We Were Supposed to Help Asian Migrant Women—Instead We Got Police

After a white man shot dead six Asian women at three spas in Atlanta in March 2021, unprecedented interest fell on grassroots organizations serving New York City’s Asian communities. Mainstream discussions about violence against Asians in America have rarely focused on migrant workers, who face aggressive policing, unfair housing policies, garnished wages, and other discriminatory actions. But New Yorkers sympathetic to the Atlanta victims suddenly inundated organizers like Yves Tong Nguyen with queries about how to help. In response, Nguyen would repeat a blunt message: “I want you to care when people are still alive.”

And people did care—just not always as hoped.

After the 1982 killing of Vincent Chin, grassroots organizations like CAAAV (founded in 1986 as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) ushered in a new era of Asian American activism. Nguyen organizes with Red Canary Song, which was created in 2018 after Flushing massage worker Yang Song died during a police raid. Shortly after the Atlanta shootings, Andrew Hsiao, a book editor who has been engaged in Asian activism since the 1980s, told me he wondered if the tragedy could be another flash point to galvanize Asian Americans to uplift the most vulnerable members of their communities.

Instead, in an age when slogans are engineered to trend rather than inspire change, a new brand of protest emerged in New York City—what I call aesthetic Asian activism. Influenced by more middle-class or white-collar environs, novice demonstrators shouted for representation and demanded carceral solutions to combat anti-Asian violence. This represented the antithesis of the kind of work that has anchored Asian American organizing in New York City for decades.

Almost a year and a half since the deaths in Atlanta of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng, aesthetic activists haven’t achieved much to decrease anti-Asian violence. But politicians, media, and influential Asian American organizations have latched onto their conservative-leaning messaging, creating a sense that tough-on-crime responses are what Asian communities are prioritizing. (Surveys indicate that health care and jobs and the economy are the most pressing issues for Asian Americans.) Meanwhile, popular interest in gendered and racialized violence against Asian women has dissipated.

“People who have money and power are going to be able to leverage that for more,” said TD Tso, a grassroots organizer with Asian American Feminist Collective. “What’s happening in the mainstream Asian American advocacy space is very much upholding the status quo.”

At rallies and on Zoom panels, aesthetic-activist talking points rely on studies with broad definitions of “hate crimes,” including name-calling, or on surveys gauging opinions of relatively wealthy Asian Americans. On the rare occasions when aesthetic activists mentioned Atlanta, it was as an argument for hate-crime legislation. These messages have then been amplified by groups like the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY), which wants to change what constitutes a hate crime to include “a presumption of hate and/or higher penalties during high stress periods.”


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