More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Vigilante action in the form of policing, surveillance and violence has long endangered people of color. That reality worries some experts who fear Texas’s latest anti-abortion law—which empowers private citizens to sue anyone they suspect of providing, or aiding and abetting an abortion—will disproportionately target people of color.
The entrenched class and racial divide in Salinas, California reared its ugly head via Instagram, TikTok and Facebook recently, when high schools students abused a Black doll named Shaniqua. Racism is injurious not just to those on the receiving end, but to those who perpetrate the continued exclusion of those not like them.
A new report concludes that “institutional racism and sexism are present, tolerated and left unaddressed at VMI. The racist and misogynistic acts and outcomes uncovered during this investigation are disturbing.”
Asian women have been overlooked, dehumanized and ignored by American society. When we are seen, we are often stereotyped as the “China Doll” or the “Dragon Lady.” We have been reduced to our perceived race and stripped of our individual humanity and identity.
If this can happen to two Asian leaders in the White House, then what is happening elsewhere across our country to Asian women with fewer resources?
Racism manifested by police stops, microaggressions at work, discriminatory and hostile treatment while shopping for groceries and doing other innocuous tasks, and systemic inequalities in housing and education take an enormous toll—both physically and psychologically.
“In many ways, Minnesota and Wisconsin have become the new south. The disparities we’re seeing rival anything in the Jim Crow era.”
This article is the first installment in a three-part series that asks what can we learn from officer-involved killings, which on their own can appear isolated and disconnected from larger social conditions and cultural dynamics.
“The violence our communities experience every day won’t be solved by more police. It won’t be solved by more people crowding our prisons. Those structures have failed us, time and time again, and they are rooted in and upheld by the same white supremacy that fuels these attacks.”
In the wake of the horrific anti-Asian racism and hate crimes in Atlanta, we need to fight for community-led solutions to help us heal. Here are four.
I am not surprised that the acute anti-Asian sentiment festering during the pandemic and the historical objectification and “othering” of Asians, particularly women, in the U.S. has culminated in real-life ramifications. As an Asian woman, violence of this nature was already clear to me.
It’s been 19 years since the 9/11 attacks forever changed the social and political fabric of the U.S.. On the anniversary of the attacks, feminists are mourning the tragedy, while also reflecting on our current convergence of crises, including racial injustice and a pandemic that has taken 50 times the number of lives lost in the 9/11 attacks—while receiving only a fraction of the government attention and response that the attacks received.
At the very outset of what would become an award-winning career as a TV journalist, Belva Davis confronted violent racism at the 1964 Republican National Convention, at which conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was nominated for the presidency. Her memory of that daunting experience reminds us that we’ve been through change followed by backlash before.
“Day one of the convention had been tense but orderly. … Day two was starting to spin out of control.”