The Importance of Asian Race Equality
Recently, a 15-year-old African American boy named Jordan Edwards was shot and killed by police in the suburb of Balch Springs, Texas. He was shot in the back of the head while sitting in a car that was leaving a party. He was unarmed. He was a straight A student and football player. The original police statement stated that the vehicle had moved toward the officers, but the statement was later retracted by Police Chief Jonathan Haber.
His name is the latest addition to a long, painful history of anti-black police brutality. When reading about Jordan Edwards in The New York Times, my mind reverted back to the case of Akai Gurley and Peter Liang. The Chinese American community was starkly divided over the case of Peter Liang, a NYPD officer who fired the single shot that killed unarmed Akai Gurley in November 2014.
While Liang’s original manslaughter conviction was downgraded to only criminally negligent homicide, he still has to serve five years of probation and 800 hours of community service. This has caused a rift in the Chinese American community due to how the outcome of his trial was different to officers of the same crime but instead, were white. Outside the Brooklyn courthouse, protesters held signs with slogans such as “racist prosecution.”
I understand the mindset behind people who supported Peter Liang and rallied against any punishment for him—Asian Americans have always been hailed as the “model minority.” We have been conditioned to believe that there are less differences between the white experience in America and the Chinese one than there are between the white experience and the black one. We are more privileged (although a country founded on ideals of white supremacy, in the end, only benefits white people). We were given this privilege in exchange for the Caucasian declaration of the “model minority,” one that they can use as an excuse to say every type of minority can easily succeed in America. That black workers and Latino workers can earn the same amount if they “work harder.” It is a lie—one that gives the image of unity but is actually meant to separate.
Some people fought against jail time and a guilty verdict for Liang because they thought it would prove that in America, Chinese Americans are equal to Caucasians. That is something they sorely want to believe. Wasn’t our country founded on the term “All men are created equal”?
By comparing Peter Liang’s case to Darren Wilson’s, Sean Williams’ and Daniel Pantaleo’s and expecting the same outcome, we think we’re receiving the same privilege that white people are. However, this is just an example of the supremacy police officers possess, not Chinese American privilege that matches white supremacy.
Another reason that people oppose a guilty charge is because Liang accidentally fired the shot that killed Akai Gurley. Peter Liang may have unintentionally killed Akai Gurley, but that doesn’t change the fact that he stood there and texted his union representative while this man—who was a father, a son, a friend—took his last breaths in a stairwell in Brooklyn. His actions speak volumes on how he didn’t even have the humanity to help Gurley first. Liang was reckless, and he took the life of an innocent man. Whether it was intentional or unintentional, he deserves to be punished accordingly.
Chinese Americans benefit from anti-blackness, though not on the same scale as white Americans. However, we shouldn’t be happy to have privilege that comes from standing on someone else’s shoulders, privilege that stems from someone else’s oppression. We are not better or worse than anyone else. We deserve equal treatment in our own right as human beings, but we need to refuse to accept the injustice targeted at other minorities that is a requisite of receiving this privilege. The protestors outside the courthouse are right: it was a prosecution with a final decision that was affected by race, but we cannot respond to it with our own form of racism and wishes of supremacy, by demanding that a man who killed someone be set free just because “white people were too.” We should be rallying against racism as a whole—racism toward Asian Americans, racism toward African Americans, racism toward Mexican Americans included. Injustice anywhere is still injustice everywhere, and as long as there is no equality for other minorities, there is none for us either.
Our feet are standing on a country that was built on slavery, on the oppression of minorities. We cannot let the anti-blackness that runs rampant in some of our communities develop any further—there is absolutely nothing that can justify hatred based on the amount of melanin in someone’s skin. When we stand alone like this, we are being selfish by only fighting for our rights, and our power is also diminished. If we stand together with other people of color, we have a good chance of fighting the plague of inequality that has infested this country for so long.
We are standing loud and making our voices heard in protests. We are defying the stereotype that paints us as submissive and quiet. That is something to be proud of, but a lot of us are campaigning for the wrong cause. Fighting against racism and white supremacy benefits everyone. Fighting for Peter Liang only serves to further perpetuate the disgusting ideologies of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and the idea that police are immune to any consequences resulting from their actions.