Count Us In: Why Asian Americans need to care about Ferguson too

"Officer Go Fuck Yourself" , aptly named for brandishing a weapon at an unarmed journalist and refusing to give his name.

 Throughout the dialogue about the events in Ferguson as of late, the focus is of course on those most directly affected - at present, the Black community in Ferguson is bearing the brunt of the extreme, militarized brutality of law enforcement. Much of the focus in the discourse that ensues is on the Black community and on the Hispanic community when it comes to those affected by police brutality. One such example is a statement made by Rosa Clemente in her account of her experience in Ferguson alongside Talib Kweli and others, posted on August 20th.

"... I looked into this white bald headed man, and I saw his eyes, I feared the moment that so many young Black and Latino, Latina men and women face, potential death..."

At first, my gut reaction as an Asian American is to take offense. Why do you leave us out? I wonder. I've known and heard of so many who have suffered brutality at the hands of police, who have experienced extreme prejudice and institutionalized racism. My gut reaction is to grouse, to be angered at the idea of being looked at as the "model minority" yet again. No wonder the Asian American voice is quiet when it comes to Ferguson. We've been left out again.

And then I realize - we can't think this way. We can't allow these lines of division to be drawn between us. There is no one to fault - many Asian Americans become complacent with the model minority myth because in many cases, our fellow non-Caucasians don't feel solidarity with us. They don't know that behind the myths and the stereotypes, Asian American urban youth suffer from issues of poverty, of lack of adequate education, of poor college retention. Asian Americans, too, face police brutality and should - must care about what's happening in Ferguson.

In 2006, four Asian Americans - Karen Chen, Quan Manh Thin, Tat M. Yuen, and Howard Ng - were pepper-sprayed at close range by a police officer while they stood outside of the Super 88 Market. Karen Chen, hardly five feet tall, was tackled to the ground. Tat Yuen was knocked unconscious. All were charged and convicted with either disorderly conduct or resisting arrest.

In 2007, 18-year-old Marlo Custodio was pulled out of his car and slammed into the hood by a police officer while simply sitting and eating while the car was parked. He called his mother for aid, and the police roughed her up as well.

In 2011, the Rapada family was disproportionately brutalized after police officers - a 'fireworks abatement team' dressed in battle dress uniform - drove over an unignited prohibited firework that the family had procured for the Fourth of July. The encounter resulted in the following chaos:

"A crowd teeming with people was nearby, which included Wendell Rapada. He was walking towards his home just a short distance from the scene. The officers accosted him and proceeded to choke him. Wendell was unarmed and turning blue. Ephraim Rapada witnessed what was happening, asking the officers why they were harming Wendell. The officers viciously turned on the elder Rapada. His daughter Crystal, who had been in the house, came out. Seeing what was happening to her father, she was frantic and tried to get between her father and the officer. She was taken to the ground, held down by an officer's foot on her neck. Ervin Rapada witnesses the scene and pleads for the officers to stop. He is attacked by 3 officers, one of whom tazed him 4 times. Crystal Rapada is frantic, calling out for her father who is injured. She is mocked by the officers on the way to the hospital..."

In January of this year, an 84-year-old Chinese man in New York City named Kang Wong was beaten for jaywalking, because, with limited English skills, he could not understand what officers were asking of him.

Kang Wong, 84, of New York. (Photo Credit: G.N. Miller / NY Post)

These are just a few cases, a small sample of instances in which Asian Americans have felt the force of police brutality, of wanton violence and assertion of dominance over minorities - and these are but a few of the reasons why the Asian American community, too, must not stand silent.

"Minorities" are only a minorities when they are segregated from one another - the solidarity of minorities into a majority is dangerous to those who assert their dominance in the form of brutality and institutionalized racism. For those who actively seek to benefit from the perception of White Americans as the majority, it is helpful to say, "Black and Hispanic America, Asian Americans are not you," and "Asian America, you are not them."

Solidarity of "minorities" is threatening. Recognition of our common victimization and oppression is a step towards empowerment - towards no longer being victims.

Why Drought-Shaming the Ice Bucket Challenge is Over-Dramatic

Actors Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston getting iced, (care of Tumblr user LoptrLaufey)

First of all, for those unfamiliar with the Ice Bucket Challenge, this is a viral campaign created by the ALS Association. ALS, which stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease also referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease in which a person gradually loses the ability to use and control their muscle movements - it can start with the limbs, but later progress to the loss of ability to eat and speak independently because of loss of tone in the pharyngeal or facial muscles.  The Ice Bucket Challenge poses the individual with a choice: dump a bucket of ice water on your head (often within 24 hours) or donate to the cause of striking out ALS. Then you nominate 3 others to do the same.

In nursing school, I spent a day with a home health nurse, during which we spent almost the entire day visiting veterans - mostly from Vietnam - suffering from ALS, and having seen the disease progression for myself, I immediately felt a sense of happiness at the presence of such awareness of the disease. A couple of years ago, during my first semester in nursing school, hardly anyone even knew about it, and now there was an entire viral campaign to raise money for it.

And then, I started seeing all of the complaints on social media. This doesn't really help, some say, but money has been raised, over $15 million at that. Others, particularly in California, bring up the fact that we are in a drought, and it is a waste of water. Inspired by a satirical article by the Daily Currant - please pay attention to the word satirical - which said that Ice Bucket Challenge participants were being fined for participating, many people have posted on social media about how shameful and irresponsible it is to waste so much water during a drought - and while, yes, we are in a drought that needs to be taken seriously, and yes, we do need to make conservation efforts, the shaming of people doing something fun and interesting for a good cause needs to stop.

