Responding to anti-Asian Violence with Creativity from the Margins

By Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes

O

n the evening of March 16, 2020, a 21-year-old white male shot and killed eight people at Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, Georgia. Six of the people killed were Asian, all of whom were women in their 60s and 70s. The effects of this massacre on the Asian American community has been visceral. Many of us didn’t sleep last night, thinking about how it could have been our own mothers or grandmothers. Others have taken to social media to share a collective fear, grief, lament, rage even over escalating anti-Asian violence and trauma that now feels overwhelming.

We are so tired of waking up to the news of yet another Asian man or woman being attacked, assaulted, murdered. Recently Asian Americans throughout the country have been targeted at skyrocketing rates. In the early weeks of February, there was a string of attacks against Asian elders. This included Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai American man who was killed in an unprovoked attack, a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman who was attacked and robbed in broad daylight in San Jose, and Noel Quintana, a 61-year-old Filipino American, who was slashed in the face with a box cutter as he rode the subway. On Tuesday, February 16, two Asian women were randomly attacked in New York City; one was punched in the face, the other in the back of the head. 

Many of us also recently learned about the attack of 30-year-old Filipino veteran, Angelo Quinto, who was murdered by the police in December 2020. One officer knelt on his neck for at least five minutes, as Quinto pleaded, “Please don’t kill me.” A horrifying video recorded by his mother shows police flipping over an unmoving Quinto after they detained him, with blood smeared on his mouth and pooling on the floor.

Despite all of this, and while the Asian American community continues to suffer under the weight of these incidents, almost every time I mention this kind of violence in person or online, too often the response is, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” 

Media outlets have only loosely covered issues related to anti-Asian racism and often not right away. Civil rights activist, Amanda Nguyen, called on “cnn, msnbc, journalists with massive platforms like @maddowshow, @andersoncooper” to cover the death of Vicha Ratanapakdee. Nguyen went on to say, “our community is being attacked. We are dying to be heard.” 

Asian Americans experience a double threat in this country: we are the victims of racial violence and our experiences are continually erased. In the face of this reality the Asian American Christian community is choosing to respond as we have done so historically. We are responding to our own erasure with creativity from the margins.

But first, where does silence around anti-Asian violence and racism come from? Our society doesn’t place a high value on the Asian American experience and voice. We are considered a second class issue and not worthy of mainstream attention. Much of this has to do with the stereotypes that people consciously or subconsciously hold about us. Historically, two of the forces that have caused Asian Americans to be overlooked are the perpetual foreigner syndrome (i.e., that Asians are assumed foreigners until proven otherwise) and model minority myth (i.e., that Asian Americans are smarter and more successful than other minority groups). These two stereotypes cause Asian Americans to perpetually live on the margins of both the Asian And American worlds, living in the “in-between” world (neither Asian nor American) and the “in-both” world (both Asian and American). We are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy. 

From these struggles for identity and integrity an Asian American theology of marginality was born. Vietnamese American Catholic theologian Peter C. Phan articulates that Asian Americans are “betwixt and between” as a marginalized demographic in the U.S. We are like Uriah the Hittite in 1 Samuel 11. Uriah, a non-Israelite who was a native of Jerusalem and a faithful Yahwist, is in-between the Israelite and non-Isrelite worlds, creating in the words of Korean American biblical scholar Uriah Yong-Hwan Kim “an ambiguous situation where he was simultaneously accepted (insofar as he was permitted to serve in the Israelite army as long as he was “wanted” by or “useful to Israel) and yet rejected when he was no longer needed (he was branded a “Hittite”).” Similarly, Asian Americans oscillate between pet and threat as Dr. Soong-Chan Rah has argued. We are welcomed in this country when we are economically useful and vilified when we threaten entrenched interests. This is evident throughout Asian American history, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, xenophobia and violence against South Asians after 9/11 and now anti-Asian racism during the time of Covid-19. 

Sociologist, Everett Stonequist, defines the marginal person as “one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds, reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds.” In our marginal status Asian Americans experience suffering, rejection, discrimination, and oppression and yet our stereotypes as both perpetual foreigners and model minorities lead to our erasure and the invisibility of our challenges around identity, racism and discrimination, immigration, refugee experiences, mental health, care for our elders, access to culturally sensitive resources and more.

What are Asian Americans to do? 

