#akai gurley

 On April 19, 2016, Judge Danny Chun sentenced Peter Liang to 800 hours of community service and five years’ probation for the murder of Akai Gurley. He received no jail time. His sentence once again exposes the impunity of police officers and the dismissal of Black lives. Our position as Asians4BlackLives Bay Area is clear: We hold no torch for Peter Liang. We want to hold all cops accountable for the violence they inflict, including the cops who killed Mario Woods, Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez-Lopez, Yuvette Henderson, and Luis Gongora in the Bay Area during the last two years.

We know our position is not shared by everyone in the Asian community. After Akai Gurley’s murder, hundreds of Asian Americans flooded the streets in multiple cities demanding “Justice for Peter Liang” and, throughout the trial, they continued to support the killer cop instead of the young murdered man. Partly, Asians responded to Peter Liang because of an ongoing fear: we haven’t assimilated enough, we’re still not white enough. They really believe that Liang’s being scapegoated. But our communities have also been pushed into accepting this narrative by right-wing Chinese nationalists, who flooded newspapers and Chinese media with pro-police rhetoric.

We reject the ongoing control of our communities by right wing nationalists who try to define the ways we identify, the ways we understand our homelands, and the ways we think about justice. Many of our parents and grandparents fled the oppression of their home countries, often escaping these same nationalists who used their own police forces to murder and kill. We’ve forgotten our own history. While many moderate Asians have attended Justice for Peter Liang rallies, the real force behind them are Chinese conservatives who have no interest in racial justice.  

We also reject the idea that racial progress means that we’re able to commit violence, like white people, and get away with it, like white people, just because the victims are Black. Protesters have called for “equal treatment” for Peter Liang, in line with the acquittal of white police officers. They want us to believe that his conviction was an injustice and his sentence, of no jail time, is a fair outcome. It is not. The real injustice is police impunity. The lack of accountability is the real terror. The conviction of Peter Liang was an intentional act of white supremacy, but only in the context of the lack of indictments and convictions of white killer cops. It is this missing accountability that we need to focus us on. Fighting racism does not mean fighting for the same privileges that whiteness affords. Asians4BlackLives does not believe that a just world is one in which Asians are able to murder Black people with the same impunity as white people. How can we believe that the ability to harm other people means that we’ve achieved freedom?

We reject the divide and conquer strategy of white supremacy. We reject assimilation into whiteness. Asians4BlackLives believes that fighting racism means ending the violence we perpetuate against each other and against Black people. We as Asian Americans need to challenge how anti-blackness influences our own diverse communities. Part of this work includes educating our communities about the history of Black and Asian relationships and the effects of model minority narratives that continue to devalue Black lives and harm our own communities.

This work means centering, and standing with, Black people, remembering that our liberation is interconnected. This work means that when we advocate for Asian Americans, we do not throw our Black siblings under the bus for the scraps of “equality.” This work means learning about our own histories – about the countries from which our parents migrated, escaping right wing nationalisms and political repression. And of course, this work means organizing, protesting, and shutting down business as usual in the name of every single person killed by the police.

There are many beautifully written articles and important commentaries on the subject, and we’ve included links to many of them below.

There is No “Chinese” Side of Justice by Timmy Lu

Peter Liang Was Justly Convicted - He’s Not A Victim, Says This Niece of Vincent Chin by Annie Tan

Akai Gurley’s family deserves justice by Qinglan Huang

Complicating our Complicity by Kat Yang Stevens

A system that doesn’t value black lives can never truly value Asian American lives by Jenn Fang

As Officer Who Killed Akai Gurley Gets No Jail Time, Asian Americans Debate Role of White Supremacy with Hertencia Peterson, Cathy Dang, and John Liu

Two MothersbyAsians4Peace

As people take to the streets of NYC on December 13th to protest institutionalized racism and police brutality, they stand in solidarity with the Black community in a struggle older than this country. It is important for individual participants to reflect on what brings them to the march and what the specific issues are. Below you’ll find ten quotes that may help you through the process. 

On Police and State Violence

“The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext…” - Angela Davis

On Social Responsibility

“…this majority is you. Nobody else can do it. The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” - James Baldwin

 On Civil Disobedience

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” -Howard Zinn

 On Solidarity

“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”-Eduardo Galeano

 The Collective

"I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.” - Frances Fox Piven

 On Community, Justice, and Privilege

“If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.”― bell hooks

Feminism Is It

“Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited” to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important.“ - bell hooks

On the power of the victim

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.” — James Baldwin

Long Overdue

“And so we must say, now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to transform this pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our nation. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of racial justice. Now is the time to get rid of segregation and discrimination. Now is the time” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

On the distance

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.” – Arundhati Roy

Briefly, why race matters: 

1) The logic isn’t that race doesn’t matter, the logic is that individuals can be racist, and systems can be racist and all they require are complicit operators.

2) Unfortunately, the entirety of American history is a race issue. The concept of race in its modern form was born here. It began with the extermination and subjugation of the indigenous people (celebrated in Cowboy and Indian movies) and the violence against the African populations stolen in the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation life.

Many slaves in the early colonies of the Caribbean were Irish or indigenous, as the demand for slaves grew so did the importation of African slaves. As the African slave population outnumbered the European, the idea of race, an exclusively Black slave population was born.  Resistance to this injustice catalyzed a reactionary intellectual movement that created the modern concept of racial difference in order to validate slavery. 

3) Policing did not begin with Civil Rights, slavery existed in the North, and racial discrimination was the law of much our country until 1964-65 when it was forcibly removed by the Federal Government. For example:

“In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.”

And so policing (especially on the local level) existed to maintain the status quo, that status quo was slavery, later that status quo became Jim Crow, and today that status quo is racist and class-based oppression.  

4) That being said, the systems that were in place don’t just go away. Nothing illustrates this point better than how quickly Angola Plantation became Angola Prison in Louisiana, to house Louisiana’s new “criminal” class of free-Black people shortly after emancipation. Criminalizing Blackness was of course a means to recapture a population and force them back into bondage and labor.

5) Think of the colonies throughout the world: are the colonized not themselves policing their own people in the interests of racist and exploitative regimes? In British India, the Imperial Police force was comprised largely of local Indians and Burmese, subordinate to European officers. Yet the colonial paradigm remained racist and exploitative.

In the contemporary American context, police officers can be of many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The POC police officer need not be racist for their actions and the system to be racist, they need only be complicit with racist orders– and by being complicit they become part of the racist structure.

Twitter: @bodega_gyro_ao