When the US government imprisoned my dad and 120,000 other Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII, guess who had their backs when they returned? A black minister was the first cleric to welcome the returned evacuees and invite them to join his San Francisco church. In Oakland, black neighbors were among the first to welcome back a Nisei dentist and his wife. A number of black families took Japanese into their homes until they could organize their affairs, and black leaders looked for jobs on behalf of their returned neighbors. To my fellow Asian American friends, I just wanna say that solidarity is an important thing. The Black communitys friendship and support has been absolutely invaluable to our own. How can we be silent when our Black neighbors are being murdered by the same system that marginalizes us every day? I came out to the protest yesterday in SF, and from over 200 people in attendance, I could only spot 3 other AAPIs in the crowd. This is a problem. Seriously, we need to start speaking up. Go protest, start a dialogue, even just talk about it on Facebook - because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and whats happening right now is one of the worst injustices I could possibly think of. Today is the 73rd anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a day that will live in infamy, not just for the lives lost but for the years of racist attacks on my community that it launched. 73 years later, we are still told that we dont belong here, that we are less than our white counterparts. Lets speak out against a system that marginalizes all of us. Lets stand in solidarity with Ferguson. And lets work to build a world that embraces diversity, a world where #blacklivesmatter and we do too.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 04:49:01 +0000
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