so white people still don’t believe that Asian Americans face racism. Because we’re invisible, the racism against us has also been invisible. This is why it’s important that people are speaking up to show: ‘Actually, this has been happening, and there’s been a spike. But at the same time, this has been going on for a long time. We just haven’t really talked about it. And now we’re talking about it, and you have to pay attention.'”

Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different. Morgan Ome interviewing Cathy Park Hong for The Atlantic

And Also.Also.Also… F*CKING THIS.

Asian women are your punchlines

Sex workers are your punchlines

Kung flu is your punchline

You fucking did this

— Jenny Yang (@jennyyangtv) March 17, 2021

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