Conversation - 07 (Asian-American) Cut 2016-03-09 00:00 ESTHER: I think the conversations I had about race with my family was primarily lead by my dad, and it would just be in little lessons. Like I’d pick up the phone and I’d say hello, and he goes, “I can tell you’re Korean over the phone,” and I was like, “It’s because I am Korean, and I’m on the phone with you,” and he goes, “No, no one should be able to tell you’re Korean on the phone, people should just think you’re American.” 00:24 RINKU: When my parents talked about Americans they clearly meant white Americans, when they meant any other type of Americans they named them, they said Black people, or Latinos, or Native- American Indians was the language they would use for Native people, so I understood early on that a real American was a White American, everybody else had to be qualified. 00:53 MONIQUE: Well, Asian-American to me is um- is a political identification, not like Democratic or Republican, but meaning a way to organize, a group identification that has political implications and meaning, and power and strength. 01:13 ADEEL: Wearing this skin color is a big deal to me, which is why I don’t say I’m just American anymore because America doesn’t see me as just American. 01:26 HASAN: My first experience with race was, when I was six years old I fell in love with this girl named Janis Mallo and I went up to her in the sandbox and I was like, “Janis I love you!” and she was like, “You’re the color of poop!” And that was memory number one with racism, and I didn’t know what that was, I just took that literally and was like, “What? Ahhh it’s not rubbing off,” like it was very terrifying. 01:47 MONIQUE: These children around me already had the racial epithets to use against me. You know it’s the first time in my life of course that I heard, you know, chink, and jap, and gook. 02:03 CHITRA: When I was in 2nd grade I used to walk a little bit to the bus stop away from my school, and there was a boy who used to beat me up, and when he used to beat me up he used to call me the N-word. Which I didn’t quite know what it meant but I knew that it was something negative, and- people who evoke the most fear in me is like 10-year-old white boys, like I will cross the street. 02:25 ESTHER: My dad used to run a small business and I remember people coming in who weren’t Korean and just white customers coming in, and they would just tell my dad to go back to his country. And this was before my dad had a full grasp on the English language and I remember seeing my dad’s hands like being balled up in fists underneath the counter but my dad just saying, “Ok thank you, come back soon.” 03:00 HASAN: My dad he grew up in a very interesting time in Indian’s sort of development and growth. So he grew up when partition happened. During the time of partition there was a lot of aggression, so for him to hear my stories of micro-aggression he just didn’t have a whole lot of room or empathy to understand what it meant, because he’s like, “I’m dealing with full on aggression, like I’ve seen full on riots, people being killed, you know, fine kids call you Saddam Hussein just deal with it, we have an amazing opportunity here. We have freeways, Wi-Fi and Jamba Juice you better go be president, no excuses. 03:34 VISH: I had enough of stereotyping and not knowing who I was that I decided, Ok I wanted to become invisible, I didn’t want any eyes on me. So I took a big step of basically taking off my turban, cutting off my hair, and that worked for a while. 03:50 CHI-HUI: You know on one hand there’s this idea of foreignness of not belonging, and then on the other hand there’s this idea of being a successful minority who has achieved, and who should be modeled after, and there’s not a whole lot of room to work in between these. 04:07 RINKU: Immigration was opened in 1965 to professional Asian families, so we were really chosen and creamed from our countries, that we were meant to occupy a position as the solution to the problem of black-rebellion and of black resistance, and that’s not a good position for us, that we should join the problem, rather than join that false solution. 04:34 ANDREW: Was I ever a model minority? Of course, you know I was a good student, and that’s probably the extent of it. But you know, I had a cousin who had a murder rap. 04:45 CATHY: You know, I was the only Asian kid in Ridgewood, in a working class neighborhood, and I went to high school I hung out with gangs, I got into a lot of trouble, and I barely made it into college. 04:55 CHHAYA: The Bronx is home for me, and I think that, that growing up with black and brown folks, you know, again, determines our political alignment and solidarity work around like BlackLivesMatter and things like that, because we came from the same community, we lived in the same ghettos and we know what it means to be invisible and abandoned in the US. 05:20 KELVIN: Just because I’m Malaysian doesn’t mean I’m exempt from the conversation on anti-blackness, simply because this system was setup in a global setting. And even within Asian countries like Japan, Korea, India, you see colorism as a very wide spread phenomena, because anti-blackness is so entrenched and so just deeply embedded in like the global psyche, and like the global construction of race— yeah. 05:44 CATHY: When you look more deeply within our own community, and how we’re treated even differently within colorism and the spectrum of our skin tone, you know, Vietnamese people are treated differently and better than Cambodians, or Laos people or Hmong people, because we’re lighter. And I think with our own communities we have to acknowledge that, and acknowledge privilege of our skin color, and how we play a role being complacent and not being complacent and fighting back against what the system is between white supremacy and anti-blackness and everything in between the systems that upholds those two. 06:18 ESTHER: And I don’t think this is unique to Asians, I think every racial group is made to feel like their situation is siloed from other groups of people, and it’s very keep your head down, eyes in your own lane, and make sure things are better for us, and I think that I saw that a lot growing up, and I’ve definitely thought that at some point in my life, where I would see injustices happening to other groups of people in this country and I would tell myself, no you have your own things to worry about, make sure things are better for you. But then I realized when I grew up, that it’s not any of us that’s the problem, it’s the system that’s the problem and when the tide rises, all boats rise, so we need to stand by each other and support one another. 07:09