Full statement:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ijorEUlVRktJc7U8wkvUl38qvEqAFLhrcZGK77KaEiM/edit?usp=sharingTagalog translation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q58gJeoqa2NDfzbNsS4bgnjllLmGEsju/view?usp=sharingTranslated by Prof. Nonilon Queano, University of the Philippines
Join us on April 25, 2021, for a day of action in solidarity with Asian Lives. We will march through Washington Heights, Harlem, and East Harlem to demand an end to white supremacy, imperialism and misogyny — the root causes of anti-Asian violence. We call upon Latinx, Indigenous, Black, Asian and white people across New York City to unite in the ongoing fight against racial capitalism and the carceral systems that uphold it.
In New York City, violence against Asians and Pacific Islanders (API) has risen 1900% over the course of the pandemic.
Attacks against API people today are in large part a product of US imperial competition with China and the blaming of China for the COVID-19 pandemic. But anti-Asian violence has a long history. Its genesis is linked to the super-exploitation in the late 1800s of Chinese labor to build the US railroad. The exclusion of Asians from the concept of America, placement of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents and grandparents in US concentration camps during World War II, and anticommunism have reinforced this violence.
Millions of our Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American immigrant parents are here because of US military intervention. Anti-Asian violence in the US is an extension of the savagery of US imperialist wars in the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea and elsewhere in Asia, which have produced mass displacement and trauma. Wherever there is war, women, girls, and femmes are “conquered” by soldiers through rape. The March 16, 2021, killing of six Asian women by a white supremacist in Atlanta is directly tied to their structural dehumanization as exoticized sexual objects. Under distinct but related conditions, Black women, girls, and femmes were raped during their enslavement in this country. Racial capitalism is at the heart of exploitation at home and abroad.
We reject carceral responses to recent attacks. The US government is using the Atlanta shootings to justify expansion of police power. But the police exist to protect private property, and originally functioned to catch escaped slaves. As agents of white supremacy, police will never safeguard Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian communities. The carceral state props up a global system of racial capitalism through artificial borders, cages of detention, and a culture of control and repression. We must work to create real safety in our communities and foster a belief in the sanctity of life. We reject, too, the detention of border-crossers everywhere, knowing that the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th century set the mold for contemporary US anti-immigrant policy.
We stand united across race, ethnicity, and gender in the face of those who seek to divide us. Those who profit by dispossessing people from their lands, exploiting labor, and extracting resources do so by sowing divisions among working people of different races, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities who share class interests and are bonded by their common humanity. State-sponsored propaganda that pits us against each other, and the erosion of public resources that leaves us squabbling over crumbs, are to blame. We are proud heirs of a radical tradition of solidarity that includes Frederick Douglass' opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act and Yuri Kochiyama’s fierce and loving work alongside Malcolm X.
When we undertake this work and recognize our common enemy, we are a real threat to those in power.
