This long history has erased any possible nuance Saturday’s protests might have brought to our understanding of what happened to Liang. Which is tragic, because there is much ugly, essential nuance to be examined. There are many within the Asian-American community, for example, who believe that Liang deserved to be convicted of manslaughter, but who also wonder why it was the Asian cop, among many other equally deserving officers, who took the fall. Others point to the deaths of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, two police officers — one Hispanic, the other Asian — who were murdered as they sat in their car in December 2014, at the height of protests against police violence in New York. In the days that followed, as policemen from around the country flew to the city to attend the funerals, I recall talking to Asian friends about the anxiety we felt over Liu’s funeral, and whether the outpouring of support and grief would measure up to what it might have been if he were white. These are selfish, neurotic thoughts, but they are the burden of feeling one’s citizenship may be conditional, and the price of decades of collective silence. When thousands of mourners showed up to Liu’s funeral and gave their condolences to his widow, our fears were put to rest, at least for a little while.

All these anxieties, born out of these small but crucial referendums on our place in America, have been reignited by Liang’s conviction. Even if you believe, as I do, that Liang should be in jail, the inevitable follow-up question — why only Liang? — suggests that the unjust protections routinely afforded to white officers should be extended either to everyone or to nobody at all. To ignore this suggestion is intellectually dishonest.

But to engage with it is to ignore the overwhelming context of the case: yet another unarmed black man killed by yet another police officer. The cleanest response — one I’ve seen throughout social media, where clean, vaguely lobotomized responses often reign supreme — is to simply say that some justice is better than none. But how can any sincere confrontation of racial inequity in policing and the criminal-justice system ignore the inconvenient singularity of Liang’s conviction?

Each of these thoughts represents an uneasy, probing investigation into the complicated, often-complicit relationship between Asian-Americans and the nation’s racial hierarchies. I do not claim to know the right answer to any of these questions. I do not know how to explain why I knew Liang would be found guilty well before the verdict was announced. I cannot adequately describe the conflict in feeling like a race traitor for applauding Liang’s conviction while also feeling like a race traitor for questioning it. I know the lifeblood of my conditional whiteness as an educated, upwardly mobile Asian-American lies somewhere in those conflicts. And because it’s historically been in the best interests of people like me to never discuss these things, even in private, I lack the vocabulary to discuss it.

This cultural aphasia comes from decades of political silence. Asian-Americans, for the most part, have been absent from modern social-justice movements, partly by their own choosing. Last year, while reporting an article for the magazine on the anti-police-violence activism of DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, I attended Black Lives Matter protests across the country. In each city, I grew angrier and angrier at the lack of Asian faces among the marchers. I had long lost faith in storybook solidarity, but I had never expected to see the divide between blacks and Asian-Americans laid out so starkly.