My apathy towards racial identity always seeps out whenever there is some incident that affects the Asian community. I read the article and see all the testimonials from famous Asian-American entertainers or politicians but I don’t feel any real connection. Lumping them together as a single group seems ludicrous because Asian is such a broad category covering Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, and many more. It’s the same dilemma when I fill out a survey. How do I answer? Do I want to be Asian or White today? There’s a mixed box, but what kind of mixed and how is this information going to be used?

I wasn’t raised to be one or the other but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an awareness. My last name always lends a bias when someone is sizing me up and was definitely an easy differentiator for kids in school. The community I grew up in was predominantly Asian so any kid with a White name and brown hair was going to be a target of othering. If anything, it was confusing being teased about race by kids that looked like my mother and her family. That confusion was only heightened by the portrayal in entertainment and the definition by the media of what it meant to be Asian.

I suppose the immigrant experience is different but, especially for kids, it doesn’t make a difference if you came from another state or another country; adapting is always going to be a struggle. How is identification with the term Asian going to help someone to manage the change when, as I’ve already pointed out, the term doesn’t strictly apply to an individual? You can be a member of the Asian-American community, but the qualification is so broad that there is rarely even one representative who could possibly understand your situation. The language, family values, and even food are so different even within the Asian countries, that you would need an army of support staff in order to provide help.

Then there is racial pride which is a ridiculous concept because how can there be pride in being born to a particular family in a particular place? Should there be pride in being born male or female, rich or impoverished, tall or short? We have to embrace who we are, not the accident of birth that put us in the circumstance. Besides, Asian pride would mean too many things to too many different people to even be of any real comfort or use.

That brings us to the problem at hand which is anti-Asian hate and violence in the Covid era which has led to the killing of six Asian women in Atlanta. It is awful and it is being perpetrated by ignorant people. These are the same people who brutally killed Vincent Chin in 1982 because they blamed the Chinese-American young man for auto industry losses to the Japanese. It was a senseless murder committed by ignorant White people who were basically let off the hook. In nearly 40 years, the attitude hasn’t changed much as the Atlanta police spokesperson practically excused the rampage by saying the shooter “had a bad day and this is what happened”.

This atrocity comes in the wake of all the police killings of Black people in the previous year. Killings that were nothing new except in the fact that many were captured on video. Maybe now is the time to see that the idea of racial pride is a useless concept that only serves to divide the entirety of people who are being oppressed and victimized by the majority. We should all embrace our ethnic makeup but, if we want to get the White majority to take notice and stop their bad behavior, all POC need to see the power that comes from standing in unity against the oppressor. We need to support BLM and LGBTQ organizations that have been successful in protesting and getting the attention of the majority. We need Asians, Blacks, Native Peoples, Latinix, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and members of every other minority community to put aside their pride in favor of demanding equity and equality for everyone.

This won’t be easy because racial pride has been the natural response to White oppression forever. People tend to trust and stick with those who look like them and shun those who don’t. That hasn’t worked and needs to change. We have to look to a group larger than what we’re used to and recognize our brothers and sisters who suffer at the hands of the same oppressor. Until we are able to put the tribalism of racial pride behind us, we’re doomed to suffer with only our own closed-minded groups to blame.