We at the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association join a number of Asian American and Asian American & Pacific Islander collectives throughout the country in condemning the countless number of violent attacks against Asian Americans over the past few months. Much has been said about the violence, including how it represents a symptom of a broader affliction this country suffers from–white supremacy, misogyny, the exploitation of women’s labor, and toxic masculinity–amplified through a gun-obsessed society.
In this statement, we first express our solidarity with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We also want to offer new dimensions to the conversation on anti-Asian violence that need to be more explicitly spotlighted. First, these attacks should not be read as ‘senseless’ violence as we have seen some news headlines depict them. They are very much rooted in racialized, misogynist, and capitalist logics of domination. By calling them ‘senseless’ we treat the perpetrators as those who do not live in a larger culture that glorifies violence against minorities through the usage of weapons and physical domination. Second, the violence against Asian Americans, especially the March shootings in Atlanta, cannot be disentangled from the history this country has of treating Asian women specifically as sexual commodities, which is tied to deeper histories of US imperialism in Asia and decades of representing Asian women as subjects that can and should be dominated within Western colonial sexual fantasies. Third, in emphasizing this and other attacks as only symptoms of white supremacy, we inadvertently ignore how white supremacy itself is a system of domination that inherently relies on racism, misogyny and capitalism to thrive. If we are to stand in true solidarity with Asian Americans, we need to also dismantle these systems as they all work together simultaneously to erode and in this case, literally destroy, the lives of BIPOC communities everyday.
We at AAAWA commit to continuing our educational and awareness-raising efforts around both the structural harms that we, the AAPI, and BIPOC communities at large confront through our public-facing programming in the months to come. We also, however, are committed, through art, writing, and scholarship to show the full and complex humanities of our communities, the full breadth of their lived experiences, so that we can continue to rehumanize those who have been denied their full humanity.
We have also enclosed a list of organizations that are actively working to promote the wellbeing of AAPI communities throughout the United States (see below).
Organizations and Resources
AAPI Women Lead and #ImReadyMovement
https://www.imreadymovement.org/
Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities
https://aaww.org/project/black-asian-feminist-solidarities/
Stop AAPI Hate
Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ)
https://www.advancingjustice-atlanta.org/aaajcommunitystatement
CAAAV (originally Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence)
Desis Rising Up and Mobilizing (DRUM)
Red Canary Song
https://www.redcanarysong.net/
API Equality—Northern California
Asians4BlackLives