In Solidarity: DAP Condemns Anti-Asian Violence

Rapid Response

Mar 3

The recent surge in violent attacks and assaults against Asian American underscores the dangerous conditions Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian bodies experience in the built environment. Asian Americans have been facing Covid-related racism and xenophobia since the beginning of the pandemic, with 2,800 anti-Asian assaults recorded in 2020, and anti-Asian violence has further increased in recent weeks.

The majority of these attacks took place in public spaces located in ethnic neighborhoods whose existences were born from spatial exclusion and that are now also threatened by gentrification and displacement.

The Context of Historic Patterns

Historically, Asian Americans are attributed with two seemingly opposite racial stereotypes. The first stereotype is one in which Asian Americans are viewed as the perpetual foreigner, never fully accepted as Americans no matter how many years or generations of living in this country. The other stereotype is that of the model minority, a myth characterizing Asian Americans as “well-behaved” and problem-free, effectively rendering invisible the legitimate and diverse struggles of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The model minority myth pits Asians against other communities of color in what is actually a collective fight against white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. The reinforcement of both tropes ignores how our history of immigration policies (e.g. 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act) has designed this narrative. Furthermore, these racist ideas distort visibility between Asian communities as well as erasing Asian people whose identities intersect with other communities of color.

The recent anti-Asian attacks also bear disturbing parallels to past attacks on Asian Americans, most strikingly to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American who was killed in a hate crime by two civilians in Detroit. Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers in a parking lot before a crowd of bystanders, and they received no jail time.

Similar to the racist and false belief that Asians are to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts, Chin was scapegoated for the economic downturn in the 1980s due to automation, massive layoffs in the auto industry, and an influx of imported Japanese cars into the US market. As with the initial under-reporting of recent anti-Asian attacks, the Vincent Chin case did not reach national attention until the Asian American community and its allies spoke out.

Ultimately, the history of racial violence against Asians and Asian Americans extends as far back as our presence in the Americas and are rooted in the same systems and cultures of oppression that we work against today.

Insights from Design Justice

As a BIPOC-led community of designers, the Design As Protest Collective’s practice of design justice is rooted in the practice of solidarity and legacy of coalition building. The particular conditions of the built environment in which these attacks took place must be understood in any proposals to address anti-Asian violence. All of the reported anti-Asian attacks have taken place in the public realm — sidewalks, street curbs, bus stops, train hubs, open areas, and public spaces. Below is a sample of incidents reported in the media and is by no means a comprehensive list of the attacks:

A 23-year-old Korean woman was punched for not wearing a mask while walking in Midtown, New York. (March 11, 2020)
A 47-year-old Asian man was with his 10 year old son and attacked for not wearing a mask while walking down a sidewalk in Queens NYC. (March 2020)
A 39-year-old Asian woman was attacked with chemicals in Sunset Park, Brooklyn while taking trash out in front of her home. (April 5, 2020)
A 89-year-old Asian woman was slapped and set on fire by two teenagers shortly after leaving her house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Police concluded that the incident did not qualify as a hate crime. (July 2020)
A 19-year-old Chinese-American man was shot and killed by a Pennsylvania State Police officer while experiencing a mental health crisis, with his hands up in the air (December 2020)
An 84-year-old Thai man was attacked (and later died) while walking on a sidewalk in a San Francisco neighborhood. (January 28, 2021)
A 61-year-old Filipino man was attacked in the face with a box cutter while riding the NYC subway. (February 3, 2021)
An Asian woman gets hits for wearing a mask at the Grand Street Subway station in NYC. (February 4, 2021)

Each of these spaces is surveilled by law enforcement. Yet, this type of security has not prevented the attacks from occurring, nor has police presence offered any sense of safety. Although many attacks are conducted by civilians, in other cases, militarized police explicitly harm and kill members of our communities with no recourse. Spaces once intended to be safe and open to the public are now attack scenes. Even community centers, typically meant as safe havens for kinship and refuge, are now targets to attack Asians.

The current system of law enforcement and policing has simply failed to provide true safety to neighborhoods and communities.

Activists from 18 Million Rising and GABRIELA Oakland at a recent action in Chinatown Oakland (Photo by Irma Shauf-Bajar, 18 Million Rising)

Beyond the Carceral State

We must acknowledge that spatial injustices of segregation and disregard of community voices go hand-in-hand with the racial profiling and discrimination of BIPOC. To address race-based violence in the built environment, Design Justice demands that we create and invest in public spaces that are genuinely safe for everyone. We must take actions beyond calls against anti-Asian violence and the profiling of Asian elders, and we must advocate for equitable, justice-oriented planning and design approaches that tackle the roots of white supremacy and preserve the integrity of BIPOC places and spaces.

We must also find alternate means of accountability to the perpetrators of violence beyond the use of law enforcement, which has historically targeted and criminalized Black and Brown communities. BIPOC communities must stand in solidarity and center actions that serve to dismantle white supremacy and police brutality. We advocate for the following:

Support and amplify community and mutual-aid groups that are organizing on-the-ground for community safety and protection of elders. The same approach must be extended to the planning and design processes that center community leadership in shaping just and equitable built environments.
Make permanent the mandate to collect racial and ethnic data that would accurately reflect these types of attacks as hate crimes across all public agencies and jurisdictions in order to understand the full breadth of these hate incidents. Data and statistics of Asian American and Pacific Islander community must be collected and disaggregated among ethinic groups to ensure accurate analysis and share of supportive resources and investments.
Reject the call for more police actions and implementation of hostile architecture under the guise of safety. We must no longer support the carceral state, which means refusing to design carceral architecture, as well as abolishing ICE and its disproportionate targeting of refugees and undocumented people (many of whom are Asian). We must end law enforcement’s brutality toward the Black community and cease the on-going profiling and discrimination of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities.
Invest in community resources to support victims and cultural neighborhoods so they can survive, heal, and thrive. Investments must address basic needs and reinforce community-based programs and infrastructure to build capacity and resilience.
Integrate restorative justice into strategies for rebuilding and strengthening neighborhoods and communities. Individuals who committed acts of violence should not be incarcerated but must still be held accountable.

A Collectively Liberated Future

“The time has come for us to re-imagine everything. We have to do what I call visionary organizing. We have to see every crisis as both a danger and an opportunity. It’s a danger because it does so much damage to our lives, to our institutions, to all that we have expected. But it’s also an opportunity for us to become creative, to become the new kind of people that are needed at such a huge period of transition.” — Grace Lee Boggs, 2012

The struggles and future of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian communities have always been intertwined. A genuinely safe built environment that is free from oppression must be rooted in solidarity with all systematically marginalized groups. Measures to combat anti-Asian violence must align with equitable, justice-oriented planning and design approaches in service of collective liberation.

On behalf of the DAP Collective,
Michelle Lin-Luse, Gloria Lau, Fauzia Khanani, Bz Zhang, Jenn Low, and Christin Hu

Resources

Please support the following organizing and help DAP amplify the following organizations to fight against anti-Asian violence in solidarity with:

APEN (Asian Pacific Environmental Network)

Mutual Aid Fundraisers to support families of victims

AAPI Women Lead

Chinese Progressive Association

Stop AAPI Hate

Chinese for Affirmative Action

CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities

Chinatown Community for Equitable Development

Asian American Feminist Collective