How Should Asian-Americans Feel About the Peter Liang Protests? fin.
Each of these thoughts represents an uneasy, probing investigation into the complicated, often-complicit relationship between Asian-Americans and the nation’s racial hierarchies. I do not claim to know the right answer to any of these questions. I do not know how to explain why I knew Liang would be found guilty well before the verdict was announced. I cannot adequately describe the conflict in feeling like a race traitor for applauding Liang’s conviction while also feeling like a race traitor for questioning it. I know the lifeblood of my conditional whiteness as an educated, upwardly mobile Asian-American lies somewhere in those conflicts. And because it’s historically been in the best interests of people like me to never discuss these things, even in private, I lack the vocabulary to discuss it.
This cultural aphasia comes from decades of political silence. Asian-Americans, for the most part, have been absent from modern social-justice movements, partly by their own choosing. Last year, while reporting an article for the magazine on the anti-police-violence activism of DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, I attended Black Lives Matter protests across the country. In each city, I grew angrier and angrier at the lack of Asian faces among the marchers. I had long lost faith in storybook solidarity, but I had never expected to see the divide between blacks and Asian-Americans laid out so starkly.
The dissonance between those two stories — the pan-cultural dream and the reality — is what deforms the stated intentions, however good or bad, of the Peter Liang protests. On Saturday, some protesters carried signs bearing the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Jr.’s image and a quote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
This is the stunted language of a people who do not yet know how to talk about injustice. The protesters who took to the streets on Saturday are trying, in their way, to create a new political language for Asian-Americans, but this language comes without any edifying history — no amount of nuance or qualification or appeal to Martin Luther King will change the fact that the first massive, nationwide Asian-American protest in years was held in defense of a police officer who shot and killed an innocent black man.
And yet it would be catastrophic to ignore the protesters’ concerns altogether. Asian-Americans have begun to protest in the streets, in part, because they have begun to wake up from that multicultural dream in which their concerns are lumped in with the rest of the minority groups of America. The word “minority” has increasingly come to encompass only black and Hispanic people. Perhaps it always did. It is my belief that Asian-Americans have to form their own way of talking about race, privilege and justice, one that acknowledges both our relative privilege and the costs of our invisibility. But that language takes time to build, and at the next political action, the message will certainly still be clumsy and riddled with contradiction. I only hope it serves a more just cause than the freedom of Peter Liang.
Correction: April 22, 2016
So basically the Chinks argument was the racist white supremacists in the Neo Gestopo get to pop niggas with impunity, so being that we don't like niggas we should have white privilege extended to us when we kill one.
