"They Just Happen to be Asian"

By Amar Peterman

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ews broke on March 16th, 2021 of a racially motivated shooting that took place in Atlanta, targeting Asian women. For the AAPI community, this news re-opened a wound that has never fully healed — a deep and lasting injury sustained by the trauma endured, the hate inflicted, the fear propagated, and the lives lost in the past year.

While anti-Asian racism and violence have long existed in our country, they have significantly increased since March of 2020. What began as the rhetoric of a “China Virus” and the “Kung-Flu” has grown into the murder of Asian Americans across our nation. Recently, Vilma Kari, a Filipino-American mother, was beaten outside a store in Queens while the assailant told her she “didn’t belong here.” This past weekend Mohammad Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant, was murdered by two teenage girls in Washington, D.C. Every week new videos flood our newsfeeds documenting the horrific violence against Asians and Asian Americans. It is physically and spiritually exhausting.

National reporters covering the March 16th attacks were hesitant to comment on the racialized motivations of Long’s actions. Instead, headlines brought attention to Long’s self-proclaimed “sex addiction” and local law enforcement’s statement that Long was “having a really bad day.” This journalistic narrative fuels a social and theological imagination that perceives racial violence as coincidental—mere happenstance. In the wake of these acts of violence is an often-heard dismissal: “They just happened to be Asian.”

As an Indian adoptee raised in Northeast Wisconsin, I hear this excuse frequently from friends, teachers, and even pastors. Yet, what my peers and educators cannot comprehend is that Asian Americans identify these acts of terror as anti-Asian violence because they align with our own lived reality.  

For those who are part of an ethnic minority, we have lived the reality of anti-Asian racism our entire lives — the bias, the hatred, the perception of threat, the silencing of our voices, the lack of representation, the appropriation of our culture, the mispronunciation of our names, the simple existence within social and theological constructions of Whiteness. Surviving as a community is a burden our souls have carried far longer than headlines have reported.

For Asian Americans who reside and worship in white evangelical spaces, even those that claim to be multi-ethnic, our churches often minimize and dismiss our experience and concerns. As Kori Edwards writes, the hope that the American church might understand these underlying and overt racial motivations in our nation and even serve as a catalyst towards justice feels like an “elusive dream.” 

One of the primary reasons that Asian American marginalization is ignored and unrecognized is because it does not align with an assumed perception of what racism and discrimination look like. Yet, anti-Asian racism often looks different from anti-Black violence. This is because Asian Americans experience the process of racialization differently than Black folk. The markers of racism for Asian Americans often do not lie on an axis of color, but on an axis of citizenship. It is not the color of our skin that signifies a perceived threat, but our assumed “foreign-ness.” We are the “perpetual foreigner.”

As Tat-Song Benny Liew clarifies the Asian American experience, this is still about race and assumed normativity. Put another way, the presence of Asian “foreignness” questions and challenges an established white normativity. While Asian Americans, as an act of survival, have sought to assimilate into American society, our perpetual foreignness remains. We may be racially typed as a “model minority,” yet we are no less a threat.

This is exactly what it means to be an ethnic minority. We are a living representation of the “other.” Our bodies, language, food, culture, philosophy, and theology all push against an unquestioned assumption about what it looks like to be “American.” This is why we must continually justify and explain why we too are America—that many of us were born here, raised in your neighborhoods, educated in your schools, and seated in your pews. Mihee Kim-Kort brilliantly summarizes our struggle: “Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.”

It is abundantly clear that racial bias marks the history of our nation and continues to fuel racially motivated attacks today. Whether it was the “Yellow Peril” of the nineteenth century or the “Kung-Flu” rhetoric surrounding the outbreak of the Coronavirus, Asian Americans are spoken of as a disease-carrying people. Whether it is planned attacks against Asian places of business or acts of public violence on subways, city streets, and community parks, Asian Americans are often the target of violence and aggression. Whether it is the fetishization of our aunts and daughters or the emasculation of our brothers and cousins, Asian Americans have been categorized as docile, weak, and passive. 

Michelle Reyes points out, however, that our struggle goes even deeper: “Asian Americans experience a double threat in this country: we are the victims of racial violence and our experiences are continually erased.” While our country rightly has addressed and highlighted issues of racism, oppression, and violence towards the Black community, we have often forgotten the simultaneous plight of AAPI folk who also face rampant discrimination and marginalization. 

Indeed, the work of racial justice requires us to understand how the malicious and evil effects of white supremacy are manifest differently in various minority communities.  Whereas First Nations people today face geographic displacement and Black folk continue to suffer under mass incarceration and police brutality, Asian Americans face a different kind of marginalization at the hands of white supremacy. Whether it is the Chinese massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles, the Page Exclusion Act of 1875 and Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese internment camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the stigmatization of South Asians following the 9/11 attacks, or slander and violence against AAPI folk following the COVID-19 outbreak, Asian Americans have been welcomed into America until we are perceived as a hindrance or threat to American prosperity.

If there is any hope of achieving this elusive dream of restoring the ecclesial vision and prophetic witness that God has called us into, then our white brothers and sisters must truly hear the cries and lamentations of the Asian American community today and move towards costly, power-divesting action. 

While vocal solidarity and corporate lamentation are good and holy things, we must go further. 

If we seek to bear witness to the unifying and reconciliatory work of Jesus Christ in our world today, we must all refuse to participate in the project of upholding white hegemony, and instead elevate the voices of minoritized voices in the church. 

If we desire to disciple our congregants out of patterns of Christian nationalism, racism, and sexism, then we must empathically listen to the gut-wrenching stories of terror told by Asian Americans in our nation. 

If we hope to move from diverse, white evangelical churches to true multi-ethnic worshiping communities, then we must place equity and decision-making power in the hands of marginalized men and women who serve faithfully in our pews. 

If we want to truly acknowledge the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism in America and the damage of false AAPI stereotypes, we must remember and speak the names of those whom white supremacy seeks to erase:  Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim, and so many more. 

This costly work rejects the notion that the relationship between Asian-ness and hate crimes is a coincidence, and instead meets weeping with weeping, lamentation with lamentation. In return, calls the Church to affirm the teachings of Scripture which proclaim difference and diversity are not only created but ordained by God. 

The Holy Spirit is at work today shaping diverse communities and is calling us into learning new patterns, new cultures, new ways of inhabiting space and land together, new ways of loving our neighbor. This is the possibility of, to use Soong-Chan Rah’s language, “the next Evangelicalism.” 

As we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, we remember that Jesus has broken down the dividing wall of hostility and invites us into a shared community as co-heirs with Christ. May we begin to live into this reality today. 

Photo by Nuno Alberto on Unsplash

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Amar D. Peterman is Director of the Ideos Center for Empathy in Christian and Public Life. He is also a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing his studies on American religious history. His writing and research have been published in Christianity Today, the Christian Century, Sojourners, Faithfully Magazine, and more. Amar also holds a degree in Theology from Moody Bible Institute. You can follow his work on Twitter: @amarpeterman