I was honored to be able to speak at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama for the #StopAsianHate vigil on April 1, 2021. My remarks are below.
It is an honor to speak here today on this occasion. My parents came to Tuscaloosa in 1965 when my father, Byoung-Song Chwe, joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Alabama. My mother Jung-Ja Chwe became chief of infection control at the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center. I went to Arcadia Elementary, Eastwood Junior High, Westlawn Middle School, and then Central High School.
There were fewer than five Asian families in Tuscaloosa back then, and my siblings and I had few Asian friends. Of course I remember personally experiencing many racial incidents, including people who made slanted-eye gestures at me, who shouted racial gibberish at me, and who taunted me about whether I could speak English. In her blog post, “Growing Up Asian in Alabama,” Rebecca Seung-Bickley, a transracial adoptee, writes that “starting as early as age 10 or 11, [w]hether I was at the mall, the bookstore, or even at a community center with my parents, there were adult men asking for my number or even asking my parents for permission to take me out as a minor.”
One particular incident I remember was outside the YMCA here in Tuscaloosa, while my brothers and I were waiting to be picked up. We were around eight to ten years old. Two white kids came upon us with sharp wood sticks and tried to corner my brothers and I, and ordered us to teach them Kung Fu. There was a TV show called Kung Fu at the time, which was supposed to have starred Bruce Lee but featured a white actor instead because Bruce Lee was deemed “too Asian.” It wasn’t clear whether the kids with the sticks were malevolent or just playing some sort of game, but evidently violence and threats were their natural way to interact with us, as opposed to just asking us. Kids even at age eight have already been taught, by their parents, by the media, by US culture in general, whom to admire and whom to approach with violence, whom to respect and whom to sexualize, and how this depends on race.
I haven’t lived full-time in Alabama since 1981, but when I talk to school friends, many say that things have gotten a lot worse since then, and by worse, they mean more intolerant. In 1980, Ronald Reagan started his presidential campaign in Mississippi with a speech supporting “states rights,” a term used for decades to support racial segregation. In the 2008 presidential campaign, an audience member said to John McCain that Barack Obama was “an Arab,” and McCain responded by saying, “He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I happen to have disagreements with.” McCain was called “statesman-like” for this statement, but of course his response accepted the premise that being Arab and being a decent family man are opposed. In 2015, Donald Trump rose in the Republican presidential primary by calling Mexicans rapists and calling for Muslims to be banned from entering the United States. In 2015, Korean American Joseph Choe asked Donald Trump a question during a public forum, and Trump responded by asking him if he was from South Korea. Joseph said later, “Not only was he rude cutting me off and not letting me finish, but it’s obvious he asked that only because I look Asian.”
In other words, there has been a very long tradition of racism and intolerance against people of color and immigrants in US politics, but with each year, culminating with Trump, it has been spoken more directly and openly. With Trump’s campaign and election, hate crimes surged, to a sixteen-year high in 2018.
Lots of social science research finds that people who commit hate crimes and violent acts, including domestic violence against women, are very cognizant of social norms about their behavior. For example, Lundy Bancroft, writing on domestic violence, notes that “While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: ‘Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble?’ ” People are much more likely to engage in hateful and violent actions if they think that those actions are tolerated and supported by others.
Thus the normalization of violence and “othering,” saying that some people are not truly one of “us” by virtue of their race, immigration status, religion, sexuality, gender orientation, or ableness, has a direct effect on whether people choose to commit hate crimes. Violence is rarely “random” but depends heavily on the promulgation of an ideological framework that justifies it.
We now have a major political party whose central principle is antagonism toward people of color, women, immigrants, religious groups including Jews and Muslims, queer people, and disabled people, basically anyone who can be made into an “other” from the point of view of white patriarchal heteronormative Christianity. Many political scientists have found that the largest factor that predicted white support for Trump was a feeling of resentment toward people of other races.
Trump’s open disrespect toward democratic norms came to its logical conclusion in January, when for the first time in American history, a president resisted the peaceful transition of power, by encouraging and delighting in a violent attack on the US Capitol building. Recently the political scientist Larry Bartels found that roughly half of Republican voters agreed with the statement “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it” and other similar anti-democratic opinions. The largest predictor of these opinions was antagonism toward people of color. Instead of willingly giving up power to multiracial and multigender coalitions, half of Republican voters are willing to give up on democracy itself.
In his book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes noted that human societies have an inherent instability, in that it is very easy for a group of people to gang up and exploit and harm a single person. Hobbes argued that the only solution to this chaotic war of all against all was to create a state. States which are democracies base their legitimacy on institutions such as the rule of law, free and fair elections, and protection of individual rights.
When a person engages in a hate crime, or engages in public campaigns against entire classes of people such as immigrants, people of color, transgender folks, this is not just an expression of ignorance or prejudice or even hate, but also a statement about how society is supposed to operate. It is a statement that the domination of a certain group of people must be constantly maintained, through violence and the threat of violence, in the Hobbesian sense, over other people who are “not one of us,” and is a repudiation of democracy and the rule of law. It is exactly like how a man’s act of violence against his domestic partner is not just about “anger” but about upholding and enforcing a system of male domination over women.
So to stop hate crimes, we need to stop supporting the Republican Party. I don’t know if I would have said this in 1980 (for example, in 1986 Ronald Reagan signed into law legislation providing amnesty to nearly three million undocumented immigrants), but it would be irresponsible to not say this now. At the very least, if you are committed to the Republican Party, you need to move it in a direction away from othering and fear mongering.
In 2016, Betsy Levy Paluck and I wrote an article for Time Magazine, and in an expanded version for the American Political Science Association, entitled “Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes.” By “stop playing defense,” we mean that we must take a pro-active, preventative approach, and not just wait for people to be victimized. We all have to stand collectively so potential perpetrators clearly understand that everyone around them believes that hate and othering is unacceptable. We have to speak as loudly and publicly as possible.
To stop hate crimes, we need to make our community as large as possible. We need to speak out and stand up for each other. Having a thick skin is an inadequate strategy.
It actually works better to speak out for communities that are outside our own, because this way we learn from each other and build a larger community. When Asian Americans speak out about police brutality and call for justice in the police killing of George Floyd, and when African Americans speak out about the killing of eight people, including six Asian American women, in Atlanta, and how a police official unbelievably said the murderer had “a bad day,” we together build a larger coalition calling for racial justice and fairness and decency in policing. If a Korean student at the University of Alabama is beaten by a white student, suffering injuries that require hospitalization, his case deserves the same attention and respect by our criminal justice system as if a white student were similarly attacked.
When the Alabama legislature tries to pass laws targeting and stigmatizing trans kids, for example preventing them from receiving gender-affirming medical treatment, this is not “someone else’s problem.” It is our problem. Any kind of stigmatizing or saying that “those people are not like us” just builds on the ideological infrastructure that supports hate crimes against all of us. Closing the door to any other person who is hurting from organized hatred is just like closing the door to Vilma Kari, the 65-year-old Asian woman who was brutally beaten in New York City while bystanders, with a single exception, did nothing. We need to open the doors, grow and learn from each other, and build as big a community as possible.