As far as water usage, let's talk about the average shower. The average shower, lasting about 15 minutes (though let's be honest - many of us take longer) uses 2 to 4 gallons per minute in a water-saving shower, or 7-10 gallons per minute in the conventional shower. The average toilet flush for a conventional toilet uses about 5 to 7 gallons of water, and up to 3.5 gallons of water with a water-saving toilet.

Now, I won't pretend to know a good estimate of how much water is used in the Ice Bucket Challenge, but I feel like saying 5 to 7 gallons is a reasonable if not generous number - and participants only dump water on themselves once. Think about that for a second.

Yes, we need to take the drought seriously - but if you are going to drought-shame anyone, focus your energies on businesses and energy industries that are responsible for the bulk of water-waste. Or, if you're upset about the amount of water used for one person taking the Ice Bucket Challenge, then take your ire out on every person who flushed the toilet one extra time to get rid of skidmarks, or stayed in the shower and extra minute or two to contemplate the meaning of life. Because literally, those actions use the same amount if not more water. Happy drought-shaming.

The Blame Game, or Why any of us could have been Elliot Rodger

I will admit that I spent a great deal of the long Memorial Day weekend thinking about the grim events in the Isla Vista/Santa Barbara community. I’ve lost some sleep and admittedly have had nightmares, because it seems that every news outlet is so saturated with facts and appraisals and opinions about Elliot Rodger - it’s overwhelming to keep hearing these things over and over again.

But the fact is, I think we need to continue hearing them.

Just this morning, I read a news story about YouTube taking down the rest of Rodger’s video blogs, saying that he is “slowly disappearing from the Internet”.

Out of curiosity, I watched most of the videos and they made me sick. They made me squirm. They made me want to cry. But, just like the #YesAllWomen trending topic should continue to be in our consciousness, even after all of this has died down, so too should the trail left by the person whose hatred caused us to dive head-first into these conversations in the first place.

In the days that have followed since the killings in Isla Vista, there has been so much blame flying around, and so much anger when people disagree on who to blame. Some want to blame misogyny. Some want to blame a poor mental healthcare system. Some want to blame laws. The blame is often divvied up and argued about, like this:

And heaven forbid you suggest the burden of guilt or blame is something like this:

But what if, in truth, the blame should look like this?

Causes include everything inside the small circles, and everything outside. We can comb through what's left of Elliot Rodger's Internet footprint and continue asking, what was the cause? The truth is, every single word he spoke or wrote probably tells us the cause. 

At the heart of the blame game lies a desire to be able to say, “not me”. There is a desire to distance oneself, to place the focus on how similar we are to the victims, to say yes, this could have happened to me. What is missing from our narrative now, however, is the call for all of us to turn inward and ask, could this have been done by me?

There is a sense of “not me” every time we say that this was a crime to be blamed on men, on misogynists, on the mentally ill, on gun advocates. There is so much rhetoric that aims to isolate someone - some group of someones - so we can all sleep better at night. But maybe we all need to lose sleep, to have the nightmares, to realize that though we want to feel connected to the victims and feel like the perpetrator exists in a world apart from our own, we are one with the perpetrator just as much as the victims.

Elliot Rodger was a 22-year-old who was shaped by the same conditions, the same world we have all been shaped by. There have been so many "Amen, yes!" reactions among people who have felt victimized as women at the hands of men who feel entitled to their bodies - because this a valid and terrifying truth. But even so - it doesn't excuse women as a whole from needing to ask themselves, could I have been Elliot Rodger?

You can gasp and point fingers in indignation, you can say "not me!" as much as you want. It does not change the fact that we, too, exist in the world that shaped Elliot Rodger. We have been bumped, bruised, and damaged by the conditions we live in - the societal expectations and the limitations, the diagnosis-medication-then-what? paradigm.

We want so ardently for Elliot Rodger's manifesto, his videos, and his Internet posts to disappear because it allows us to cement our belief that he is the other, that he was not one of us. We want to connect with the victims because it allows us to preserve our own feelings of innocence.

We can never be fully certain of anything, except that there is no single cause - we cannot point fingers because none of us have enough fingers to point if we want to cover every factor that contributed to this event. We do not want to believe that one lost friendship, a divorce, a chemical imbalance, could cause us to become monsters too. 

We feel a need to create monsters in our narratives of tragedies because if someone is a monster, they are not  like us - we can dismiss the idea that we, too, house monsters inside of us. But, we need to acknowledge those monsters because we need to honestly, humbly look at the things in the world around us that anger us, our misconceptions, our beliefs that could turn us into something cruel and ugly, because we are all capable of being, becoming, - doing cruel, ugly things.

The point of bringing this up is not to say, "It could have been caused by anything, so there's no point talking about it." It is not just Elliot Rodger's single combination of circumstances - a broken family, a fear of socializing, possible mental illness, exposure to extreme misogynist ideologies - that created a monster. We live in a world where any of us can be exposed to or afflicted with something that can make monsters out of us. We can't make him disappear just because we want to continue believing that we are cut from a different cloth.

This could have been caused by anything - and that is why we must talk about it.