Asian American theologians have long argued that the first step to countering our own erasure is acknowledging our marginality. It is, after all, a permanent predicament, Paul Nagona argues. Contrary to Robert E. Park’s highly contested melting pot theory, our marginality should not simply be viewed as a way station to becoming assimilated. Instead of fighting our liminality, we must embrace it and declare divine intent in our “in-betweenes.” We can say, “This is where God has placed us and though others intended our marginalization for harm, God will empower us with strength from the margins.” We can certainly be angry over our own oppression and erasure, but we can also learn to use our experiences and marginal position as a means to humanize ourselves and others.

Being in the in-between means we have the ability to transform the margins. As Asian American Christians, our response shouldn’t be to simply abandon the margins or remove ourselves from them, but rather to replace the margins of power and oppression we’ve experienced with the margins of love and service. The great example of this is Jesus. Jesus was a hapa, a person who lived in the in-between. He was a celestial immigrant who left the realms of heaven to pitch his tent among men, a brown-skinned disenfranchised Jew in a Roman world as well as a refugee (Matt. 2:13). Jesus knows more than anyone the feelings of being an outsider with no one to fully understand his personal experiences. Luke 9:58 tells us, "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." Jesus knew how it felt to be misunderstood, to not ever feel at home in this world, and to be rejected. But for Jesus, living in the in-between was worth it. Jesus’ embrace of and embodied marginality enables him to break cycles of racial, spiritual, and social violence. Despite the pain and the hardships he endured, he embraced marginality in order to meet us where we are. In fact, it is through his death on a cross and resurrection that Jesus embraced the way of suffering, the taunts, the pains of rejection, and even death so that we could be invited into his family and find a space among equals. 

It is an out-of-the-box idea to pursue faithful, creative engagement in response to violence from the margins. Historically, inspired by our own in-betweeness, Asian Americans have learned to raise our voices through the arts, music, and more to creatively educate people to our own history and experiences. We’ve begun to report violence against our communities and raise our voices within organizations to spotlight the Asian American experience. Under the leadership of Dr. Russell Jeung, Dr. Manjusha P. Kulkarni, and Dr. Cynthia Choi, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center was founded on March 19, 2020 and since then over 3,800 hate incidents have been reported. We’ve also learned how to mobilize and connect with the Asian American community in the digital space, hosting twitter conversations and launching campaigns that equip and empower our own people.

The more we study the lives, stories, and theologies of marginality from Asian American Christians that came before us, the more we can see the ways their history can and should repeat itself within our own lives in different ways. For example, inspired in part by the activism of Yuri Kochiyama, Kamaladevi Chattopadhya and more, the Asian American Christian Collaborative organized a march during Summer 2020 to raise awareness to both anti-Asian and anti-Black racism. Organized and led by President of the AACC, Raymond Chang, in partnership with two historic Chicago churches, the Chinese Christian Union Church and Progressive Baptist Church, between 1000-2000 people attended the march for “Asian Americans for Black Dignity and Lives.” 

I recognize that the task of self-advocacy is in many ways unfair. It is unfair for anti-Asian violence to go unnoticed in the midst of a racially divided country and to ask the Asian American community to do the hard work of speaking up for ourselves. It’s unfair to demand oppressed peoples continue to suffer their own marginality in the hopes that their oppressors will relinquish power and control. It is unfair that the liberation of Asian Americans as a marginal people can only come about when we actively work to liberate people at the center from their own exclusivist and discriminatory worldviews. Nevertheless that is the model of Jesus. 

Through Jesus’ life and ministry we can have a positive take on marginality. As theologian Jung Young Lee writes, “The margin...requires continuous creativity, and acknowledgment that one is not, nor need be, bound by another world or another way of living. The “in-beyond” person is not merely looking to survive; such a one is committed to being a healer and reconciler in a multicultural world, in which many other people’s confusion or complacency needs to be encountered.” The reality is that violence against Asian Americans isn’t going to end on its own. But there is still a hope that we can live and thrive in this land. We, as Asian Americans, have to be active agents, working to end our own oppression. We can do this by playing a unique role in sharing the American dream of equality and justice for all people and we can do so creatively and powerfully through the margins.

Photo by Ronny Sison on Unsplash

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Dr. Michelle Reyes is the vice president of AACC as well as a church planter, pastor’s wife, author, speaker, and activist in Austin, TX. In 2014, Michelle and her husband co-planted Hope Community Church, a minority-led multicultural church that serves low-income and disadvantaged communities in East Austin. She also serves as the local CCDA Austin Networker. Michelle has a forthcoming book with Zondervan on cross-cultural relationships. Her writings on faith and culture have appeared in Christianity Today Women, ERLC, Missio Alliance, Faithfully Magazine, and Patheos, among other publications. She and her husband have two young kids aged four and one.