As George Floyd lays face down on the pavement next to a police car with three Minneapolis officers applying pressure to his body — Derek Chauvin on his neck, J. Alexander Keung on his torso, and Thomas Lane on his legs — a fourth officer, Tou Thao, stands off to the side, watching and waiting.
“I can’t breathe, man,” Floyd yells. “Please.” Thao keeps watching. The officers tell Floyd to get in the car, but Floyd — with Chauvin’s left knee firmly on his neck — repeatedly says that he can’t. Sixteen times in less than five minutes, Floyd tells them he cannot breathe. Floyd screams for his deceased mother twice before he drifts into unconsciousness.
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Chauvin’s knee remains on Floyd’s neck. Thao looks on, five feet away.
Bystanders begin to gather, asking for Chauvin to get off Floyd. Chauvin responds by pulling out what appears to be a bottle of mace while Thao turns toward the sidewalk, providing a shield as Chauvin continues to asphyxiate a now-unconscious Floyd. A woman approaches Thao, imploring him to check Floyd’s pulse. Thao, in the only words we hear him speak, responds: “Get back on the sidewalk.” Floyd is on the ground dying, but Thao has stopped watching. He is turned in the opposite direction, concerned with a less dire matter.
For the Asian American community to become better allied with the Black community, we must first acknowledge our history of ignorance when it comes to American politics and social justice issues.
All four former officers are responsible for Floyd’s murder. During a live CNN interview on Sunday, the Minneapolis police chief told Floyd’s brother that the other three were “complicit” by “being silent or not intervening.” But as America has erupted into nationwide protests over the unjust killing and grapples with how this country can root out systemic racism, I can’t stop thinking about the appalling symbolism of what was captured on camera outside that Minneapolis deli on Memorial Day. We saw a Black man suffering, suffocating, succumbing under the weight of a white man’s knee. We heard him cry out for help again and again and again. But for eight minutes and 46 seconds, an Asian man who could have helped ignored Floyd. And then he looked the other way.
Thao’s inaction has triggered an examination into the relationship between Asians and Black people, even sparking threats against the Asian community in Minneapolis. For the Asian American community to become better allied with the Black community, we must first acknowledge our history of ignorance when it comes to American politics and social justice issues.
In the context of acknowledging our privileges, in using the money, prestige, and social status that come with being in those professions to lift up other minority groups, we have failed.
It is a fact that Asians, despite being the “highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the United States” — according to the Pew Research Center — they are less inclined to vote than other minority groups. In the last census, more than a third of us gave the excuse of “too busy, conflicting work or school schedule.” In the continuous struggle for white and Black people to co-exist, Asians — not prone to many of the hardships that Black people face but not nearly as privileged as whites — have nonetheless been content historically to sit it out, quietly and dutifully doing their work.
This is the myth of the model minority, the desire to listen to whatever authority is in charge and not concern oneself with irrelevant issues. In 1974, famed Asian American novelist and playwright Frank Chin wrote, “Whites love us because we’re not Black.”
In some ways, the model minority mindset has paid off. In the Bay Area, the majority of software developers are Asian. Look around the Bay at its melting pot of cultures, and Asians are in nearly every white-collar profession: doctors, dentists, scientists, engineers, lawyers, accountants. But representation in the perceived pinnacles of society doesn’t necessarily correlate to successful assimilation into that society. And in the context of acknowledging our privileges, in using the money, prestige, and social status that come with being in those professions to lift up other minority groups, we have failed.
The predominant racist agenda is that Black people represent the opposite of Asian achievement in America.
Beyond that, Asians have contributed to the systemic racism in the United States. The anti-Black sentiment in the Asian community is real. Growing up in the Bay Area, going to Chinese restaurants and overhearing racial epithets against Black people casually stated in Cantonese makes me shudder to imagine the day a Black person who understands Chinese walks into a Chinese restaurant. The predominant racist agenda is that Black people represent the opposite of Asian achievement in America. The misguided belief is that rather than shut up, work hard, and go to medical school, Black people are lazy, unmotivated, and reliant on food stamps and other government benefits at taxpayers’ expense. The line of xenophobia goes: If Asians have to immigrate to the United States and are able to succeed, then why can’t Black people — who are already in this country — do it?
In Asian cultures, skin tone is also a sign of social class. Despite often being categorized as “yellow,” the color can vary from a light yellow to almost a brown hue. Light skin is preferred because it is an indication of wealth and a cosmopolitan, indoor lifestyle. Thus, many Asian women wear sleeves when driving or walking during a hot day. Dark skin signifies that the person had to perform manual labor and be out in the sun all day, a sign of poverty and a low social class. A person is judged almost immediately by the darkness of their skin tone. The stigma results in wildly racist comments toward Black people, which I was privy to growing up at gatherings with older relatives and family friends. A flippant remark about how “dark” a Black person appearing on television looked was not uncommon as were comments about how a certain person didn’t look “that Black” — like it was a positive thing.
The first step to solving a problem is recognizing there is one. Most Asians acknowledge the existence of racism, but we need to realize that the system that allowed whites to love us “because we’re not Black” is the same system that is so obviously stacked against Black people. This is not easy because it means risking the artificial mantle that has been carved for us in American society. There are so few mainstream Asian American actors, athletes, politicians, and singers because we don’t like to put ourselves out there; attracting attention when we’re supposed to keep quiet goes against the unspoken rules of existing while yellow in this country.
Hopefully, 2020 is the beginning of a change in mentality. To be alarmed by the racism against Asians during the Covid-19 pandemic but remain silent after another heinous crime against a Black person is simply hypocritical—and racist. To prop up the story of how our parents immigrated to America with nothing in their pockets and built up a lucrative career so their kids could have a brighter future but to ignore the privileges that this upbringing affords us is ignorant. To be appalled by the video of Floyd’s death but to not speak up because we want to avoid conflict and politics is to fall into the trap of the model minority, a stereotype that cannot and should not define Asian Americans.
Asian Americans must realize that our success should not come at the expense of another minority group.
I am guilty of playing into that stereotype. As a sportswriter, I feel even more pressure to act like a model minority. In sports journalism, we are unreasonably admonished about “sticking to sports” because apparently nobody follows us on Twitter to hear about our politics. Like a good soldier, I try to abide by this unwritten, nonsensical principle, scared that employers might not hire me or I might lose followers. But in a sense, complicity in this so-called directive is to voluntarily and knowingly strip oneself of their identity. As an Asian American with a background in journalism and the ability to pitch my words to a widely read magazine such as this one, I can do better. It starts with this piece.
Few of us will ever be put in the shoes of what Tou Thao experienced on Memorial Day. But if we are, hopefully we have learned enough that we do the right thing. Do not be a bystander. Do not watch silently with your hand in your pocket when a crime is being committed just because you are not the one suffering. Do not provide protection and make the matter worse as the perpetrator continues to harm the victim. And do not look the other way.
America has myriad problems, but its identity as a melting pot, as a place where anyone can live the so-called American dream, is what attracts different races and cultures. Asian Americans must realize that our success should not come at the expense of another minority group. When one group suffers an injustice, we all hurt.
As the anti-Asian sentiments ramped up during the onset of the coronavirus, with the president referring to it as the “Chinese virus” and incidents of racist attacks against Asians reported all over the country, every sensible American stepped up to condemn these horrific acts. Now, as we watch with horror while the Black community mourns another tragic death, it is only right that we are there for them as well.
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